« The Golden Age of Russian Cooking | Main | Yours, Lenin (P.S. Use your toughest people for this) »
March 1, 2005
"Instead of that you are giving us [expletive]!"
(Muscovite weather insanity, reprinted from the Washington Post, which is irritating to link to, because as with every two-bit online rag readers have to register first.)
Washington Post
March 1, 2005
Forecasters Feeling Some Official Heat
Moscow's Mayor Directs Displeasure at Weather Bureau, Proposes Fines for
Inaccuracy
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
MOSCOW, Feb. 28
Weathermen of the world, beware!
The mayor of this city, where -- stop the presses -- it tends to snow a
lot, is furious that weather forecasts are sometimes inaccurate. And he has
proposed fining the weather service every time it gets a forecast wrong.
"We are paying and would like to receive a quality product," Mayor Yuri
Luzhkov thundered at a city government meeting last week that was attended
by a number of forecasters. "Instead of that you are giving us [expletive]!"
The mayor's hot flash was prompted not by a failure to predict snow, but by
the Moscow Weather Bureau's inability in January to say exactly when a
blizzard would arrive and how much snow it would dump on the city. On Jan.
28, the city endured its heaviest snowfall since record-keeping began in
the 19th century, and local public services were unable to cope.
The storm snarled the city's already horrendous traffic, closed airports
and forced pedestrians to wade through high drifts.
"I think it's very funny he gets so upset, because we all know it snows in
Moscow," said Larisa Stemkovskaya, 61, a retired engineer. "But the mayor
is obsessed with weather."
Officials at the weather service, which is funded by the city, reacted coolly.
"Meteorology is a science, but meteorologists never claim a 100 percent
accurate forecast," Alexei Lyakhov, head of the weather bureau, said in an
interview. "Punishing weather forecasters is not happening anywhere else in
the world, but maybe we should think about it. It's worth considering this
idea of fining us if we also get bonuses when we get it right. And we get
it right 90 to 99 percent of the time."
The mayor, however, wants perfection and has shown himself to be something
of a control freak when it comes to the weather.
He created the capital's weather service in 1999 after the federal agency
failed to forecast a thunderstorm that knocked down trees across the city.
The following year he threatened to fire forecasters when they flunked in
predicting the severity of a snowstorm. He famously accused the federal
weather service of "telling lies."
On occasion, he directs the weather himself.
In advance of major holidays, sports events and parades, Luzhkov forks out
tens of thousands of dollars for planes to seed clouds with dry ice and
liquid nitrogen. That causes them to unleash their loads of moisture before
reaching Moscow, often bringing torrential downpours to the hapless suburbs
while the city basks in sunshine.
Posted by michele at March 1, 2005 6:51 PM