As I start this open line monologue everyday, I always stress over what to put here. I can spend hours browsing the days news stories to come up with something seeming halfway interesting that might generate some conversation. Tonight, I decided to see how many visitors we have from the coastal area, and to say something witty like “To the 12 or so visitors we have for some reason on the coast this weekend, be aware that there is an evacuation for Ocracoke Island. Dare County and Currituck County officials were meeting Wednesday evening to determine whether to call for an evacuation as well.” So I pulled up my counts by location report and was immediately taken aback by the graph showing our daily visitors for the past 30 days look like this: ____/ Um ok, what in the world happened on Tuesday? Let’s check the story stats… Ah, the earthquake story. We got over 1,700 views on that story alone on tuesday. Including Wednesday, we got nearly 1,900. The next highest page was our home page, then the Hughes story, then the Vance County Redistricting maps.
We were right quick to post the story of the quake on our website, as I was at my computer when it happened and it was the 2nd thing I did, besides checking twitter for confirmation. I imagine we were one of the first places to have a news story up about it in NC as our site search results were dominated by phrases like “earthquake nc”, “nc earthquake”, “earthquake felt in nc”, “earthquake in north carolina august 2011”, “earthquake in nc”, and all sorts of variations.
We’d like to thank all for visiting our little site. Now, back to my original thought.. After checking the stats for the coastal area, I checked July 1st until today, and there are a surprising number of visitors from coastal NC, I’d say around 300 visits. (If you’re curious we received just shy of 7,000 visits from Henderson in the same time period.) So, To the 300 or so visitors we have for some reason on the coast this weekend, be aware that there is an evacuation for Ocracoke Island. Dare County has a mandatory evacuation for all visitors starting 8am on Thursday. Currituck County officials were meeting Wednesday evening to determine whether to call for an evacuation as well.
Please note the Vance County Redistricting maps have been updated Wednesday to provide an additional document that enlarges the maps by a full page per district. You may download the pdf from our article linked above. The county and all those involved really are wanting the public to see these maps, please do your responsibility to check the maps, attend the public sessions, and submit comments to the planning committee as soon as possible.
Open it up for The Thursday Lines!