October 29, 2007

From Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio…

You know, every week I say summer’s not over until I say it’s over.

Well, there’s an old quote that says that climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. So I’m officially announcing—as it’s raining outside in New York and the temperature is hovering in the high 50s and about to drop—summer is over. (But not everywhere.)

There were a lot of people on the West Coast who wished they had our rain today. Our hearts and prayers go out today to the folks in Southern California, also a place where I live, where the wildfires destroyed more than 1,000 homes and about 15 people were killed. The devastation and the damage are unprecedented—more people evacuated in one movement since the Civil War, and firefighters working beyond overtime.

And, the most amazing thing to me was one woman and her husband who said on camera, “All those guys who were fighting our fires, who saved our home, were volunteers. They weren’t even paid.”

That’s right, 75 percent of all firefighters in this country are volunteers. That’s something for you all to think about, and maybe, something that you might want to consider doing. If you have a volunteer fire department, go down there and see if you can join. It’s not the worst thing you could do for your community, and it’s probably one of the best things you could do for yourself and your family.

I have to launch a missile at FEMA here. Did you hear about their fake news conference? They actually called a news conference at the last minute, and all the people in the audience were agency staff officials pretending to be reporters. They were basically lobbing up softball questions to their head guy saying “how great are you?”

Oh boy, this is not the way to go. Haven’t they learned anything from Katrina?

Find out more about who helped during the wildfires and who balked.

NASA-GATE

All right, that’s my dumping today on FEMA, because normally we don’t dump on the FEMA folks, we dump on other federal agencies, so let’s get right to it: NASA. There was an $8.5 million federal safety project, basically supervised by NASA, which surveyed and interviewed 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. When it was done, NASA refused to release the results, claiming that it might undermine the public’s confidence in the airlines.

Well, hello? You know, are these the same guys who launched the space shuttle this week? Talk about undermining confidence. This is nuts. We paid for this study, why can’t we see it? Unbelievable.

Obviously, Congress is getting involved into this now, and even though NASA had asked the contractor who did the survey to destroy it all, I think that people got involved in it fast enough to stop that, and we might even see it.

And what might we see in that survey? Reports of more near mid-air collisions, of more near-runway collisions, reports of more confusion during final approach—things that might be able to help us, actually help us avoid problems in the future.

Who is NASA working for, the airlines, or for the taxpayers? That, my friends, is a rhetorical question, and they should take the heat for this. And we should see the survey—remember it’s an anonymous survey anyway. We’re just looking for trends here, and they didn’t even want to release that. Talk about economics trumping common sense. Let’s get back on track, guys.

HALLOWEEN HAUNTINGS

And by the way, a very happy early Halloween to everybody. On October 31, you’ll see my Today show piece on hotels around the country that have “rooms with a boo.”

These are places where you can really get the you-know-what scared out of you … or at least they claim you will. There are some great legends and folklore and myth there. But the cool thing about haunted hotels is that it doesn’t just happen on October 31. No, it’s 24/7, 365. If you want to be scared in March, go there.

CUTTHROAT CRUISE SHIP PRICING

You know we always talk about airlines and what’s going on with cutthroat pricing, or maybe not cutthroat pricing. Here’s one for you about cruise lines, and I think it’s indicative of where the cruise industry is now. There’s an ad going on right now, in which the Queen Mary II is actually selling Easter or President’s Day weekend deals next year: four-day getaways, round trip from New York to the Bahamas, for as little as $799. How cool is that? If you’ve ever wanted to be on the grande dame, the Queen Mary II, there’s a sale right now.

I think you’re going to start seeing a lot more sales for those off-peak periods in February, March, and April, where people aren’t really doing a lot of cruising—except they’re doing some seven-day cruises to the Caribbean. But, you know, a four-day cruise is a tough cruise to sell for the cruise line, so if they’ve got one and they want to dump it, you should jump all over it.

This commentary comes from Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio– check out our radio page for more information.

Find more great prices on vacations in our Deals of the Week section.

And if you want more of Peter’s commentaries, check out the Travel Detective Files.