Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

  • Home
  • About
  • Archives

Powered by Genesis

Fort Worth Mega-Wreck

February 11, 2021 by tornado Leave a Comment

As of this writing, about 16 hours after it started in the pre-dawn darkness, the massive icing-related vehicle pileup on I-35 in near northern Fort Worth has claimed 6 lives, with at least 65 people being treated for injuries. Here’s a rolling story from local TV station WFAA channel 8.

We’ve seen horror scenes like this in recent years from Interstates in places like Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It illustrates the fundamental truth that the physics of friction know no geographic limits. I saw it in person in the ice storm of New Years Day 1979, when abandoned vehicles, that had slid off Central Expressway in Dallas, sported not just Texas plates, but Indiana, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, among others. Nobody, from anywhere, is immune to sliding on icy roads. Neither maturity, nor experience, nor even understanding of the laws of physics, makes one immune to them. And a lot of drivers have none of the above.

I’ve driven this stretch of Interstate many times. It’s ideally prone to a mass crash of this sort: an elevated roadway (preferentially ices), headed southbound into an area of tight curves and narrow lanes near downtown, with the approach not visible over a blind hill, where a crash can’t be seen at highway speeds until too late. The thin ice glaze had begun not long before, overnight when traffic was lower. Local officials claimed the road had been salted, but obviously insufficiently.

It was the perfect storm of bad circumstances for such a disaster, except for one aspect: the weather forecast from NWS Ft. Worth (incidentally, located just a couple miles from this mess) was very good, so that wasn’t the problem. Likely some weren’t paying attention to the local forecast or otherwise were ignorant of it (here’s looking at both locals and long-haul truckers).

It’s not as simple as “stay home” either. Many people still are “critical/essential” workers who have to report to in-person duties regardless of weather (including storm forecasters like me!); indeed, the story notes quite a few people in the pileup were health workers. Such situations present a major hazard to first responders (cops, fire crews, ambulances) who have to get in there, close off the scene, sort through the carnage, and treat and remove people. It’s also hazardous to second responders (wrecker personnel, HAZMAT remediators, sanitation crews who have to clean up the roadway of debris, and such). As the story notes, these are events for which emergency management prepares, but hopes not to need to execute their plans. They had to here.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communications tech could help in these scenarios, but is a long way off from standardized mass deployment, and realistically, mostly won’t be retrofitted on older vehicles. Trucking firms should prioritize for this, since their momentum and deadliness are greatest in general, and clearly were here (if you’ve seen the crash video taken from a car on the opposite side of the freeway).

Pray for the injured and the families of the casualties.

Filed Under: Weather AND Not Tagged With: disasters, ice storm, transportation, weather, weather safety

Thoughts on the Atlanta Snow Debacle

January 30, 2014 by tornado Leave a Comment

      Photo courtesy Georgia D.o.T.

A horrendous winter-weather debacle unfolded in Atlanta and a few other Southeastern cities two nights ago, far, far out of proportion to the puny total of precipitation that fell. Less then three inches of snow basically paralyzed a metro area. As I got wind of this, and as a professional meteorologist with an unnamed entity that I’m not representing here, I couldn’t help but think, “Why”?

Notice the question isn’t, “Who is to blame?”, but is the more fair and balanced, “Why?” That’s a deliberate distinction. Asking questions, trying to get to the bottom of things, and finding holes in the Integrated Warning System that lead to disasters, is not the same as blaming. If you can’t understand the difference, stop reading right now. The rest will make no sense.

Being an atmospheric scientist and forecaster by trade, my first inclination was to look at the available public- and private-sector predictions for the event. My impression was they, while not perfect, they generally were very good–including and especially the forecasts from NWS Peachtree City. Contrary to the impulsive, borderline slanderous scapegoating by the Georgia governor and city officials, with no understanding or justification of how forecasting uncertainty works, I came away with the impression that an extremely difficult forecast was performed fairly well. This story on the backlash from some private-sector meteorologists illustrates that well.

Were all the forecasts from all sources good? Probably not. James Spann, Birmingham TV meteorologist for whom I have a great deal of respect, perhaps was too hard on himself when he said, “Days like yesterday, unfortunately, are part of my job. There have been bad forecasts in the past, and there will be bad ones in the future. Football coaches don’t win every game, and we don’t get every forecast right. But, when you lose, you do deep study into what went wrong, and work to be sure it doesn’t happen again.” The undercurrent there, however, is that forecasting cannot be totally right; and to expect perfection is just plain stupid. Please understand a key part of what James stated: There will be bad ones in the future. His ethic of learning and improvement is exactly the right attitude to take–not only in weather forecasting, but in preparedness for bad weather (more on that below).

Meanwhile this quote from Nathan Deal illustrates the problem that politics causes: “If we closed the city of Atlanta and our interstate system based on maybes, then we would not be a very productive government or a city. We can’t do it based on the maybes.” News flash, Nathan: forecasting necessarily involves maybes. It’s called uncertainty, and is unavoidable in forecasting. Get used to it, and plan accordingly, instead of complaining about forecasters failing to meet impossible standards of perfection.

While those ignorant blowhard politicians thunder their hollow indignation across the TV screen and throw the local NWS under the bus, I’d like to put Peachtree City up for a medal. Although not a forecaster by trade, Marshall Shepherd offered a hugely appreciated and very well-reasoned summary of the problem, including a strong message of thanks to the forecasters. So…thank you, Marshall. You beat me to a lot of the same points, and saved this BLOG entry from being even longer than it already is.

To that, there’s little I can add regarding the forecasting. A better predictive performance with such a hard and uncommon (for them) type of event as a sub-mesoscale northern edge of a snow band–especially more than a few hours out (when a winter storm warning was in effect)–would be demanding the unreasonable. Alas, because the response to the event and the resulting impact thereof each were so ghastly (which is out of control of the meteorologists), such an award isn’t likely to happen. That’s a shame.

Response and preparedness–which are two different but interlocking facets of the Integrated Warning System–absolutely do matter! The readiness in Atlanta, both governmentally and on individual levels multiplied by hundreds of thousands, was nothing short of wretched. Even in Dallas, San Antonio and Houston–cities of roughly similar metro populations as ATL that are farther south in latitude–hasn’t experienced an ordeal like that in their winter-weather events. Could it be that even in those places, just enough folks know to cancel plans in advance when winter weather is forecast?

Vehicular traffic is horrid in Atlanta on many a fair-weather day, and just one or two well-misplaced wrecks can render the situation FUBAR. Have you looked at a road map of that place? There are hardly any gridded, straightforward alternative routes to the freeway system, which itself looks like twisted noodles. Throw hundreds of thousands of vehicles onto that nonsensically chaotic spaghetti diagram at once, and into conditions for which few of their drivers are individually experienced or prepared, with essentially no pre-treatment or treatment of roads thanks to lack of suitable equipment, material and foresight at the civic level, and voila! You get what they got. In such gridlock, with the cars that can spin their wheels going nowhere in the process, the situation goes from FUBAR for a couple of hours to unprecedented and dangerous stasis. This was preventable.

Individuals: There is individual responsibility in this! Be aware of the forecast–the very latest forecast, since they can and do and should change as the event gets closer. Pay heed. If you’re inexperienced at driving on ice and snow, then don’t drive in ice and snow. Stay at home. Leave the roads clear for those who really need to be out there. If already at work, stay there awhile and let things clear up–it’s a warm place and beats sitting in traffic the same amount of time or longer with a hundred thousand other lemmings, burning gobs of fuel, stressing over being stuck, risking hypothermia should the need to evacuate the vehicle arise, and potentially being hit by idiots sliding into you.

State and local governments: All disasters are local. This means it’s up to you to be ready–not 1-3 days before, but months before. It’s not up to forecasters to do the impossible and tell you exact snow depths tomorrow down to the block and lot. You have to make decisions based on uncertainty! Deal with it…that’s your job. Maybe it’s not “cost-effective” for a big southern city that does get pretty cold sometimes to have access to lots of sand and salt trucks, and the sand and salt to go therein, and a strategic contingency plan with short-fused, priority-driven disbursement of the vehicles and material. Fine–don’t complain, then, when the cost/benefit ratio you so carefully weighed turns out to be wrong and comes back to bite you hard. Learn from this and quit trying to play childish blame games. Cooperate across city and county and school-district borders instead of myopically operating as insular little fiefdoms; the North-Central Texas Council of Governments (“230 member governments including 16 counties, numerous cities, school districts, and special districts”) is a great template to follow! Finally, emergency management exists for a reason, and this qualifies as an emergency. Make use of that expertise already located right under your noses.

Politicians: Admit your mistakes, for once, in a very specific manner, with clearly stated plans for how you’re not going to repeat them. Quit trying to blame those least deserving of it (and as public servants, least in a position to defend themselves). The Ray Nagin school of blame-shifting should have been closed long ago.

Media: You are the mainline communicators between meteorology and the public. I have one “don’t” and a lot more “do’s” here. Don’t give mixed signals, multiple model forecasts, and other confusing messages. Do keep it clear and straightforward. Do express uncertainty, and use that to convey the “better safe than sorry” message. Do keep up with changes in the forecast, because uncertainty mostly tends to shrink as the event gets closer. Do everything possible to encourage caution, safety and preventative avoidance of the roadways in a winter-storm scenario.

Forecasters: You (we) did well, overall. Not perfectly, but under the circumstances, not bad either. We all can learn and improve from this event, as James alluded. Remember: there’s more to consistently reliable forecasting than just models. Some folks actually hand-analyze surface and upper-air charts, investigate satellite imagery, examine and modify real soundings, and perform other physically insightful diagnostics of the actual atmosphere before ever invoking the prognostic models. Thorough analysis is the difference between merely seeing and truly understanding. This is also part of Snellman’s “Forecast Funnel” approach and is time-tested. The day we let the models do our jobs for us is the day those jobs can be automated.

This event was a woeful concatenation of misfortunes: natural forecast uncertainty, unprepared and ignorant individuals times hundreds of thousands, communications failures, badly designed transportation options, terribly ill-prepared governmental entities, and the worst timing of a snow event with respect to a weekday commuting scenario. The bottom line: Winter weather is only as bad as your preparedness for it. Take heed, Atlanta, and do it better next time. Let’s all learn from this, lest it be repeated.

Filed Under: Weather AND Not Tagged With: analysis, Atlanta, Atlanta snow, Atlanta snowstorm, blame game, Cobb County, communication, emergency management, emergency preparedness, forecasting, Fulton County, Georgia, gridlock, ignorance, individual responsibility, media, models, Nathan Deal, politicians, politics, preparedness, snowplows, stupidity, traffic, transportation, winter storm, winter storms weather prediction, winter weather, winter weather prediction

Best of Other BLOGs Lately

April 18, 2011 by tornado Leave a Comment

I’ve been bereft of BLOGging of late, at least in this medium.

Truth be told, I’ve had an intermittent case of writer’s block. When the block lifts and I get an imaginative spurt, I’m in bed, in the shower, driving, at work, or otherwise indisposed from capturing prosaic lightning in a bottle that can be expressed here; and its luster fades fast along with my memory of specifics. Lacking the time, opportunity or creativity lately to devise much of my own prose while in a position to compose it, I shall divert loyal readers’ attention to some thought-stimulating entries by friends and colleagues of mine in the BLOGosphere, along with recent chase and photo entries I’ve made elsewhere.

My beautiful and enormously gifted wife Elke, a writer and thinker of an extraordinarily insightful and gifted nature, recently began a BLOG, Sojourner between the Eternities. She doesn’t write much these days, but when she does, it’s powerful. Here was her entry as her father lay in what would be his death bed. The few entries she has so far are but a tiny tip of the vast and seemingly limitless reservoir of spiritual and natural insight she possesses, and which I get to behold on a daily basis. Maybe I’ll be able to dig up some absolutely dazzling old e-mail writings of hers on natural wonders that she may post there too. In the meantime, check out the fine tribute to their dad that her brother Gernot wrote (edited lovingly by Elke before publishing online). She also took the photo of her dad and his wonderful wife Sue, who is a dear friend of ours and beloved as a grandmotherly figure by my kids.

Weatherwise, please check out Patrick Marsh’s discussion on preliminary tornado reports versus actual tornadoes. In the aftermath of the recent three-day severe episode from Oklahoma to the Atlantic Tidewater, the issue of tornado-report confusion has reached a crescendo. Simply put, tornado reports are not the same as actual tornadoes! In fact, at least 30 different reports of the same Sanford/Broadway/Holly Spring/Raleigh NC tornado came in, all now distilled to one tornado. I cannot emphasize this enough; daily report logs are PRELIMINARY and WILL change as events are surveyed and Storm Data compiled over a span of weeks. Do not take same-day or next-day tornado counts literally!!!!

Mike Smith, in one of his latest entries, gave much-appreciated kudos to convective outlooks, watches and warnings for the recent Carolinas/Virginia tornado outbreak, with a nice discussion leading into how much more deadly an event like this might have been in the days before the integrated warning system got this reliable. In addition, the 1630Z outlook (before any tornadoes) was upgraded to tornado probabilities supporting a “HIGH RISK” in the area that later got hardest hit. Mike’s plea for tying down of mobile homes is one that should be heeded. While this step won’t do much good against EF3+ tornadoes, it can save lives in the great majority of events that are weaker, and the residents are not afforded time to reach adequate shelter nearby. I would take it a step further and urge mobile home residents, whether in tied-down units or not, to leave and position themselves in or within a few minutes’ access of a sturdy permanent structure whenever a tornado watch is issued. Yes, the probability your particular place gets hit is low, even on a major outbreak day like that; but I suspect the families of those who were severely hurt or killed would testify that it is a chance not worth taking.

Chuck Doswell just posted a slam-dunk piece on Monday-morning quarterbacking, specifically the second-guessing of official, national severe storms forecasts by pompous little second-guessing ignoramuses who seem to appear out of the woodwork from time to time in the storm-chasing world. Hey: Talk is cheap. Back it up! I used to live in Missouri, so…show me. Prove your self-proclaimed superiority on a consistent basis, with daily and publicly available advanced forecasts of all three specific forms of severe weather all year long, and the post-event verification statistics to back up your claim. Any blind chicken can get a worm sometimes; and even a busted clock is right at once or twice a day (depending on if it specifies a.m. and p.m.). Who can outperform the experts time and again? Step up and take Chuck’s challenge…if you dare. Otherwise, I call BS to any second-guessing fools.

Storm observer and saxophonist Bob Hartig posted a fine rant on the failure of highway department contractors to account for severe weather in their work. I agree with some of his critics who say the chasers (and public at large) need to be aware of these construction zones and severe weather threats themselves. While that’s true, it doesn’t absolve the managers of these projects and crews for their responsibility to minimize hazards also—and that includes advanced awareness of severe-storm situations.

I actually have been doing a little BLOGging–summaries of my first two storm intercept trips of the season to reactivate our Storms Observed This Year BLOG for…this year! If you’re interested, check out my reports, with a few photos, on the US-412 storm in northern Oklahoma, and three supercells (including the tornadic Tushka storm) in southeastern Oklahoma.

Finally, I have been keeping up with Image of the Week, adding a new personal favorite from my outdoor photography portfolio on a weekly basis, in hopes that others can enjoy the images and gain inspiration in some way regarding the outcomes of God’s handiwork in the land, water and sky around us.

Filed Under: Weather AND Not Tagged With: Bob Hartig, Chuck Doswell, Elke Edwards, forecasting, ill-informed second-guessers, Mike Smith, mobile homes, North Carolina, outlooks, Patrick Marsh, photography, severe weather preparedness, storms, supercells, tornado reports, tornadoes, transportation, Tushka, Tushka OK, warnings, watches

Search

Recent Posts

  • National Debt: Not Just a “Problem” — A Crisis
  • Scattershooting 230128
  • A Thanksgiving Message
  • Human Weather Forecasting in an Automation Era, Part 3: Garbage In, Garbage Out
  • Human Weather Forecasting in an Automation Era, Part 2: Lessons of Air France 447

Categories

  • Not weather
  • Photographic Adventures
  • Scattershooting
  • Weather
  • Weather AND Not
@SkyPixWeather

- June 2, 2023, 7:39 am

@yangyubin1998 Beautiful footage—horizontally oriented, steady and “tripodded”, too, the way tornado video should be.
h J R
@SkyPixWeather

- June 2, 2023, 7:33 am

@evan_bentley @NWSSPC Great May to schedule my chase vacation months in advance. ;-) https://t.co/vOwvPYkmG2
h J R
@SkyPixWeather

- June 1, 2023, 7:40 pm

@jamesaydelott Have a couple bucks? I’d like to hoof it out of here.
h J R

Blogroll

  • CanadianTexan
  • Chuck's Chatter
  • Cliff Mass Weather & Climate
  • Digital Photography Review
  • DMN Dallas Cowboys BLOG
  • Dr. Cook's Blog
  • Dr. JimmyC
  • E-journal of Severe Storms Meteorology
  • Eloquent Science
  • Image of the Week
  • Jack's Cam Wall
  • Jim LaDue View
  • Laura Ingraham
  • MADWEATHER
  • Michelle Malkin
  • Photography Attorney
  • Severe Weather Notes
  • SkyPix by Roger Edwards
  • Tornatrix
  • With All My Mind

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org