The Weather Service that cried Wolf

[altivo]

So, because of the dire (and I do mean dire) weather warnings being issued, we did our shopping early this morning amid a crowd of people who were apparently afraid they'd run out of frozen dinners and starve to death. Never mind that one of the expected problems was to be electric power outage "that might last weeks" according to NOAA. I don't know how they expect to use their microwave with no electricity. Anyway, it was a little challenging but we got our week's groceries and came back home on still dry roads. The sky was getting pretty ominous looking for 9:30 in the morning though.

By 10:30 the snow started. Just a dusty little flurry at first, but by 11:30 it was accumulating on the backs of the horses and sheep in the outside pens. We put the sheep back in. The horses seem to like this stuff and were having fun mock-fighting and racing around so we left them out.

By 1:00 pm the snow turned to drizzle, which started to freeze on top of the snow. At 3:00 pm we put the horses in. Gary moved his car to a different spot because he is convinced that a certain tree branch that overhangs his usual parking spot is going to fall down. It didn't. At 6:30 it was no longer raining, and the temperature was risen to just barely below freezing. I put my car into the newly rearranged garage at Gary's insistence. Now the snow and ice will melt all night getting his clean floor all soppy. Well after sunset, temperature is still rising. It may reach 38 or 40 F by morning, so most of the ice and snow, such as they were, will be gone. Instead of the 3 to 4 inches of snow with a half to an inch of ice on top that were predicted, we've gotten perhaps a half inch of snow with a very thin crust of ice over it. Mind, I'm not complaining, even I don't care for ice. But it seems that the NOAA forecast was way off. I can forgive them the margin of error, but not the dire warnings about running out of food and all the other nonsense that any person with half the IQ of a moron should already know for themselves.

Mind, the conditions were not good for driving I'm sure, and discouraging driving was wise. But giving the weak minded a severe case of panic so that they rush out in bad weather to buy all the toilet paper, candles, and matches in the store is just plain irresponsible.

Comments

[alaskawolf.livejournal.com]

i love it when the weather turns out better then predicted :) still a pain to cause a panic though

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I really don't mind a good storm now and then. What I do mind is all the hysteria. People who ring their hands and run in circles as if a little snow was certain death.

[doco.livejournal.com]

Now the question is, why is this post tagged "knitting"? Were you planning on knitting a nice warm sweater while the world was going to come to an end according to NOAA? :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. I meant to mention that I sat by the woodstove and knitted socks while the world didn't come to an end as scheduled. ;p

[lobowolf.livejournal.com]

They're predicting the end of the world here for Monday...."OMG, over a foot of snow in some locations!" In this case, those locations would include the tops of mountains. We're supposed to get about 5 inches at the house...not a crisis of major proportions.

NOAA probably takes kickbacks from the grocery stores and flashlight-battery manufacturers.

The media likes nothing more than to get people whipped up into a frenzy of panic, and the weather is an especially good topic for that because everyone gets weather :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

As usual, this one turned out to be a dud. When they whip the hysteria up for a couple of days in advance, the weather never fails to be far lighter than the forecast.

I've been saying for years now, it's when they predict "a chance of light flurries" that we have to batten down the hatches.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Maybe they (the people shopping for frozen dinners, that is) wanted to roast them on an open fire. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*snicker*

It really is a problem here that we have a huge percentage of the population who would not know how to survive without fast food and microwaved prepared meals.

As for open fires, I wouldn't trust most of them with a match, let alone a fireplace.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Yeah... truely descendants of their pioneers forefathers. ^_~

Not that I'm much better myself, of course - I rely on my microwave a lot (although I don't usually eat frozen or convenience food). But I *can* cook, at least, and I imagine I'd be able to do come up with something edible even if I had to use an open fire instead of a regular cooker. I'd struggle, of course, but I don't think - or at least don't hope - I'd starve. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I suspect you'd manage quite well, even if it took a bit of floundering about at first.

No, these folks around here wouldn't figure it out at all. It's really true that in the US we've had a couple of generations now where cooking was considered to be a menial task unfit for ordinary people to learn or practice. So now we have a huge population of folks who don't know how to boil an egg.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, there'd be lots of floundering indeed... nobody should expect Lobster Thermidor aux Crevettes with a mornay sauce served in a Provençale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pâté and brandy with a fried egg on top and spam on the first day. :) ("I DON'T LIKE SPAM! >.<")

^^ No, but seriously, I do believe I'd manage not to starve, and I'm confident I'd learn to cook reasonably well, too - "reasonably well" as in "edible, and you won't think 'yuch, this tastes terrible', even if you don't outright like it, either".

But yeah, I suppose that's not true for everyone - and I can't say that I believe that Germans would fare better, either. c.c

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

We went shopping for all sorts of things before it started snowing yesterday. If the power goes out, we can store our frozen dinners in a pile of snow on the balcony, and cook them on a bonfire made of old VHS tapes for that genuine aged plastic aroma. ;-) We forgot the toilet paper though! :-0

(we were almost out of food and didn't want to go driving around today instead, when the roads would be [and are] quite sloppy)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's 40°F here right now, warmest we've had in several days. The inch or so of snow and sleet on the ground is creating great fog banks, which are probably more of a danger than any "stuff" left on the roads.

But it's supposed to start cooling off by noon and a second course of snow is predicted. After yesterday's extreme exaggeration, though, I'm not holding my breath.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

*you turn to the back of the comic book and theres a simple
black and white picture of a guy playing the piano.*

They all laughed when he bought oil lamps and a butane stove...

XD

Really, the infrastructure is supported by billions of dollars,
so all you have to do is wait. And that means Boy Scout Dinners
and batteries and filling the bathub up for water.

Microwave dinners?

*knocks on one with a fork*

"Daddy? Can I have your Salsbury Steakcicle?"

XD

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, it will come back eventually. Actually, the power outage when it hit here lasted about 15 minutes. I think they were switching things around to restore power somewhere else and dropped us offline briefly, rather than any actual damage here.

We are generally prepared. Gary insists on it (being overprepared.) Back in 1999 he filled the crawlspace under the house with "supplies" while keeping it hidden from me that he was doing so because he figured I would laugh at him. I did, eventually, but not too hard. We already had an emergency generator to run the well pump and cycle the freezers.

I can only remember having actually "cooked" dinner on the woodstove once in the nine years we've been here. As you say, it was boy-scout-style that time, nothing fancy. In a prolonged outage, I'm sure I'd get more complicated. I do know how, and I know you can manage too because you can prepare actual food rather than just microwaving a box of chemicals.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

I loves me my "box of sodium" in the microwave,
but I'd have to go with Gary on the "overprepared"
route.

Its insurance really, if there's no "apocalypse"
you'll end up eating the stuff eventually anyway,
if there is...

@.@

[altivo.livejournal.com]

you'll end up eating the stuff eventually anyway,

Well, that definitely depends on what the "stuff" is. ;p I remember when I was an undergraduate back in the 70s, and the university decided it was time to clean out all the supplies stashed in the fallout shelters around campus that had been constructed during the cold war paranoia of the 50s. Twenty year old graham crackers anyone? They did discard some stuff as completely unusable, but the rest was given away to anyone who would take it. Lots of people were sampling old stale soda crackers and instant cocoa for a while.

We've also had problems in the past (and just recently) with excessive stores of long shelf life foods, like dry beans and such, being broken into by mice. Yuck.

Power did go out again yesterday, at 7 pm right as I was preparing supper. Stayed off until midnight, which sure put a crimp in my pizza baking plans.

[rrwolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah the weather was kind of disappointing based off what they said the weather was supposed to be. I did not see one report that was the same as the others. Even on the Weather Channel each weather person was talking about the same system and giving a different forcast back to back.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I really do think the quality of weather forecasting has declined in the past five or so years. I suspect funding cuts. The administration wanted to shut down NOAA entirely in fact.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

If it actually snowed here to warrant stocking up on food and certain items I'd do that at the start of the first snow.

As to frozen dinners, all you need to do is place the frozen dinner into boiling water to cook them up :) Or like I could do, leave it out in the summer sun.

I liked your mentioning of the horses playing in the snow :) It conjured up some nice mental pictures :)

"Excuse the lateness of this reply"

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*races by you, kicking up snow ten feet into the air*