As the winds died down and the rain let up throughout southern B.C. Saturday night, some residents took to social media to voice their underwhelmed reactions to what was promised to be a much more dangerous storm.
SEE ALSO: Wind, rain warnings lifted after third B.C. storm in a week hits south coast
Saturday’s storm, the third in a series caused by the remnants of Super Typhoon Songda, was expected to be the worst of the bunch. While heavy winds and rain did hit the region, with gusts exceeding 90 km/hour, damage to both property and nature was relatively minimal and not as widespread as predicted. Many residents said the effects of the storm did not match the warnings issued throughout the weekend.
Meteorologists are saying that even with hindsight, they would have still issued the same warnings they did in advance of the storms, based purely on the data they had and the responsibility to the public.
“A lot of people are in agreement that we did put out the right message, we did send out the warning, we did show what the worst-case scenario could have been,” said Global News meteorologist Yvonne Schalle.
Fellow Global meteorologist Michael Kuss, meanwhile, has grown comfortable with the nature of his job, where even though predicting the day’s weather has a 95 per cent accuracy rate on average, that still leaves the five per cent of the time where the weather doesn’t play out exactly right.
“Forecasting is predicting the future, and predicting the future is hard,” said Kuss. “But it’s better to err on the side of caution than on the other side.”
“The tough part is that folks only remember when the forecast is wrong. And the forecast isn’t wrong that frequently, but those are the moments that we remember.”
Below are some samples of Twitter’s nonplussed, and often sarcastic, reactions:
Despite these and many other examples of sarcasm, many others are reminding social media that the storms still wrought damage. Tens of thousands of homes were without power Saturday alone, and a teenager was killed by a falling tree in Surrey on Friday.
Click here for full coverage of the B.C. storms.
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