The most epic blizzard ever is coming to destroy us all. Again.
Ratings-starved meteorologists are spinning their annual yarn of freezing sleet, record snowfall and bloodthirsty Yetis roaming the streets. Maybe, just maybe, this will be the time the actual storm makes its inaugural appearance.
This Time’s Gonna Be Different…Until I Do It Again
Around 7:30 on Thursday night I received a Snapchat from my sister, merrily navigating her shopping cart through the masses at a D.C.-based Trader Joe’s. “Ready for the blizzard!” read the snap, which depicted some bottles of red wine, assorted carbohydrates and boxes of soy-based meat replacements that expire sometime after the dinosaurs return (FYI: vegetarians will outlive us all).
It’s a scene playing out across the D.C. metro area; residents stocking up on the essentials before the ice goblins arrive Friday afternoon. Considering three-quarters-of-an-inch of snowfall brought the city to its knees on Wednesday night, it’s hard to blame residents’ preparation for a storm that may bring considerably more.
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Thankfully, leaders in the city are doing their part to keep the public safe, with federal workers ordered to cut their typical 10-4 workday short at noon. This is crucial as “the first flakes are likely to drift in during the midday to afternoon” and an inch may accumulate by “the early evening.” Everyone has plenty of time to hit the gym and grab some beers at happy hour before a light sprinkle hits pavement.
Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
“The Great New York City Blizzard of 2015. It didn’t happen,” read the opening lines in a Weather.com post titled “Winter Storm Juno: Did We Get It Wrong?” Unfortunately, this was about as close as the leading fib factory would come to owning their role in fabricating the Storm of the Century That Wasn’t.
Underneath a slideshow featuring a fisherman in Marshfield, Mass. uprighting a solitary crate in the gleaming sunshine, the communications team issued a wonderfully passive aggressive mea culpa.
Despite record snowfall not materializing in major media markets as promised, the report insists that “some New Englanders had seawater and ice floes in their streets, while others struggled to pick out backyard sheds from the snowdrifts encasing them.”
The empty apology tour culminates with Dr. (Doctor? Really?) Louis Uccellini, head honcho of the National Weather Service, stating, “We recognize the need to work harder and smarter to produce better forecasts and to better communicate forecast uncertainty and manage expectations.”
Don’t faux-pologize to me, faux-doctor. Stop cooking up tales of the end of days every time they threaten to shut down The Weather Channel for low ratings. You’re delaying the inevitable at considerable damage to the rest of us.
Garth Brooks Trapped in the Crosshairs
D.C. isn’t the only place where folks are hunkering down for the “Storm of the Century, But Really This Time” (SotC,BRTT). Residents in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia are all in a state of emergency.
In these wastelands of arctic tundra, schools have closed and students were told to go buy dehydrated foods with their parents. If you’re truly an emotionless heathen, consider the fact that American strongman Garth Brooks was forced to postpone two sold-out performances of him yelling about beer and pickup trucks. State of emergency indeed.
While not as important as cowboy hats and belt buckles, our country’s airlines are preemptively taking a battering due to SotC,BRTT. Over 5,000 scheduled flights have already been canceled across Friday and Saturday; around 12 percent of flights nationwide. Let’s hope that all those disrupted travel plans didn’t occur just because The Weather Channel needed to keep the lights on.
Our Take
Listen, if there’s a serious storm that endangers lives, obviously warnings need to be given and precautions need to be taken. Proper preparation can save lives.
The problem, as we all learned as toddlers when told the lovely tale of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” is that people don’t take warnings seriously when every storm comes with days of hyperbolic promotion.
Up in Maine, this lesson was not lost on the Bangor Police Department who offered some kind words of advice to the folks in the storm’s path.
“Don’t panic. It’s just frozen rain,” the department stated in a Facebook post. “DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT buy all the bread on the shelves. As a lifelong Mainer, I would recommend cereal.”
Maybe I’ll wake up on Saturday morning to the Snowpocalypse we’ve all been promised and it’ll be my turn to look like an utter jackass whose ranting and raving proved totally unfounded. Then I’ll know what it’s like to be a meteorologist.
