On 3 Feb, 20:12, "Col" wrote:
Now you can dismiss this as the ranting of a bitter Northerner if you
wish, but hear me out...

I am getting increasingly irritated by the media's response that yesterday's
snow was the 'Worst in the UK for almost 20 years'.
Actually it wasn't.
It was the worst in London and selected areas of the SE, mainly to
the south of London and especially the North Downs.
So only a tiny part of the country had it's 'Worst for almost 20 years'.

I'm not complaining about the amount of media coverage given to this
event, clearly this area has millions of people and the disruption caused
was very severe.

What annoys is the casual assumption that because *London* was involved,
the rest of the UK somehow had to be affected in the same manner.
Had a similarly sized area in NW England been affected by a polar low
giving an equivalent amount of snow, nobody would have claimed it
was the UK's worst snowfall in almost 20 years.
It would have been reported as merely the worst snowfall in NW England
for 20 years.
--
Col

Bolton, Lancashire
160m asl

As a north-easterner (and for big-snow experiences, that's better than
your common-or-garden "northerner"), I can appreciate and share your
annoyance. Likewise, now I'm working in London and living pretty
close-by, I can see, full well, what the fuss is all about and how it
reaches such deafening proportions. When the London infrastructure
fails, it often fails big-time and involves one hell of a lot of
people. The other thing is that severe conditions don't happen very
often here and the definiton of "severe" is of a lower order of
magnitude too. All that gives rise to an almighty fuss - in the
media, Govt and amongst the population when anything does happen.

I twitched when I saw the phrase "worst for almost 20 years" and
realised that it was a gross error. But that's the media
sensationalising.

In severe events, I ALWAYS read in some newspaper or other or hear on
the TV: "and it's not over yet", "there's more/worse to come/on the
way etc. etc. - when, more often than not, there isn't.
Sensationalist drivel, to be sure, but no-one seems to stamp on it,
when it's proved so utterly wrong, and it's therefore wheeled out,
time-after-time, like some doom-monger's mantra, each time we have bad
weather. As if the weak and vulnerable aren't scared to death already
by the wind, snow, floods, cold, or whatever, that has already
happened to them in their area.

The fact is that London brought to a standstill is big news. It's
quite pathetic that it should happen in the way it did on Monday but
no-one is prepared to spend the money to prepare for that once-in-two-
decades-event and no-one down here really believes that these sorts of
things can possibly happen - until they do - and then they're never
going to happen "in quite that way", ever again. That also leads to
incredibly ramshackle planning arrangements.

I was personally involved in official rescue operations in the east
London floods of late Oct 2000, that had last happened, I'm told, in
the 1920s. As I stood at 22.00 hrs and watched floodwater fill a
street by coming UP through the street gullies (as the tide came in on
the Thames and blocked the egress of floodwater coming DOWN the storm
drains), and then begin to inundate nearby houses, I rang the control
centre and asked for sandbags. There was a stunned silence on the
other end of the phone. Eventually, the Controller came on the line:
"Is anyone standing nearby who can overhear?" he asked. "No, I said.
Why do you ask?". "Well" he said, very quietly, "We've got lots of
sandbags .............. but no sand". I, and my colleagues, stood
with the Fire Brigade doing absolutely nothing as maybe 40 houses were
flooded that evening. Sandbags might not have prevented that but at
least we'd have felt we were trying to do something useful and the
residents (who never once remonstrated with us, by the way) might have
thought so, too.

There was a form of enquiry, afterwards, but IMO it glossed over the
issues. I've no reason to believe that, with public finances and
politics still heavily involved in all this, anything much will ever
really change.


- Tom.