PRE-PRECIPITATION SYNDROME

In much of Maine on Wednesday, families woke up to no snow … and no school. Call it precipitation anticipation. After days of news stories warning of a huge storm headed for New England, the cancellations began Tuesday, nearly 24 hours before the first snowflake fell. With so much meteorological information a mouse click or channel change away, weather watching, for good and bad, has become a national obsession.

Few people are as acutely aware of this as school superintendents. Ask any retired school superintendent, says Dale Douglass, executive director of the Maine School Management Association (and a retired superintendent), and they’ll tell you the thing they miss least about the job is deciding when to cancel school. They worry about kids on buses, kids walking in the road because sidewalks aren’t plowed, staff members and parents driving to and from school. If they cancel school and the big storm doesn’t materialize, they are criticized for being too cautious. If they keep school open and the whopper storm hits, they are criticized for not taking the forecast seriously.

“Today’s extended news shows often start … with an ominous warning: ‘Get ready! Buy your bottled water and batteries … The Big One is coming.’ Mind you, it’s not coming today or even tomorrow. It’s predicted to hit seven days from now,” mused then-Ellsworth Superintendent Jack Turcotte in the February 2003 issue of “The School Administrator.” “What superintendent in his or her right mind would try to run a school when the news media have been forecasting this killer storm for the past 10 days?”

Judging by Wednesday’s cancellations, not many.

The move toward cautionary cancellations caused outbursts in Augusta on Tuesday as lawmakers questioned why hearings and work sessions were being called off long before it was actually snowing.

Others begin worrying even further in advance. Pete Geiger, editor of Farmers’ Almanac in Lewiston, says he daily gets numerous inquiries from people who want a prediction for, say, the specific June day in 2008 they have picked for their nuptials. The 190-year-old almanac has survived the proliferation of weather Web sites and television coverage because it is the only place to get a two-year advance, albeit general, prediction.

All the weather watching has its benefits. Storm-related deaths have declined dramatically as predictions have been better and more widely dispersed. A hurricane hit Galveston, Texas, in September 1900, killing an estimated 8,000 people, mainly because no one knew it was coming. A much smaller storm certainly would not escape attention today.

It would be causing superintendents heartburn while it was still hundreds of miles out to sea.