Washington DC dispatch

Storm warning over nothing

Weather forecasters predicted a violent snow storm that never arrived in the north-east of America after a state of emergency was declared, writes Martin Kettle
Exactly a week ago today, those of us who live in the main cities of the north-eastern United States got a nasty shock. By Sunday, the local TV news reported, we would be hit by a winter storm the like of which few could remember.

It would be nasty. It would be brutish. And it would be long. The storm would continue for 48 hours. We should expect two feet of snow, and perhaps more.

At times such as this, the US weather forecasting culture goes into a full battle mode that has to be seen to be believed.

Rapidly changing multicoloured graphics ripple across the screen. Emergency messages interrupt your favourite sitcom. And the normal repertoire of weather speak mutates into a new and more apocalyptic vocabulary that is felt to be appropriate at such moments.

Storms don't approach in the United States, they barrel in. In American winters, snow doesn't fall, it dumps. Here, winds cease to blow and start instead to churn. Meanwhile, Americans don't prepare, they hunker down.

Boy, do they hunker. From the first moment that what inevitably was quickly dubbed "the perfect storm" appeared on the multicoloured radar, the local TV stations and the 24-hour cable networks dispatched reporters to stand in front of prominent local landmarks to describe the frenetic preparations that we were all enjoined to undertake.

The weekend supermarket shopping chores instantly became panic buying. At checkout counters huge lines grew up of people wheeling trolleys full of bottled water, gallons of milk, every kind of processed bread, batteries galore and enough food to feed large parts of Africa for several weeks. As ever, when the snow threatens, there was not a snow shovel to be found in shops up and down the Atlantic coast.

The snow was scheduled to arrive on Sunday evening, and on Sunday morning I watched as reporters from the Weather Channel positioned themselves in places like Times Square and the Washington Mall to look out for the first flurries. The reporters were always clad in kit that most of us would find excessive in Antarctica, hunched dramatically over their microphones.

In the background, doubtless to the mirth of the camera crews, guys in sweatshirts and jeans stood looking casually into shop windows and, on one occasion, even started to play a game of touch football. Didn't these people have any idea what was going on?

As it turned out, of course, they knew better than the forecasters. In Washington, at some point on Sunday night, it began to rain. The following morning, for about an hour, there was a flurry of snow on the wind. But it didn't settle. By lunchtime, the sun was actually shining from a clear blue sky.

But that hadn't stopped the airlines from cancelling flights, leaving bemused travellers standing in largely empty concourses watching the drizzle outside that had brought the nation to a halt. Schools across the north-east stayed closed.

Mayor Giuliani told New Yorkers not to clutter the streets by coming to work. In New Jersey they declared a state of emergency and then, rather ruefully, had second thoughts.

It has to be admitted, of course, that in some parts of the north-east, there was indeed a lot of rather unpleasant wet snow for a night or two. Somewhere on the Massachusetts coast there was some nasty flooding of a limited kind as the sea rose for a while. But for most of us the perfect storm turned out to be singularly imperfect. An awful lot of people had an awful lot of milk to get through before it went off.

These false alarms are one of the regular collective dramas of modern American life, and inevitably one wonders why everyone goes on participating in them when they must know, not very deep down, that the air of crisis is mostly unnecessary and excessive.

Part of the explanation, without question, is the influence of 24-hour news television, which treats these events with such earnestness that one feels under an obligation to swallow one's scepticism. When you keep on hearing the man on CNN telling you that it isn't snowing in Philadelphia, though it just might do so any moment, you eventually submit, and you nip out for an extra few gallons of milk, just in order not to embarrass him.

But there's also something magnificently, absurdly metaphorical about it too. Britain may have weather, but Americans have climate. It's them against the elements, proving to the world that the American dream is undaunted and that the Star Spangled Banner still waves through dawn's early light, and the disappointingly brief snow flurries.

The American faced with a winter storm watch is a bit like an American confronted with the prospect that North Korea might launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at Honolulu. Rationally, you know it isn't really going to happen.

If it is, then there's probably not a lot you can do about it anyway. It will either hit or it won't. But they both provide an opportunity for an act of conspicuous collective defiance before we all retreat in doors to watch the world end on primetime in our sitting rooms.

Or - as it turned out once again this week - not.


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