Politics is a lot like the weather. Everyone likes to complain about it. Few are willing to do anything about it.

Perhaps that’s an unfair comparison, but weather has been on many Georgians’ minds for the past couple of weeks. The temperatures have been a bit on the cold side even for winter. 

Add in some precipitation and some wild and perhaps over-hyped forecasts of ice and snowfall and you get most everyone obsessing over the same thing at the same time.  Outcomes differed widely.  Much like politics, the perception of those outcomes also varied from household to household. 

What happens after a weather event has a lot to do with what actions happen in the days – or even years – that precede it.  We focus a lot on whether we can get roads covered in salt and brine before precipitation has the chance to turn to ice.  

Georgians have a bit of tolerance for short storms that are cured by the sun within a day or two.  Our northern friends do not.  They get a lot more snow, and the temperatures in winter regularly stay below freezing for weeks. If the snow isn’t removed immediately, it can block roads and sidewalks for months. 

Our friends in Washington D.C. are questioning their Mayor about new ice formations and their inability to navigate the nation’s capital right now.  They Mayor has responded for citizens to come and pick up salt and be part of the solution.  …Good luck with that, I guess.

Thankfully, at least in Georgia, we don’t have to worry too much like our friends in Texas do that we have sufficient base load power generation to account for peak electric demand for heating.  It took several ice storms for the body that loosely regulates Texas’ independent power grid to notice that the averages they use to predict wind power don’t work when there is a high correlation between deep freezing temperatures and a lack of wind.  

Redundant backup power requires investment. In a crisis, that pays off. When skies are sunny and the wind is blowing as normal, people complain about their electric bills. 

Our friends in Texas have invested in backup generation and dodged most of the last two weeks’ worth of weather.  Much of Nashville Tennessee, however, has been without power for over a week with full restoration not expected until this weekend.  

Their problem is not the same as Mississippi, where a generational ice storm took out most of the above ground infrastructure over a wide and disparate area.  There is only so much humans with limited capital can do to prepare for natural events.  

Nashville’s grid operator is facing outages much more severe than their more rural neighbors.  There are open questions if their management turned their preparation and training away from restoration and into political reorganization. Time will tell if their system was more focused on HR than critical operations.

The perception of these events has a lot to do with the folks that often are disassociated with the preparation nor responsible for the aftermath. “Official” weather watches and warnings come from the National Weather Service.  Many of us still use local broadcast stations to provide advance cautions leading up to these warnings.  

The TV folks are now competing for the same online views and the ad dollars that follow them with “independent” weather sources.  Some are very reliable.  Some aren’t weather sites at all – just hype machines that invest heavily in deception to generate clicks.  Sounds a lot like politics too, doesn’t it?

When the storm comes, some of us get relative calm and quiet.  Those of us who got snow and were lucky enough where preparation kept our power on, our streets cleared, our pantry’s full got to enjoy a day inside where it was warm and we were well fed.  

Not everyone was this lucky, even here in Georgia.  But a lot of hard work by a lot of different people in the public and private sector went into most of us getting this good luck.

The aftermath, too, is often telling.  There are those who claim the storm was overhyped. Some feel they were promised a different outcome – especially those who live on the western side of the state.  

The thing about weather is that we all know it’s unpredictable. We’ve seen enough snow (and non-snow) that we know we’re almost always on the line of where it happens and where it doesn’t.  This weekend a 20 mile difference in metro Atlanta determined whether you got no snow or 6 inches of it. 

Sometimes we just like to complain. It’s easier to blame someone else than to look at readily available data, understand that there is always uncertainty, and plan then act for a variety of outcomes. 

The media can bring us some data. The utilities can invest in what they can control. The government will make decisions based on their own models plus a risk-averse set of decisions of what might happen.  But we ultimately remain responsible for our own preparations – be it for weather or anything else.