I'm seeing a pattern here. Last Saturday I wrote a post, "Portland's Channel 12 gets Salem freezing rain annoyingly wrong."
My gripe was that Channel 12's Mark Nelsen said that Salem and other parts of the central Willamette Valley easily could get an inch of freezing rain on Saturday, January 13. That, Nelson added, could produce widespread power outages on the magnitude of the Great Ice Storm of 2021.
Actually, the National Weather Service was forecasting much less freezing rain for the Salem area.
That turned out to be correct, as there was little freezing rain in our area on Saturday, with no power outages, so far as I know. So Nelsen broadcast a sensationalized forecast that freaked people out, but didn't come to pass.
Fast forward to Monday, January 15, when another ice storm was being forecasted on Tuesday.
Basically the same thing happened with a Salem Statesman Journal story by Zach Urness. I made a screenshot of how the online story started out, because I suspected Urness also was sensationalizing the impact of the storm -- probably for the same reason Nelsen did, to garner more audience attention. You know, clicks, which generate advertising revenue.
As you can read below, Urness claimed that the National Weather Service was forecasting from a quarter to three-quarters of an inch of ice for the area from Salem/Corvallis up to Portland. The Statesman Journal headline spoke of a major ice storm being likely for the Willamette Valley on Tuesday.
Actually, that wasn't true. Urness should have checked more National Weather Service sources than merely talking with the National Weather Service forecaster quoted in the story and including a NWS graphic that was on the site formerly known as Twitter, and he should have included details in his story about the amount of freezing rain being forecast for Salem.
This is what the National Weather Service web site was forecasting for Salem on Monday, when the Statesman Journal story appeared online. The Tuesday ice accumulation was shown as 0.1 to 0.3 of an inch possible, with less than 0.1 of an inch added Tuesday night.
So there wasn't a quarter to three quarters of an inch forecasted for Salem, as the Statesman Journal story implied. The amount being forecasted was a bit more than a tenth of an inch to a bit more than three tenths of an inch. In reality, on Tuesday the Salem area got around a tenth of an inch, to my understanding. That was the case at our house in rural south Salem.
It also appears that Urness either didn't read the National Weather Service Ice Storm Warning issued at 2:26 pm on Monday, January 15 or he didn't pay attention to it. Though it came out before his story was published, the Ice Storm Warning said that Salem and other central/south Willamette Valley cities could expect total ice accumulations of one tenth to two tenths of an inch.
That's less than the quarter of an inch that Urness said in his story was the low-end of the National Weather Service forecast, which obviously wasn't true.
All in all, then, this was shoddy reporting by Urness. He created a lot of anxiety among the (thankfully few) Salem residents who still read the Statesman Journal by failing to present all the facts about how much ice was being forecasted by the National Weather Service for our area. Which is too bad, because I enjoy Urness' stories about the Oregon outdoors and he's a good writer.
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