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Because I didn’t understand the algorithm.

Later, back in Dallas, at a bar on Elm Street, we worked out the numbers.

In journalism, you need at least 5,000 dead Mexicans to equal one dead American in any storm-related story that’s going on the front page. And I’m being generous with that number, it might be 10,000.

That particular hurricane hit Tampico. I was hoping it would go all the way down to Veracruz so I could ask a chef why they cook fish in tinfoil, but my whole Mexican posse was blown out of the water—like matchsticks—by the cold journalistic principle that a dead American is like the strong dollar. Foreign currencies just can’t compete.

So over the past two weeks we’ve had two “hurricanes of the century,” and I see that all the old algorithms are still in place:

1. Everybody assembled the squad.
2. Harvey went from Biblical to Swath overnight.

Everyone thought it was Biblical, so the first few days were “We don’t know how many dead bodies are out there,” and they had a mayor out of Central Casting who was saying things like “Don’t go into attics unless you take an ax with you.” So far, so good.

But when the death toll kept hovering around 70—you know, less than one-tenths of one percent of the Galveston Death Toll Standard, and 1,800 less than Katrina—they had to switch to heartwarming.

And they did a damn fine job with it.

Rednecks revving airboats while rescuing Asian women with babies.

Gospel singers at the shelters.

Shelter dogs saved from drowning and airlifted to Jersey.

The kayaker who rescued a deer.

The kid in Philadelphia raising money for victims at his lemonade stand.

The doctor who canoed through the swamp to get to the hospital to save the kid’s life.

There were dozens of these, and the pivot was perfect. We went from “worst storm in modern history” to “everyone in America is a selfless saint,” and kept that sucker alive day after day, like Kirk Douglas in The Big Circus.

But then we got Irma, and Irma had to deliver, because you can’t do heartwarming twice in a row.

The New York Post had the right idea when they dubbed it “Irmageddon”—Biblical and memorable—and I have no idea why nobody else picked up on the moniker.

This was gonna be the worst storm in the history of storms. This was gonna tear up Miami Beach and kill every supermodel who failed to get a reservation at the Delano in time. Highest winds in history. Biggest landmass in history.

And then it wiped out the wrong country.

It wiped out Barbuda.

St. Maarten didn’t do that well either.

Richard Branson, cowering in his wine cellar on Necker Island, got more publicity than the destruction of three or four island nations.

But the algorithm is holding. No dead Americans. So all those wiped-out countries are like a preseason game.

But wait! There were dead Americans! But they were in the Virgin Islands. No big deal.

This is actually a refinement on the journalistic algorithm. It might take 5,000 dead Mexicans to equal one dead American, but it also takes ten dead offshore Americans to equal one dead mainland American.

And then two things happened that ruined the whole story.

The hurricane brushed across Cuba and slowed down, leaving places like Caibarién, Remedios, Camajuaní, and Varadero underwater with about thirty dead.

There’s no way to do that story: “Communists sacrifice lives so that Floridians may live.”

Then, just as Irma was hitting the Florida Keys, God decreed an earthquake in southern Mexico that leveled several cities with unpronounceable names and killed more people the first day than died in all the days of Harvey.

We know how that conversation went.

“Come on home. No story. How do you pronounce ‘Oaxaca’?”

Not sure what to do, dealing with a death toll under five even after the storm had traveled up to Naples, the media decided to send various Geraldo Rivera wannabes out into the surf to be battered by the wind as they screamed into their microphones.

And, by the way, where is Geraldo Rivera? I don’t like the fact that Anderson Cooper has replaced Geraldo Rivera. There was a time when, if you lost all your worldly possessions, Geraldo Rivera would be camped out on your front lawn making arcane references to the late works of John Lennon. Anderson Cooper goes inside the house and hugs you. This is disgusting.

Then, just when it seemed Irma couldn’t get any worse, 41 million people were impacted by monsoons in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. In Nepal alone, over a thousand were dead. Mumbai was underwater. Karachi became submerged by floods right before the Buddhist army started machine-gunning civilians and driving 270,000 Rohingya refugees out of Myanmar.

Fortunately for the integrity of CNN and Fox News, it takes at least a million Rohingya refugees and 100,000 dead Nepalese killed by storms to make the nightly three-minute wrap-up, so the Irma coverage continued unabated with wild-eyed correspondents pushing against the wind in their slickers and telling people not to venture out because it takes a professional to stand in the rain. I personally wanted to see one of them snapped like a matchstick.

In other words, it was one big swath.