Schools around here are in the middle of a snow week*. Not due to the snow, though we did get a decent amount on Sunday - it’s the cold. Currently it’s 8 F below, with a wind chill of -20. The low is -28 BEFORE wind chill, and tomorrow is only supposed to get UP to -16 F. That’s a -30 to -40 wind chill, and that’s dangerous as hell, especially for kids waiting for buses or rides outside.
I think school is scheduled to start again on Thursday. As I see little of the hooligans anyway, I suppose that’s good.
MN through the 70’s. Yeah, we didn’t close often either (we kids said if the superintendent could see his hand while lying in bed, it was OK to have school).
However, I think there are a lot more two-income/single-parent families these days, and both early ends and late starts can play havoc there.
As an aside, I was a town kid (vs. farm kid) in a small town. Sometimes they didn’t close school early enough to send out the buses, and the farm kids whose parents hadn’t come to pick them up got sent home with various townies. Mom had 6 kids of her own, and depending on the storm up to 12 or so guests (we ate a lot of pancakes on those days). Always pissed her off when they sent that army to the house early - she saw no reason that we couldn’t stay in school until the regular release time.
Our district closed and there wasn’t as much as a raindrop. I work in another district that was open, but did an early dismissal. As I was driving home I thought they were crazy. An hour after I got home, I was relieved. It’s not a lot, but it’s falling steady, visibility is getting bad, and the side streets are getting covered. I just have to wonder if the superintendent in my home district gets some very good info because they would’ve gotten high school and middle school home, but elementary might have been challenging or if he was thanking his lucky stars he didn’t look like an idiot. I do agree with the poster above, do an early dismissal, parents are pissed. Close, parents are pissed. I would never want to be the one to have to make the call. Just one bus, or one kid, I can live without that pressure.
Same, but for heat index. I was always baffled by the numbers until it came to me: they’re slapped on there by Yankees. To a native Texan, 95 is 95, period.
Wind chill I believe has a legitimate definition. It’s not about how cold you feel, but how rapidly your body temperature decreases. Wind chill at the same temperature will decrease your body temperature the same way, regardless of the actual temperature.
However, all I can find for “heat index” is how hot an average person feels. I would have hoped it was based on something scientific.
“The humidex (short for humidity index) is an index number used by Canadian meteorologists to describe how hot the weather feels to the average person, by combining the effect of heat and humidity. The term humidex is a Canadian innovation coined in 1965.”
It makes a huge difference. Whether the final number arrived at accurately quantifies how cold it is, I don’t know. But -10F with no wind is not as bad to me as single positive digits and 30 mile and hour wind. I was out shoveling snow on I believe this past Sunday in just a sweatshirt, jeans, slip on shoes, and a winter hat. No coat. No proper boots. It was in the single digits, but completely bearable, because there was little to no wind that day. Didn’t faze me one bit. But walking the dog on Monday, when it was in the teens and I was wearing full winter coat, two hats, layers and everything, it was miserable because the winds were at 20 mph. Makes a big difference. I’m looking at the calculator and supposedly with the current wind chill calculations, my 13F at 20mph equals about a -5, while my 3F (which is what the Sunday morning temp was) at 5mph (supposedly, there was that much wind when I was shoveling, according to the weather page for 8 a.m.), is -6F, so about equal, but the 13F @ 20 mph felt far worse to me. If anything, it looks like they underestimate how brutal it is.
When I was a kid, we had a lot of Snow Days. but that was the 50s and 60s, and there were always “housewives” (God, I hate that term) to watch the kids. I really don’t know how couples nowadays handle that. Whenever I hear “Schools wiil be closed…” I remember calling in Not Sick But I Have The Kids, and my boss asking me why my wife wasn’t watching them half the time (she was!).
You’re not getting it from me, though it is exceptionally cold here, but still, I see Chicago reporting -13F right now whereas here it’s only just about zero F (-18C). It’s supposed to warm up tonight in the Chicago area, though, to about zero F, and then well above freezing towards the weekend. Quit whining at me – if you want to blame someone, blame the guys from out west, like Minnesota and Saskatchewan, where it’s colder than Pluto in winter, and prevailing winds tend to blow it eastwards, mostly in the form of liquid nitrogen and frozen CO2.
Environment Canada disagrees with you. They have had a red “Extreme Cold Warning” advisory for the past two days. It’s going to start easing Friday and Saturday, and by Sunday we’ll be into rain and all this shit will be melting.
Whining? I thought I was being respectful and polite. Next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy. (Tonight in Chicago, we’re actually looking at -27F. The balmy 0 is expected tomorrow afternoon.)
The problem is increased litigation in our society. Parents that bitch the most when school is cancelled when the weather outcome fails to justify it will be the first to sue when their little Tommy gets injured in a bus accident on a snowy day.
I’m a big believer in “better safe than sorry” the results of drivers testing the forecast when it says not to and get into accidents are far worse than when the town shuts down even during a blown weather prediction.
It’s human nature to sit on our fat asses and bitch bitch bitch but IMO meteorologists have saved countless lives over the past several decades and thank goodness for them.
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At least they cancelled schools. Three or four times a year, they keep schools open, but cancel the buses - a move that makes people far LESS safe. School buses are the safest form of transportation there is; anything that makes students go to school in any other way instead of a bus increases the likelihood of injury and death. And yet they keep doing it because they won’t get sued if a child walking to school is hit by a car, or if the child is killed in their parents’ car.