Unpredictable as the weather.
It’s a phrase used often, a kind of mild indictment of meteorologists everywhere. It tells us that nothing is really predictable. Just like the clouds and the rain, anything on the horizon can be blown off course by a little wind or melted away by a sunny day.
The problem with it is that a lot of things are predictable — including the weather. Ask AccuWeather — a Pennsylvania-based company that largely is responsible for building weather forecasting as an industry. Ask Penn State — one of the top meteorology schools in the world.
They will both tell you weather is absolutely predictable. It just isn’t 100% precise because, hey, what is? What is important is that we are given a potential problem to prepare to handle and we react accordingly.
Texas, on the other hand, didn’t.
The Lone Star State is no stranger to severe weather. A fair number of hurricanes each year steer themselves away from the Atlantic coast and into the large fishbowl of the Gulf of Mexico, where they slam into the coast. The state is harried by droughts and heat and wildfire.
Cold weather, however, is just not what the state expects. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen — as the recent ice storm that hit Texas hard proves. The subsequent problems including a paralyzed electrical grid were exactly as predictable as weather. It is an uncommon but not unheard of event. Other freezes happened in 2011 and 1989.
The state was warned after those incidents that power plants needed to be winterized, but like a motorcycle rider without a helmet, the plant operators decided to take their chances. A cold snap might not happen every day, but once in 10 years is proving more than enough to collapse state systems and kill at last count 58 people.
What is predictable doesn’t have to be common. It doesn’t have to be likely to be possible.
Weather doesn’t care about preparation. The rain falls if you brought your umbrella or if you left it in the car. All that states can do is look at predictions based on what can happen in an area, what has happened before and what might happen in the future. All power providers can do is prepare for the worst case while the sun is still shining.
And every state that isn’t Texas needs to look at what is happening there as an object lesson in hubris. It’s easy for a Northern state to look at one that’s more used to being on fire than trapped in ice and make fun. But is Pennsylvania prepared enough for its own highly unlikely incidents to risk that karma?
We have car insurance not because we expect to T-bone an SUV at an intersection or back into a minivan in a parking lot. We prepare for the unlikely not because the catastrophic is inevitable, but because the most predictable thing in the world is that what we don’t prepare to handle, we will be unprepared to endure.
