The Last Storm, The next Storm, the Stupid Storm.

In case you didn’t notice 😛 there was a big storm yesterday. Here are the NWS Local Storm Reports from yesterday for wind/tornado/thunderstorms:

There are 22 Tornado reports, two funnel clouds, and a water spout in the data base so far, with over a thousand reports of thunderstorm and wind damage. The Snow/Ice reports were pretty impressive as well …

Locally in coastal GA/SC there were a lot of limbs and trees down. At one point yesterday there were several thousand homes without power in midtown Savannah. Here are the sites of damage reported to NWS so far …

Update: here is a link to the preliminary NWS Charleston report, with wind speeds and damage reports for the Georgia/South Carolina coast. I don’t see the Jacksonville report yet (South of Darien, including Brunswick). 

Even as the cleanup from this storm gets underway, another big storm system is working its way across the country – in fact, in the national map above, you can see it already causing disruption and damage in the Pacific Northwest. By Friday it will be sweeping across the East Coast …

So, another Day of Terror? It’s shaping up to be another big storm, with some characteristics that are similar to yesterday’s system, especially with respect to wind. The current forecasts are for a bit less wind (although still gusty), but more potential for convection (thunderstorms), so as the current forecast discussion from the Charleston forecast office says this morning, “Damaging wind gusts and isolated tornadoes would be the primary hazard.“ We will have to see how this evolves tomorrow, but at the moment it looks like Friday will be another messy day. If you don’t have a weather radio it’s well past time to get one, as that is the best way to get alerts. Other means are not as reliable, and social media is terrible – by the time you read something it’s probably obsolete, and given the way algorithms work, what you are seeing is based on popularity and controversy rather than information content.

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Speaking of a lack of information content, there is some guy based in Brunswick who is now running a local morning talk radio talk in Savannah. This dude was ranting this storm wasn’t so bad, making fun of school closings, etc. It horrifies me how people in that role can be so brain numbingly ignorant (don’t even get me started on his other views). Those of you who monitor Facebook may have seen a reader who was upset about the opposite point, that they were “disappointed” in my take on school closures (which I have to think was a misreading of my post – I was pretty clear that while students are safe *at* school, busses aren’t safe in sustained winds over 35mph or gusts over 45 mph and “it made sense” to close them). 

If there is any core point to this blog and my research, it is that things are almost never simple. As noted in yesterday’s post, the decision to close a school isn’t just about safety at school. Often the biggest safety issue is getting the students to and from the school. And, given the timing of the storm yesterday (and likely upcoming Friday as well), running busses right in the middle of a frontal passage is potentially hazardous.

But there are other issues as well. People in the middle and upper income classes often don’t realize what a central role the public school system plays as part of the social safety net and support system. Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that is a good thing: in fact, I think it is a terrible way to do things. But that has become the defacto way a great deal of social support is provided to poor and socially deprived children in this country. When you close the schools, you are shutting them off from those services, including what can often be their only source of a good meal. You may not like it (I certainly don’t), but programs at schools are effectively child care for many; the working poor (often hourly workers) are placed in a terrible position of having to leave children unsupervised or going to work. 

So school closures have a cascading effect through a community. That is reality, and should be factored in when considering closures. ”But we always err on the side of safety!” Really, that’s a silly comment, because it’s all about probabilities: the risk of a direct impact from the storm (often low), with the risk of impacts from the closure. At some point the risk to the child from not getting that meal, or being left unsupervised and getting in to trouble (impacts that may not show up until years later as developmental or even legal problems that society has to pay for) are all consequences of that closure decision and are in fact a “safety” decision, albeit not as obvious as, say, a bus being overturned by a wind gust. So closing may be the right thing to do but it isn’t consequence free. That was my main point, as well as to say people need to give decision makers some space to be wrong one way or the other in close cases. 

When I teach decision making to emergency managers and administrators one of the first things I try to get across is that no matter what you do, you’re going to hurt somebody, so you need to recognize and be able to live with that. The decision to close schools is a perfect example. Life isn’t simple. And these decisions are hard. We can (and should) discuss them, but always keeping the complexity of the decision in mind, and being aware of the indirect consequences of the decision.

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