Photo of Rocks at the shore of Lake Michigan. (AP Photo)
At the end of January 2019, a polar vortex was coming to town. My teachers seemed to think Evanston Township High School wouldn't close because we only closed once in 30 years due to winter weather. And that one time they closed in those 30 years, the superintendent was interviewed the next day saying he regretted closing the school. This is because many students' main access to heat and food was at school. So if school closed people would lose access to a lot of basic needs. We asked teachers if the school was going to be canceled, and they laughed, saying it was extremely unlikely. So when the call came home saying the school was canceled for two days we were shocked. This meant something serious was about to come our way. Yet my siblings and I cheered in the kitchen when we saw D202 calling our home phone and leaving the automated voice message of the school being closed.
We couldn't imagine what negative thirty Fahrenheit would feel like. I didn't imagine that it could be insanely cold, it was. The conversation quickly turned from silly jokes about throwing boiling water to scary ideas about frostbite in under 20 minutes. Many of my friends including me were banned from leaving the house. January 30th was the first day off of school, and my siblings wanted to check out how cold it was. So we opened the door and then decided we weren't going to that again. The rush of cold went through to our bones. It was time to make tea and soup. I spent a lot of that day sitting on the radiator trying to warm up.
This was not the reality of everyone hit by the polar vortex. Extreme cold is one of the most dangerous geohazards. People across the Midwest lost power and companies urged customers to turn down their heat (Smith, Bosman, Davey). The mayor of Chicago warned everyone not to use too much water because the pipes might freeze and then break. And because cold temperatures are so dangerous at least 21 people lost their lives to the extreme cold that passed through the midwest on January 30th and 31st, 2019 (Smith, Bosman, Davey). This polar vortex came from the north bringing a polar cold, south into the midwest (weather.gov). On January 30th the 24-year cold record was broken. On January 31st the all-time Illinois cold record was broken at -31 Fahrenheit (weather.gov). Shortly after the polar vortex, the temperature swung up around 70 degrees.
Weather.gov diagram of polar vortex
After two days stuck inside we were all back in school. This cold shutdown marked the last time Evanston Township High School ever shut down without having an online school instead. With polar vortexes getting worse with climate change, schools are shutting down for the online “snow day” more and more. This was a historical two days not just because of the record cold but because it was the last real “snow days”.
Smith, M., Bosman, J., & Davey, M. (2019, January 31). Extreme cold weather spreads east. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/us/weather-polar-vortex.html
US Department of Commerce, N. (2019, February 4). January 30-31, 2019: Record to near-record cold in Northern Illinois. National Weather Service. https://www.weather.gov/lot/RecordColdJan2019
Comments
Post a Comment