I have seen this behaviour before. When Yugoslavia began to fall apart, the local people made outings to the border, to 'watch the war' as the Serbs ran over Slovenia. And that with Serb planes flying up over our airport and we had nothing to counter with.... Said 'border' being a river that wasn't much wider than the one in town here, and it isn't all that wide. So you had the Serbs raising havoc on the other side of the river, and the locals watching what was happening. They were generations of people who hadn't been touched by WWII, and had no sense of the danger, or that someone could be killed by stray bullets across the way. Luckily, no one suffered any damage.... but at the time I thought, 'how crazy can you BE, hey?'
In Maine, some people seem to have lobster brains.... Check this out from Pam's House Blend... I wouldn't take my children out in that weather if you paid me for it.
But another aspect of it is understandable to me. With the exception of a class two hurricane that wreaked havoc in NH in the Thirties, people there aren't USED to that weather, so it is sort of a 'wonder' they want to watch without knowing how life-threatening it is to them, because it never happened before....
It it had been a 'Noreaster in winter, they would have taken precautions and stayed indoors, and kept their kids safe... I hope....
Perceptions. Always perceptions.... and a repsitory of knowledge, I guess, that some people put into the very back of the file cabinets they call their brains.
And to top this off, some poor 70 year old lady up north of here got nervous in that last bad thunderstorm we had that half-knocked off the chimbly of our last house. She was concerned about her freezer in the cellar, and went down there to do something about it? The house must have been near a brook, or something, there isn't a river there. But a brook is something tricky. You get a storm like it was there? Water broke in with such violence, she didn't have a chance, and seemingly being frail, she drowned. All because of the little she had in there.
(Have since learned it knocked off every electrical appliance in the building where I last lived, they still don't have electricity, one family has a private company and it killed their computers as well, so that was gawd retribution if you wish to look at it that way...)
