I’m sure all of us have experienced the Weather Channel going on about an upcoming snowmageddon that turns out to be just flurries.
They, and other media, sensationalize the shit out of the weather. Which ought to be against the law. Weather data is life and death decision-making data. Deliver it accurately and emotionally flatly or get off the air/internet.
Problem with the Weather Channel et al crying “wolf” so often is obvious. People apply a large discount to their warnings. With statistically predictable results.
And for whatever reason, the general public seems to greatly prefer getting their info from places like that and not from the real source: NWS. Which has not yet been doged/trumped into uselessness.
I agree about the Weather Channel horse shit - I mean, they name run of the mill storms now - “Five million people on the East Coast are in danger of getting rained on!!” But in this situation the group was led by 4 guides who, as professionals, were probably not getting weather info from McWeather dotcom, but (hopefully) instead getting info from the Sierra Avalanche Center. We need to wait and see how the decision-making process went on the morning of their trip departure, as well as the morning they were hit by the avalanche.
Dog Valley Road? Without vehicle clearance, it’s sketchy on the best summer day. Winter sounds like a good way to get an expensive tow.
Google has at some point helpfully physically added “Closed winters” to the name on the map. But I’ve still heard of them sometimes routing people through it recently.
Apparently the group had a choice of two travel options:
Western route: Frequent exposure to multiple overlapping avalanche paths, and limited options to reduce exposure and Eastern route: Many options to reduce or eliminate avalanche exposure.
For those who want a little insight both into how avalanche conditions occur and are predicted, and into how otherwise smart folks talk themselves into dumb situations, I can’t think of a better read than this. Snow Fall was published by the New York Times in 2013 after a very similar disaster at Stevens Pass, just east of Seattle.
It’s not just a gripping story, told well, with a incredibly sad ending, it was also a groundbreaking piece of multimedia journalism that holds up today. And it won a Pulitzer Prize.
“Snow Fall” became a sensation in journalism circles. NYU’s Jay Rosen called it “a break point in online journalism.”
The feature won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and a Peabody Award, which called it a “spectacular example of the potential of digital-age storytelling, the web site combines thorough traditional reporting of a deadly avalanche with stunning topographic video.”
…and…
A graphics and design team of eleven staffers worked on the feature (including a photographer, three video staffers, and a researcher), taking more than six months to assemble the piece.
The worst part of the story, and I mean, don’t click on this if you can help it, is the call one of the rescuers makes to the ski patrol office. Of course, not realizing that it was folks the ski patrol team worked with and knew. Listening to that poor woman start the call in a professional emergency management mode and break down when it became personal is just really tough.