It was snow day. Already into spring, but there was a winter storm on the horizon. Doomsday predictions, rampant speculation from all sorts of media. We were all in the afternoon news meeting trying to decide what stories to cover for the day. Each reporter trying to pitch a story interesting enough to keep us out of a live shot in the cold weather telling people how cold it is outside. Not that we reporters don’t love live shots, it’s just we’ve all done weather stories and know if you pitch a story that’s good enough someone else will end up being cold for the night. Of course when it’s spring and there’s snow in the forecast, it didn’t matter what any of us came up with…we were all doing a weather story.
The most interesting idea of the day was a discussion we got into when someone pitched the idea of are people buying the forecast? Weather had been a big topic all week and we had seen predictions from anywhere from 12″ to 2″ in the metro…some people even predicting roads would be shut down in the city because of the impending doom. Beware the White Death screamed the billboards. Tie a rope from the barn to the house so you can feed the animals during the blizzard. OK, so maybe that’s a little over the top and a bit exaggerated, but it was a little silly at times. I think we’ve all seen snow forecasts in Oklahoma that were big and scary and then turned out to be nothing. So thus was born the idea that became my assignment.
It was decided that I would be the one to go out and find the snow skeptics. Since I was one of the biggest skeptics, it seemed only fitting. Plus for those who don’t know me…I sometimes smart off about things…and my sarcastic humor lended itself to this story quite nicely.
In the end…the forecasts were partly correct. Parts of NW Oklahoma saw up to two feet of snow, but it dried up just before hitting the metro. Officially, Oklahoma City got an inch of snow…I would call it a trace of snow at my house, but then again, almost all of it had melted by the time I woke up and went to work. The snow picked back up when the storm moved out of OKC and I ended up following the storm east for my Saturday story and actually saw a lot of snow that we were lucky to have avoided in the metro.
Phil
Let it Snow
