65° - 01.09.1967, Blaðsíða 27

The oldest likes school once she gets there but
it takes her a long time to get ready in the
mornings. She is old enough to foresee that if the
teacher is ill — teachers sometimes get colds too
— the class she prepared to shine in will be
cancelled, or perhaps only half the children will
show up and the examination for which she has
studied so conscientiously will be postponed. Is
it worth going for? On the other hand, if the
class is half full, the teacher might entertain them
with something unusually interesting, or might
not. It is nasty weather and a long walk, but she
doesn’t want to be the one coward who was
intimidated by the weather. So in addition to
her usual morning grogginess, she is weighing
the pros and cons, wishing someone would say
definitely whether there is to be school.
The mother finally sends them off: they are
supposed to be hardy Icelanders, and think of
the Vikings who went abroad in all weathers!
Then she begins to worry, for the weather wor-
sens. She has almost been blown under a car on
her food-shopping tour. Will the children be able
to make it home? Should she send for them in
a cab? How much will it cost? Should she fetch
them herself so they can blow together or call
the principal and ask if any arrangements can
be made, knowing the school has no bus? And
should she bother the principal, who is a busy
man? It’s not his business to get the children to
and from school, only to regulate conditions
while they are there. Finally the children come,
one by one, drenched and breathless and sniffing,
sometimes sore or dirty from having fallen. And
unless the weather changes, there is the same
problem to be faced tomorrow.
This is what really happens.
What could happen is that when our sleepy-eyed
Inga faces the question of school or no school,
she clicks on the radio at seven-thirty for the
special bad-weather-broadcast.
The weather station has earlier announced
general weather conditions hut the schoolboard
has long since conferred privately with weather
experts and now only has to refer to its transla-
tion manual which is more helpful than the rou-
tine report poor Inga heard.
The manual is specific. It describes a near gale
(allhvasst) at 7 vindstig, at which speed it is
dangerous to work on rooftops. A gale (hvass)
is 8 vindstig and twigs of trees may be broken
and pedestrian progress impeded. A strong gale
(stormur) registers 9 on the Beaufort interna-
tional windscale, at which time slates can be
detached from roofs and slight structural damage
occur. Storm (rok) measures 10 vindstig, and
though seldom found inland, can cause consider-
able structural damage and uproot trees. The
same hazards increase with violent storm (ofsa-
viori) which registers 11 vindstig, and hurricane
(farviSri) registering 12 vindstig.
More people than Inga are ignorant of the fact
that the weather moves from west to east, and
that it is easier to predict weather changes in
Europe where recording bases can be set up on
land. Furthermore, of the 100 weather stations
scattered over Iceland, only some 50 send daily
reports to the weather station. Reykjavik’s weather
station is at Reykjavik airport and reports the
weather every three hours. This is a mean report
however, and depending on whether one lives in
a thickly or sparsely built section, on a hill or in
a valley, the wind force may vary from that re-
ported from the airfield.
Although long range predictions are impossible
to make, owing to the lack of stations to the west
of Iceland, forecasts of twelve to forty-eight hours
ahead are made by the weather bureau. That the
newspapers do not make use of this fact and
prefer to print yesterday’s weather and not to-
day’s, is due to their own laziness, and is not
expected to help people prepare for the current
day’s weather. This would certainly reassure Inga
if she could know. She has always felt unutterably
stupid about interpreting the daily weather map
in the newspapers.
Luckily, however, the schoolboard has digested
this information, especially the pertinent facts
that hvassvifiri can blow small children down the
street, under traffic, or into the ditches that
abound on unfinished streets; that rok and any
speed above is unsafe for older children and
adults, and that rain or snow or dust carried at
those speeds impairs the vision of pedestrians
and motorists alike, making an extremely danger-
ous situation.
So on this obviously bad weather day, action
is begun. A call to the weather station clinches
the windspeed and the forecast for the school
day, and now the principals merely check the
age levels in their schools. Each principal phones
in his statement to the radio station in time for
the seven-thirty report, which could run about as
follows:
“Here is a special announcement prepared by
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