Gridlock

I'm not saying I told you so, but Providence was a mess last night. Most of Northern Rhode Island was. Schools got out, businesses got out, but only after the snow got bad and grew much much worse. 60 Providence School buses were still out at 8 pm. Elementary School children, mostly.

The Superintendent of the Providence School system, Donnie Evans, should have just cancelled school. Just because it wasn't snowing in the morning doesn't mean it's not going to change dramatically and quickly during the day. But one should not blame just this Superintendent. It's a system-wide problem. The State is investigating the response to the storm, and how badly the system failed.

But honestly, how can the Providence Journal Bulletin actually print this excuse?:

Had they known how ferocious the initial snowfall was going to be, he said, they would have cancelled school altogether.

“I think in retrospect, if we had known the kind of storm, the pacing of the storm, the kind of gridlock there was going to be on the interstates, we would have cancelled school from the beginning.”

The National Weather Service had predicted a brief but intense storm, lasting several hours, that could have left 4 to 7 inches over the region. Forecasts on Wednesday afternoon had indicated the storm could arrive around 1 p.m., but it moved into the area around 11 a.m.

Click here to read the full story.

We have hour-by-hour weather forecasting technology. Weather.com anyone? I followed this storm closely, to see just how accurate the predictions were. It stopped snowing a bit earlier than I thought it would, but otherwise the impact of the storm in Providence, the way I experienced it, followed the predictions.

And it was the nonchalance with which the community treated this storm that was really distressing to me yesterday, and exactly the scenario I imagined. We don't have the good sense as a culture to just stay home when conditions are going to be bad? At least our early ancestors could argue that they didn't have METEOROLOGY to help them make decisions.

We have more information at our fingers than at any other time in human history, and yet we FAIL to avail ourselves of it.