"Amateurs 'Playing Meteorologist' is a Formula for Disaster"

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Title quote from interview on Fox 59. Interestingly, Fair spokesman Andy Klotz confirmed that fair officials were second guessing the meteorologist, a point I discuss here.

Interview in The Indianapolis Star. 

Comments

  1. larrycosgroveAugust 17, 2011 at 8:11 AM

    THANK YOU for speaking up about this Mike! Honestly, so many tragedies happen because people "in charge" are unaware or blissfully ignorant of the opinion of experts who deal with severe or extreme conditions every day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousAugust 17, 2011 at 11:07 AM

    Yes indeed man! Thank you so very much for speaking up on this! Larry I gotta tell yas that I was so saddened by this event. I was happy at first because I had a decent storm chase on the southern end of this line of storms. That went away in a hurry after hearing about the collapse:(

    ReplyDelete
  3. Richard PAugust 17, 2011 at 2:07 PM

    In engineering we call this the MBA effect. Managers think that they know more than the technical experts, and make decisions using their own experience. Much of that experience is tainted with confirmation bias. The decisions normally involve conflicting needs and priorities, and it isn't till after the incident, that the realization those priorities were wrong.

    We see this all of the time in decisions affecting product quality, and customer satisfaction. If a problem is found and data is shown that it will cause a certain percentage of failure, they will ignore it to fit the needs of the moment, and deal with the repercussions later. They were not really playing amateur meteorologists that day (at least in their minds), just managers looking at the big picture.

    ReplyDelete

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