The end of the world has come … or at least that’s what the weathermen would have had us believe during the storm of a lifetime — “snopocalypse.” However, once The Journal staff got close to campus we wondered, “What’s the big deal?”
Webster University shut its doors for a solid two days, canceling classes and closing down school buildings. Other schools were closed countywide on Tuesday and Wednesday, and grocery store shelves were devoid of storm favorites such as milk, eggs and bread by Wednesday afternoon. Once the shoppers were done, the shelves were as lacking in food as the roads were in cars as shoppers fervently holed themselves up at home. The Journal wasn’t aware that buying three-weeks-worth of groceries was necessary to survive a two-day blizzard, but the rest of Missouri did.
Looking outside of our respective windows, the projected six to 20 inches never seemed to appear. The storm that promised a bang left with a whimper, leaving The Journal wondering what happened to the state of emergency Gov. Jay Nixon had issued Monday night or the thunder snow we had all hoped for.
We understand that in other areas of Missouri, there were historic amounts of snow and ice. Even our rivals at University of Missouri-Columbia had a historic number of snow days, racking ip a total of three already this week, coming close to beating their four snow days in their total school history. However, in the St. Louis metro area this really wasn’t the case, but the news coverage would have told viewers quite differently. The news doesn’t need to provide 20-minutes worth of coverage during a 30-minutes show; we’d like to give St. Louis listeners a little more credit. Yes, keep us up-to-date, but at some point, we get it.
Our biggest complaint lies with the treatment, or rather lack of pre-treatment, of the roads. In St. Louis in particular, the roads wouldn’t have been nearly as bad had the roads been pretreated with salt before the ice hit. If Gov. Nixon is going to call in the National Guard before the storm hits, at least use them wisely to help keep our large driving population safe.
The only good thing that actually came out of the Snopocalypse of 2011 was the running stream of snow puns – snomageddon, snOMG and snotorious B.I.G., to name a few of our favorites.
Despite the impending doom of the snopocalypes, our favorite weather projection of this week came from a Philadelphia weatherman. Punxsutawney Phil projected an early spring on Feb. 2 amidst the end of snomageddon. Based on the predictions from our St. Louis weathermen, however, we are far more inclined to listen to the groundhog from now on — at least he seems a little more reliable.
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