(With apologies to the authors of the book with the same name...)
I believe the proper vernacular expression at this point would be, "...aaaand we're back..." Last Friday, much of the Mid-Atlantic portion of the Eastern USA experienced an event for which the word "weather" seems wholly inadequate. A set of merged thunderstorms moving steadily eastward from the Mississippi Valley came very near to smacking the entire DC metro area flat as a pancake. The result was outages (or disruption) of all the public services we depend on in modern civilization: electrical power for lighting and air conditioning (mostly gone), landline telephone service (disrupted), cell phone service (disrupted), natural gas (pumping disrupted), traffic signals (mostly gone), clean water (restricted use due to pumping station backflow), public roads (many impassable), fuel for vehicles (unavailable when service stations lost power)... the list goes on.
I am typing this late on Tuesday night, almost exactly four full days from the time the storms finally left the area... and thousands of people in the area still have no electrical power, over 100 intersections have no working traffic signals in this county alone, cable TV and Internet service are still spotty, and things like batteries & flashlights are just beginning to reappear in many stores.
Okay, I get it: this was a major storm, not your everyday summer evening thunderboomer that we are all so used to in this area. (At one point, local Doppler radar showed an unbroken line of severe weather stretching from slightly north of Philadelphia, PA to well south of Richmond, VA.) But consider, for a moment, the following:
- Many of the local providers of electrical power have been scrambling nonstop since "Snowmageddon" a couple of years back to trim trees away from power lines, refurbish or replace older equipment, and reinforce or re-engineer weak points in the grid, all while making darn sure the public knew all about all the good stuff they were doing.
- Weather forecasts at this time of the year almost always include severe thunderstorm watches or warnings, tornado watches or warnings, and high wind watches or warnings, and yet somehow the public had no clear warning of how unusually severe this particular weather event would be despite the storm system being tracked from its formation roughly 48 hours before reaching the area.
- A series of powerful thunderstorms, complete with extremely strong "microbursts" and mini-tornados, have repeatedly interfered with all the affected services over the past several years and yet none of the "preparation" for serious weather events was able to prevent said repeated disruptions, much less the massive collapse of almost all public services that for many people is still ongoing, 96 hours after this particular bout of severe weather left the region.
This is the 21st century, folks. You know -- moon bases, flying cars, weather control, all that jazz. Okay, the space program (at least in this country) has been sliced & diced almost out of existence, the flying car is still a concept very much in development[1], we are still learning how weather works with no sign of actually being able to control it anytime in the near future...
... but this is the twenty-first century. Why, oh why, can we not build basic infrastructure in a way that prevents a single bout of severe weather lasting only a couple of hours from absolutely obliterating all the services that make modern life different from life in the 12th century... and then remaining disrupted (or wholly nonexistent) for days at a time afterwards?
Yeah, I'm annoyed, you betcha...
[1] Considering how most people drive, I have come to believe that we are all far better off without flying cars... It's hard enough to travel on (or walk across) a road filled with vehicles that only move in two dimensions -- can you imagine the chaos if we had to worry about drunk, inexperienced, distracted, angry, sleepy, incompetent, and/or just plain unlucky drivers above and below us as well...?!?!
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