WHAT A snow job.
Schools all around Boston were shuttered. Gov. Maura Healey told non-emergency state workers to stay home. Events were canceled. The area braced for eight inches or even a foot of snow.
What did we get? Bupkis.
Baby boomers still revel in sharing tales of the Blizzard of ‘78. This generation of snowflakes will be left to recount how they endured the Dusting of ‘24.
The storm moved well south of the area it was originally forecast to land, hitting some areas hard but leaving sidewalks around Boston nearly dry, and meteorologists with considerable egg on their faces.
Taking one for the team, weather guy Dave Epstein, writing in the Globe, said forecasting accuracy has actually improved considerably from the 1970s and 80s. But with it, he said, has also come “the pressure for meteorologists to be right all the time.” It is “pretty unusual for the models we use to be so different just a day before a storm is about to hit,” he said. But it happens.
The other variable in the mix is the way public officials react in making decisions to close schools or offices. The calls to cancel school and shut down state offices and other workplaces came early in the day on Monday, increasing the window of uncertainty during which the storm could change course.
If there’s one person to blame for the tendency of officials to err on the conservative side these days, look to John Lindsay, the two-term mayor of New York City in the late 1960s and early 70s. Vincent Cannato, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and his Struggle to Save New York, says Lindsay’s botched handling of a 1969 snowstorm became the cautionary tale that has spooked city leaders for decades.
In February of that year, with his first reelection approaching in the fall, Lindsay was caught flat-footed when the forecast called for a bit of snow changing over to rain but the city was instead walloped by more than a foot of snow – the opposite of what the Boston area experienced on Tuesday. The storm claimed 42 lives in the city. Municipal government was completely unprepared, and areas of Queens were impassable for days. Residents were enraged.
Battered over his handling of the storm, Lindsay, a liberal Republican back in the day when they existed, lost the GOP primary and had to pivot to run as a third-party candidate under the Liberal Party banner. He won a three-way race, but limped across the finish line with only 42 percent of the vote.
“It highlighted issues, fairly or unfairly, about city governance,” said Cannato. “If a city can’t clear the streets, what can it do?”
Ever since, said Cannato, holed up at home in Framingham yesterday with his 9- and 10-year-old kids home from school and “maybe a slushy inch” of snow on the grass, governors and mayors “know when there’s a big snowstorm, you’ve got to get things ready.” (One city leader who never got the memo was Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic, who 10 years later famously lost a 1979 Democratic primary for reelection after his disastrous handling of a major storm.)
That ethos, Cannato said, now extends to embracing a form of “safetyism” that leads officials to more quickly close schools and offices if there’s even a chance of a major storm.
“Better to err on the side of parents grumbling about missing work for a day than to have a bus stuck in a snowstorm or get into an accident,” said Cannato.
Appearing on GBH radio on Tuesday, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said the city relies on three different national and international forecasting services, and “all three models had really converged about 24 hours before on a pretty significant snow event right during the morning commute.” The city decided to close schools, and do so with enough time to give families as much notice as possible to make plans for the day, she said.
“I will take being over-prepared than under-prepared every single time, but it does come with a lot of disruption and inconvenience for families, and people trying to get to their jobs,” Wu said of the storm that proved to be a bust. “So it’s really unfortunate but we are glad to be safe rather than sorry in this case.”
It’s hardly the first time Massachusetts officials erred on the side of caution.
Twenty years ago, in his first winter as Somerville’s mayor, Joe Curtatone declared a snow emergency in advance of a projected storm that never materialized. The city had issued several thousand parking tickets and towed 200 cars for violating a street parking ban. The city reimbursed towing costs and waived all the ticket charges.
In 2010, then-Boston Mayor Tom Menino offered a similar ticket amnesty after an expected storm petered out.
Epstein emphasized that as good as the weather models are, things can – and do – change. He suggested officials might “hold back a little longer” before making their calls, asking, perhaps with a bit of understatement, “have we tipped the cautionary scale too far?”
