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Tribal dancers a step ahead of weather forecasters
Thursday, July 29, 1999 By Jon Schmitz, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Hooked to some of mankind's best technology for watching and forecasting the weather, Rich Kane and his colleagues at the National Weather Service began dropping hints late Tuesday about yesterday's street-swamping, tree-flattening storm.
At best, they were hints.
At 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, Kane, in a routine weather service advisory, mentioned the "best ingredients we've seen in some time coming together" for rainstorms the following day. But he estimated that the storms would move so fast they would drop no more than a half-inch of rain.
At 3:14 a.m. yesterday, the NWS updated its call, issuing a special weather statement forecasting a "slight risk for severe thunderstorms late this afternoon and tonight" with heavy downpours and damaging winds. The statement said the storms, if they came, would likely reach Western Pennsylvania in the evening.
Unfortunately, Kane and the NWS were not dialed into what proved to be the most reliable weather indicator Tuesday.
That would be the children from the Yu'pik tribe of Alaska, who were attending the All-American Council of the Orthodox Church in America at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown.
Hearing that the host city was in a severe drought, the children performed a traditional "lightning and thunder dance," and within about 24 hours, had their desired results.
But virtually no one in these parts was tuned to Yu'pik weather yesterday. Even as inky clouds and thunder started to invade the city just before noon, some radio stations were still using stale forecasts calling for "a 40 percent chance" of thunderstorms last night.
By mid-morning, the NWS operations center in Moon was becoming aware of what the Yu'pik children had wrought.
At 9:43, the weather service posted severe thunderstorm warnings for Lawrence and Mercer counties -- the first of 33 storm and flood warnings it would post for the region.
At 10:05 a.m., the weather service issued a "severe weather outlook" that called for a "slight risk of severe thunderstorms across the region" for the afternoon and evening, citing a "near-tropical and unstable air mass" in the upper Ohio valley.
As the storm barreled toward Pittsburgh, the service posted a severe thunderstorm watch for Allegheny County at 10 a.m. Severe thunderstorm warnings for Beaver and Butler counties went out at 10:47 a.m. and 10:55 a.m.
Warnings -- which indicate damaging storms are imminent -- and watches are instantly disseminated via computer and radio to a host of interested parties, including emergency management agencies, law enforcement and the media. They are flashed instantly on The Weather Channel on cable TV systems.
Kane, a 15-year weather service veteran, decided at 11:30 a.m. to issue a severe thunderstorm warning for Allegheny County -- giving most of the county about 30 minutes to take cover, grab hip waders or build arks.
Kane said the NWS tries to strike a balance in its storm-watching so it doesn't develop a pattern of warnings that don't materialize -- the "cry wolf syndrome."
"While the thunderstorms are in Mercer County, we don't want to warn Allegheny County. There's a lot that can happen and by the time the storm gets to Allegheny County, it might not be severe anymore," said Kane, 47, a Penn State graduate who has worked in NWS offices in North Carolina, New York, Washington, D.C., and Virginia.
Kane said the weather service had a good scorecard yesterday. Of the 33 severe thunderstorm and flash-flood warnings across the region, reports indicated that in 28, damage occurred while the warnings were in effect.
The 30-minute heads-up for Allegheny County was "not bad for a severe thunderstorm," Kane said, but acknowledged that "sometimes it takes a while for people to hear it, depending on where they are."
KDKA-TV got instant notice of the storm warnings via the Emergency Alert System, the successor to the old Emergency Broadcast System. Within seconds, it ran "crawl" messages on the air with the warnings, said Larry Richert, evening weather anchor.
The station was into its noon newscast when, at 12:08 p.m., a "wall of water" crossed from the North Side into Downtown, Richert said. Weathercaster Bob Kudzma used the station's "Storm Tracker" system to forecast the precise moment of arrival in towns that were in the storm's immediate path.
Richert, who had mentioned a "chance" of thundershowers in the 11 p.m. newscast the day before, said, "No one out there anywhere saw this one coming to this degree."
"We thought there would be a good outbreak but we thought it would be later in the day," said Kane.
Lest anyone think that the Yu'pik children were a lightning flash in the pan, Gregg Nescott, public relations chairman for the church council, noted that they performed the same dance in Columbus, Ohio, last Thursday.
The next day, it rained.
Staff writer Ann Rodgers-Melnick contributed to this report.
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