When I was in high school, our school system (in Bedford County, VA) once closed down for two or three weeks because of the weather—a few consecutive snow storms of a few inches each. I wrote about it at the time in the Liberty High School Sentinel newspaper, pointing out that it was a bit silly to close the schools for a couple inches of snow, especially for so many days. During those two or three weeks off school, the roads were clear enough that I spent most of those days visiting friends, going to movies, and so on. If I could drive safety to the towns of Altavista, Virginia, and Lynchburg, Virginia, (each 30 minutes away from Bedford), I’m sure I could have made it the half-mile up the road to the high school.
The lunacy hasn’t stopped there. In my current home of Northern Virginia, it’s not uncommon for a summer thunderstorm or a couple rainy days in a row to result in widespread road closures, drastically worsened commutes, power outages, and more. Come on people; our infrastructure can’t handle a little rain? It’s absolutely, utterly ridiculous. A single drop of rain turns most DC-area drivers into drunken lemurs.
The National Weather Service certainly isn’t helping matters. Jason Samenow at the Capital Weather Gang raised the question a bit over a week ago whether our local NWS office in Sterling is too trigger-happy with issuing severe weather warnings. There’s no question; they are. An average afternoon thunderstorm passing through on a summer day does not necessarily qualify as ‘severe’, nor is it worthy of initiating the regional Emergency Alert System, interrupting TV programming, or setting our weather radios blaring.
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