Back Home by Chris Hardie
As we enter a new year, I will once again confess – as I have before – that I am a weather nerd. During my 32-plus years working in the newsroom, it’s safe to say that no reporter wrote more weather stories and no editor assigned more weather stories than yours truly. While I may be a bit obsessed about the weather, I am not alone. The weather is what everyone talks about, which has always been one of my favorite definitions of news.
I also took a weather and climate class in college. OK, I am a bit ashamed that I only received a “C” but I do have some scientific knowledge about weather. I could have combined that knowledge with my mass communications degree and entered the world of TV weather forecasting, but one look at the mug that accompanies this column and it’s pretty clear that I needed to hide behind a byline and not be in front of a camera.
I may have pushed the envelope a few times on my weather stories, like the time I calculated the wind chill on an unusually cold summer day in July when the temperature barely topped 60 degrees. “Must be a slow day in the newsroom,” was the quote I remember from one of the friendly meteorologists at the La Crosse office of the National Weather Service.
I also took to heart the words of a former editor who abhorred calling snow “white stuff.” Snow is snow.
This preamble that took longer to form than a slow developing occluded front is the lead-in to my cranky old man rant that there is complete overkill these days when it comes to forecasting winter storms. I blame this – along with many other things – on social media.
A week before a snowflake can even begin to develop and the weather front is developing over the Pacific Ocean there are both professional and amateur weather folks warning of a coming storm. They tout various models and develop graphics to show that the storm could anywhere from a dusting to several feet with the caveat – it depends on the track of the storm.
Well, duh!
As a weather fan, I think folks need to pay attention to the forecast and be prepared. There’s no need to stock up on bread and toilet paper a week out. It’s winter in Wisconsin. It’s going to snow.
Of course there was no Internet and mobile phones or computers when I was a kid, so we didn’t have websites and texts and dings and beeps to tell us it was going to snow. My folks watched the local weather forecast that had no fancy graphics or super duper hyped up radar, just the weatherman with his pointer and some maps drawn in marker on a glass screen.
The winter of 1970-71 we had just moved into the new home my parents built on the farm. There were two major storms in January and February. On Jan. 3 and 4 we had 16.8 inches (according to National Weather Service records) and on Feb. 4 and 5 we had 10.2 inches. That winter had 67.6 inches of snow, which is the sixth highest on record. I remember the deep snowbanks along our road and climbing all over them.
There were no emergency trips to the store. Cows had to be milked and chores had to be done. Snow removal was just part of the deal.
As long as I am in old man cranky mode, I also wish that folks these days were better prepared for winter driving. While today’s all-wheel drive vehicles are much better in the snow than most of the rear-wheel drive tanks we drove 50 years ago, some folks think they’re invincible on the road. A slippery road is just as slippery no matter how many wheel drives you have.
It should be mandatory that anyone getting a driver’s license in Wisconsin should be required to have actual winter driving training. Hose down the DMV parking lot and create a layer of ice and teach these young drivers how to do donuts. Then they will know how to handle a car on slippery roads.
OK – that’s enough old man rant for now. I have to shovel some snow …
“Hey kid, get off my lawn.”
Chris Hardie spent more than 30 years as a reporter, editor
