Blame God, Danny Healy-Rae or Met Éireann, but stay safe
PARTS of the country went to bed with an Orange warning and woke up to Status Red. It was 5am yesterday when Met Éireann moved the dial up a notch to the most severe measure possible. Companies and schools that were putting together plans were suddenly caught off guard by up to 16cm of snow.
Blame God, blame climate change, blame Danny Healy-Rae, blame Met Éireann. Or maybe it was a good thing that we got that early morning text telling us schools were closed or buses delayed.
As a nation, we are non-believers when it comes to the weather. We know it rains all the time and yet are frequently caught without the comfort of an umbrella.
Met Éireann’s Evelyn Cusack put her hands up to admit that she “wished” she called a Red earlier “but Orange was the best estimation yesterday afternoon”. Her colleagues don’t make these calls based “on the off-chance”.
“We only issue it when it’s meteorological [correct]. Otherwise we’d have a Red out for most of the winter,” she said. And that’s how the weather works.
Later today may not be ‘unprecedented’, but for almost two million people this will be the first time they have ever experienced snow like this.
Ireland in 1982 was a simpler place and probably easier to shut down and so yesterday we saw the National Emergency Co-ordination Group (NECG) use some extraordinary language. Over recent years, I have spent an unnatural amount of time at briefings from the group that comes together amid floods, storms and now for the first time blizzards.
In many ways, the NECG could be described as the ‘keep calm brigade’. They don’t like to hand journalists easy headlines. But yesterday was different.
“It would be suicidal to go driving in blizzard-like conditions,” said Sean Hogan, the chair of the group.
“Our concern for public safety is that if you get driving wind and snow coming together, visibility will be very poor. If you are out there, you won’t see, you may get disorientated very quickly.
“Unfortunately, we had cases of people dying, during the cold spell in 2010, who were outdoors. There is a very real public safety issue here.”
Ms Cusack concurred that visibility would be “more or less zero” when the gale force winds start to “whip up” the light Siberian snow.
A Red warning is defined as an event involving significant falls of snow likely to cause accumulations of 8cm or greater. According to Met Éireann, there “will be judgment required on the part of the forecaster who
must weigh up the possible severity of the weather conditions and the likelihood of their occurrence”.
Red warnings are rare. This is just the seventh time one has been issued, and it’s the first of its kind in Ireland for a snow event.
It “implies that recipients take action to protect themselves and/or their properties”.
In this case, the action needed is to stay indoors between 4pm today and midday tomorrow.
Asked whether he was effectively calling for a ‘shutdown’ in Leinster and Munster, Mr Hogan bluntly replied: “Yes.”
So forget about the colour coding and old wives’ tales of kids walking to school in their bare feet long before iPhones and 24-hour rolling news. This is a national duvet day that we may well be talking about in 35 years. There’s no reason to panic if we do the right things, stick to the advice of the experts and stay indoors.
Ms Cusack was asked yesterday whether the early jump from Orange to Red meant the next 24 hours could actually be worse than predicted.
Her answer was telling: “Red is as big as it gets.”
But perhaps we should accept for now that there’s no telling how this might go. After all, it’s happening on what meteorologically speaking is the first day of spring.