If you live anywhere else in the country, I'm sure you're thinking, oh, snow, how nice. It doesn't snow very often in Portland, does it? I'm sure snow would look very pretty with all that greenery.
If you live anywhere in the Portland area and you don't live in a nuclear bunker, you are rolling your eyes and snickering. We've been hearing for about 4 days about how we are going to get snow this weekend. TriMet has detailed their preparations (chains on all buses) and ODOT has been careful to assure that they are prepared for the winter weather (I'm not sure how, but the guy on Channel 8 with the Starbucks cup seemed pretty sure that ODOT was in fact, prepared.) We've had full analysis of the weather - all Dopler radar and weather cams geared up to give us detailed info on barometric pressure, precipitation and wind velocity. This morning, at 6:30am, at least 20 hours before the WINTER BLAST is expected to hit, we watched LIVE reports from the critical areas likely to be affected. Note that the critical areas are large parking lots, overpasses and any road with the word "Hill" on it's street sign. You would think we live in Honolulu and are expecting a blizzard.
How much snow are we expecting, you ask?
1 - 3 inches on the valley floor.
I'm sure Oregon must be the laughing stock of the entire nation.
How does the possibility of 1-3 inches result in full, first story coverage (though one station did give top billing to the bomb that went off at a local bank, killing two police officers. Maybe they didn't have enough reporters to have someone look outside and see the extreme weather conditions...)
Why do we have live, continuing coverage of WINTER BLAST when it is 40 degrees outside? I'm sure many stations are paying their meteorologists overtime to gather information and make predictions about the FIRST COLD SHOCK of the season. Is it imperative that we have live, continuous coverage of potential cold wave? Uh, yes, of course it is! We have to have people reporting live so we don't risk the chance to interview the guy walking down the street and his preparation for the event. "Uh, yeah, I had to find my gloves. Heh heh. I only had one glove so I had to ask my wife where my other one was. Heh heh, I really need both gloves in case one of my hands gets cold. Heh heh. I can't stick them in my pockets - it doesn't do the trick. Heh heh."
If it seems like the continuing coverage is getting a little redundant, they pull out old footage of ARCTIC BLAST 2007, where an unfortunate soul got caught on tape as he careened down an icy hill, hitting several parked cars on the way down. Or they show similar footage from POLAR BLAST 2006 where some other guy did the same thing.
If we actually see weather like they're predicting, all regular programming will be preempted in order to provide full coverage of the snow that accumulated on the freeway and the traffic nightmare that resulted. (The 10 people that actually decided to go to work apparently all drive the same route.)
Okay WINTER BLAST, bring it on. I'm ready. Lord knows I've been prepared for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment