What use is a ‘warning’ if it leaves us in the dark?
A‘CATEGORY orange’ warning was how this week’s devastating Storm Ali was flagged in advance by Met Éireann. There’d be ‘extremely windy conditions’ with ‘severe and damaging gusts’, we were told on Tuesday night’s weather forecast, so ‘do take extra care’.
By the following night, two people were dead, trees had been uprooted all over the country, roofs blown off, fences flattened, power lines downed, and several marquees at the National Ploughing Championships reduced to rubble. Pavements across Dublin city were littered with heavy branches, big enough to maim or kill if they’d caught a pedestrian on the head. Almost 200,000 people were left without electricity? Category orange? Really?
They weren’t wrong about the ‘damaging gusts’, and spot on when they cautioned us to ‘take extra care’. But ranking the storm as ‘category orange’ inevitably undermined those warnings in the public mind. Depending on your point of view, an orange light means either ‘proceed with caution and prepare to stop’ or else ‘put the pedal to the floor and boot it, and sure you’ll be grand’. To most of us, it does not mean ‘stop’, and it does not ‘mean clear and present danger’.
Afterwards, as the clean-up began, Met Éireann insisted that while it had foreseen the ferocity of the storm, the public really didn’t grasp it at all. What we’ve got here, to quote ‘Cool Hand Luke’, is a failure to communicate. It wasn’t Met Éireann’s inability to predict the storm that caused such chaos, it was its inability to convey the level of that threat to the ordinary citizen. And so, as we are probably facing another winter of extreme weather events, the need for a beefed-up system of grading threat levels couldn’t be more obvious.
The joint initiative by Met Éireann and the UK Met Office to invite the public to ‘Name Our Storms’ was intended to raise awareness of severe weather events before they hit. Arguably, though, it’s had the opposite effect, and succeeded only in making storms sound cuddly and innocuous. But storms are not newborn baby elephants in Dublin Zoo, and we don’t give chummy nicknames to tsunamis and earthquakes out of respect for those whose lives and property are devastated by their impact. Far better, perhaps, to engage the public in devising a new method of grading storms, one that would actually convey their potential impact in relatable terms. It might be something as simple as a scale of one to ten, with each number linked to a real-life example of damage caused by a previous event of that magnitude. Instead of ‘category orange’, then, this week’s storm might have ranked at an eight or even a nine, meaning that trees would be uprooted, power lines knocked, roofs and unsecured structures – like tents, marquees or, tragically, caravans – at risk of being blown away. That would have left nobody in any doubt of the perils they faced.
It may be that Met Éireann is a little too sensitive to accusations of overreaction, for which it was most unfairly pilloried from some quarters after October’s Storm Ophelia. What a lot of needless fuss, some business owners whinged after they’d been compelled to send employees home and lose a day’s business. Yet three people died all of them because they found themselves outside, for one reason or another, in the very circumstances we’d been warned about.
IMAGINE the carnage if there had not been widespread compliance with the warnings, imagine if the country’s roads and pavements had been busy as usual that day? There will always be the grumblers, the cynics and the ‘told you so’ trolls ready to roast Met Éireann on social media if a predicted event falls short of devastation, and if schools and workplaces are closed in anticipation of a storm or a blizzard that passes us by. But any life lost in an avoidable accident is one too many. If ever there was an argument for erring on the side of caution, it’s when you have no way of knowing just how many lives that caution may save. If Storm Ali had blown itself out by dawn then, yes, for sure, Met Éireann would have come in for a hammering for disrupting the Ploughing Championships with its alerts. But where lives are at stake, then bad PR, critics’ ridicule and negative chatter online must never influence the decision to raise the alarm.
We need a newer, better system of alerting the public to life-threatening weather events and, before the next crisis of a winter that seems to be hurtling towards us with fury, we need it now. You could say we’ve just had our category orange warning...