Damned If You Do-Damned If You Don’t
By Albert B. Kelly
As we enter the fat part of winter, we face the prospect of
snowstorms, ice, and freezing rain. We’ve gotten better at forecasting and
meteorologists are able to generate computer models days in advance to give us
a “heads-up” that something may be coming. Yet as good as we’ve gotten, it is
often the case that we won’t know snowfall amounts and dividing lines until the
thing is practically upon us. The other thing we’ve come to realize is that a
shifting of 50 miles in a system can have profound impacts on one area or
another.
For all that we’re able to forecast and all that we’re not,
meteorologists do a good job and with each passing year, they get better. But
for all of that, officials- elected and otherwise- still face the “damned- if-
you- and- damned- if- you- don’t” scenarios when deciding what resources to
deploy or not, in advance of a weather event. It is no small thing because it
could make or break a political career.
It used to be that weather was just one of those things that
went into the category of “nature”, which was an acknowledgement that the
forces behind the weather were part of the natural cycle of things but also too
big, uncontrollable, and mysterious to really know. People resigned themselves
to this fact and did their best to deal with the aftermath. But science and the
ability to know and unravel these forces changed people’s outlook.
As meteorology got better over the last several decades, the
measure of things became how quickly after a weather event routines got back to
normal. For example, if a governor or mayor was slow in getting the snow
removed and the streets cleared, people would be reminded of this going into
the polls at the next election. That’s understandable. After all, snow removal
and picking up the trash are the basics and if they do nothing else, officials
need to get the basics right.
But as meteorology got more advance, it wasn’t enough to
just get the aftermath right, the measure became about the steps that were or
weren’t taken in advance of a storm. This involved everything from declaring
states of emergency in advance of the approaching system, activating command
centers, deploying or positioning a fleet of trucks, closing certain things,
and likely a host of other behind-the-scenes measures that have evolved over
the past couple decades to mitigate the impacts of a given storm.
The upshot is that while citizens are heading to the
supermarket to stock up on bread, milk, eggs, and Cheetos, the speculation
begins in the media about what the governor or perhaps a mayor for bigger
cities, anticipates deploying ahead of a storm, when they will do it, and
whether they foresee problems if the weather never materializes, etc. It’s also
at about this time that comparisons get made to predecessors.
The bottom line is that today, anyone charged with making
such decisions operates out of the “abundance of caution” framework and why
not? I say that, because it always comes down to thinking about the worst thing
that can happen and then acting accordingly. If a governor or a mayor doesn’t
deploy resources and activate systems or does so only partially, and a weather
event unleashes its full fury, they are potentially risking people’s health and
safety- protecting both has to be the highest priority.
On the other hand, if you deploy resources and activate
systems and the weather event is a dud, you’ll have wasted time and money for
no good reason while opening yourself up to charges of overreacting and crying
“the sky is falling” but at least in the short term, you will not have risked
public safety. In the long term though, you’ll have “cried wolf” so that people
might ignore you in the future and that becomes the trade-off.
The bottom line is that there are no easy answers because
the weather, as good as we may have gotten at tracking and predicting, is still
unpredictable and it can still surprise us. Throw in a little climate change
and global warming and these weather events (i.e. intensity and duration) will
become even more unpredictable. So for now, we’ll work to make the best
decisions we can in the moment- something to keep in mind with the amount of
winter we have left. Here’s to spring.