monkey nonsense

Anger Mounts as Predictions of the Big One Melt Away

By Michael E. Ruane and Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 1, 2005; Page A01

The computer models could not agree. The ocean buoys clocked offshore winds that were hurricane force. One forecaster said the storm’s track would be “everything.” Special reconnaissance flights probed the northbound system for clues.

At 3:40 a.m. Sunday, National Weather Service meteorologist Andy Woodcock looked at the swirling combination of data and wrote: “This is definitely a tuffy.”

It sure was.

After a Sunday of storm-of-the-season forecasts, anticipating accumulations of as much as 10 inches, yesterday dawned with scarcely a flake. The morning rush hour came and went with no more than a dusting. By afternoon the storm — heading from the Carolinas to New England — was dancing up the coast, leaving in its wake confounded forecasters, disgruntled parents and defensive school officials.

Yet as the evening rush hour wound down, the storm picked up, snowing at Reagan National Airport at the rate of an inch an hour. Motorists reported that streets had suddenly turned slick and slush-coated. The National Weather Service urged motorists out at the time to exercise “extreme caution.”

By 11 p.m. accumulations of five inches were reported in several places, and snow was still falling. However, highway department officials appeared optimistic about morning prospects, at least for principal commuter arteries.

Unless “we start getting inches” of additional snow, said Ryan Hall, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Transportation, “we’ll be fine for rush hour.”

Farther away from the District, officials decided to close schools today in Fauquier, Stafford and Spotsylvania counties.

As of late last night, snowfall readings in the metropolitan area ranged from 2.5 inches in the city to 5.7 inches in Columbia. Reported accumulations included 3.5 inches near Leesburg, 4.3 inches in Annapolis, 4.5 inches in Brookeville and 5.5 inches in Reston.

Meteorologists said most of the remnants of the storm should melt away today, leaving a partly cloudy day with scattered grumbling and temperatures in the mid-30s.

When it became clear yesterday afternoon that the storm would not reach expectations, District officials not only called off their snow emergency, but they also announced that motorists who received $250 tickets for parking along snow emergency routes would have their fines slashed to $30.

“This is in light of the fact that we didn’t get any snow,” Public Works Director William O. Howland Jr. said.

Parents got no such bargain. Yesterday’s cancellation, coming on top of snow days on Thursday and Friday, meant that many children were home for the fifth day in a row. Monday’s decision seemed hasty early in the day but wiser as snow began to fall with greater intensity later.

Still, Leon Langley, director of transportation and athletics for Calvert County schools, said he received several calls from profanity-spewing parents irate that the schools had closed based on errant predictions from meteorologists.

“There aren’t other options,” he said, speaking on a cordless phone whose batteries were almost dead from constant use. “We don’t have any other magic to predict the weather. . . . It is weather. It is not math. It is not an exact science.”

This was cold comfort to parents with kids cooped up at home again. “It just was astonishing to wake up and have dry streets and no weather with schools closed on the third snow day in a row,” said Margaret Paulsen, a mother of three in Bethesda and part-time lawyer.

With a kindergartner, a preschooler and an infant at home, she was running out of ideas to entertain them. She baked cupcakes, hauled out the Play-Doh, showed videos and cycled neighborhood children through the house. “We’re digging deep here,” she said.

Shaneena Bitanga spent yesterday caring for her 9-year-old son, a student at the St. Thomas More Cathedral School in Arlington, and two children of a friend. The kids were thrilled, but Bitanga’s schedule was thrown into disarray. An online sales associate who works from home, she had to postpone a doctor’s appointment and put off work until 9 last night.

“It just kind of wears on me,” she said. “After three days, they get cabin fever, and they eat you out of house and home.”

The weather generated other complications. The Maryland School Assessments for grades 3 through 8 had been scheduled to begin today in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties and tomorrow in Howard County. Officials sought and received state permission to postpone the reading and mathematics tests until Thursday.

Many residents reserved much of their unhappiness for TV weather forecasters, charging that they hyped the storm’s potential impact Sunday.

Howard University communications professor Paula Matabane, who had to cancel class for the second time in a week, said the flurry of news reports bordered on irresponsibility. “Everybody is watching TV expecting accurate information, and instead they are giving us drama,” Matabane said.

Asked if the forecasts were hyped, Topper Shutt, chief meteorologist for WUSA (Channel 9) and at the station since 1988, said the conventions of local TV news sometimes trump accuracy.

“We often can’t control what the newsroom does with our information,” Shutt said. “If we covered the story, we would probably cover it differently as weather people, but they [the reporters] are looking for a different effect. They say, ‘Let’s go and jump on something.’ ”

Off-air meteorologists pointed to other reasons that the forecasts missed the mark.

Henry Margusity of AccuWeather.com said the two main computer models for projecting current weather data into the future could not agree on where the storm would go. One said it would hug the coast and bring more snow; the other had it going out to sea, producing less snow, he said.

“It was a tricky bugger,” Margusity said.

The Weather Service began warning of the approach of “the culprit,” as one forecaster called it, as early as Friday, according to David Manning, meteorologist at the Sterling office. Special reconnaissance flights monitored its development in the Gulf of Mexico, he said.

By Saturday night, the thinking was that the snow would begin Sunday night but “it should be stressed that a shift in storm track could have large impacts on [precipitation] type and associated amounts,” one forecaster wrote. By Sunday night, meteorologist Richard D. Hitchens said the snow would start in Washington about 4 a.m., but he cautioned: “Track is everything.”

At 3:49 a.m. yesterday, Woodcock noted that “warm air is getting into the system,” and he lowered some predictions from six to 10 inches down to three to six inches.

By the way, one forecaster noted that there’s more precipitation headed this way. It’s expected by the weekend.

from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59314-2005Feb28.html

Friday, February 25, 2005; Page E01

Hardly a flake had fallen yesterday morning before every school in the Washington region was closed. Thousands of parents were forced to skip a day of work. Business meetings were postponed, events canceled, trains delayed and government workers sent home early. All day long, TV news crews whipped up fears about “treacherous driving” even as the scenes behind them showed traffic moving smoothly on snowless roads.

Can someone explain to me why the capital of the richest and most powerful country in the world needs to be shut down by the mere threat of an eight-inch snowstorm? Are people in Buffalo or Providence so much smarter or tougher that a routine event that barely causes them to miss a step brings Washington to its knees?

I spent the day yesterday listening as officials from all the major jurisdictions described why they had absolutely no choice but to close the schools. The narrow country roads. The little 5-year-olds forced to walk on unshoveled sidewalks. The poor teachers who have to commute in from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The buses so tightly scheduled that any weather delays wreak havoc.

As you probably figured out already, I’m a New Englander driven nuts by Washington’s weather wimpiness. And during my 17 years here, it’s only gotten worse. That, despite the fact that most new cars now have front-wheel drive while the number of SUVs and other four-wheel-drive vehicles has exploded. And despite the fact that resources and technology devoted to snow removal have only improved. Thanks to GPS devices, for example, the regional director of the Virginia Department of Transportation can sit at his desk and call up a map that shows the location of every truck in his fleet and the last time a plow or sander went down every street in his domain.

What we are witnessing, I believe, is a self-reinforcing cycle of falling expectations and herd mentality. Because of increased coordination among officials in all local jurisdictions — normally a good thing — closings in one community now subtly encourage closings everywhere else. And with each new round of closings, people feel less urgency about the need to clear streets and sidewalks, or learn how to drive in snow, or develop the tricks necessary for maintaining their daily routines. This degradation in skills, in turn, demands more closings.

The essential lesson of welfare reform, of school reform, of corporate reengineering is that if you set expectations high and give people the necessary tools, they will rise to the challenge. Consistent with the Bush administration philosophy, that insight should guide a new strategy of preemption when it comes to snow.

Public works directors need to understand they’ll be out of a job if they can’t keep major roads open and safe during run-of-the-mill storms, as most of them do already.

And employers — including schools — need to impress upon employees the need to have a contingency plan for getting to work when it snows, even if it means arranging special car pools or taking public transportation or, if all else fails, trading in the Toyota for a used Subaru.

Is it too much to ask people who choose to live in rural places to walk or drive their kids to bus pickup points, or arrange car pools, on days when snow makes country roads unsafe? Inconvenient? Sure. But not as much as having kids at home all day.

And why not invite local high-tech companies to develop simulators and computer games so people (and bus drivers!) can practice driving in snow?

Maybe, in the end, there will still be 15 percent of students or teachers or employees who still can’t get where they need to go. But isn’t that better than closing things unnecessarily for the other 85 percent?

Despite what you hear from the snow defeatists, this isn’t a matter of safety, it’s a matter of preparedness, ingenuity and will. In a regional economy that produces a billion dollars worth of goods and services each workday, cutting and running at the first snowflake results in a significant loss of productivity and output. Worse, it teaches our kids to be wimps.

Steven Pearlstein will definitely be at work today. He can be reached at pearlsteins@washpost.com.

from:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51558-2005Feb24.html

Tuesday, February 1, 2005 Posted: 5:37 PM EST (2237 GMT)
(CNN) — A photograph posted on an Islamist Web site appears to be that of an action figure and not a U.S. soldier being held hostage.

Liam Cusack, the marketing coordinator for Dragon Models USA, said the figure pictured on the Web site is believed to be “Special Ops Cody,” a military action figure the company manufactured in late 2003.

“It pretty much looks exactly like the same person,” he said.

Cusack said he was contacted Tuesday morning by one of his retailers, who informed him that the alleged hostage appeared to be one of the company’s action figures.

“I thought it was a joke at first,” he said.

But after reading a report on a news Web site about a U.S. soldier allegedly being captured, “I looked at it and said, ‘It does look like one of our action figures.’”

“Cody” is an action figure the company made for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which supplies U.S. military bases worldwide with various items. The doll was meant to look like a U.S. soldier who might be serving in Iraq, Cusack said.

On the Islamist Web site, a group calling itself the Al Mujahedeen Brigade, posted a photograph of a man it claimed was a captured U.S. soldier named John Adam, and it threatened to behead him if Iraqi prisoners are not released by U.S. forces.

Staff Sgt. Nick Minecci of the U.S. military’s press office in Baghdad told The Associated Press that “no units have reported anyone missing.”

The photograph showed the figure against a black flag with white lettering reading, “God is great, there is no god but Allah.” A U.S. military assault rifle was pointed at its head. It appears that “rifle” was part of the plastic weaponry that came with the action figure.

The photograph immediately raised questions.

CNN military analyst James Marks, a retired Army general, questioned its authenticity.

He told CNN in a phone interview that the flak jacket in the picture had a kind of trim along the edges that he’d never seen before, and that the open-legged pants, as opposed to gathered hems, struck him as odd.

He also questioned what appeared to be camouflage paint on the face.

“We have not used camo paint with conventional forces serving in Iraq,” Marks said.
from: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/02/01/iraq.hostage/

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.

Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains.

He told them that after the avalanche, he had opened his car window and tried to dig his way out.

But as he dug with his hands, he realised the snow would fill his car before he managed to break through.

He had 60 half-litre bottles of beer in his car as he was going on holiday, and after cracking one open to think about the problem he realised he could urinate on the snow to melt it, local media reported.

He said: “I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down below the window, and then I peed on it to melt it. It was hard and now my kidneys and liver hurt. But I’m glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there.”

Parts of Europe have this week been hit by the heaviest snowfalls since 1941, with some places registering more than ten feet of snow in 24 hours.

from: http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1261997.html?menu