TORNADO WARNING!!!!!
Maybe the title gets your attention, or maybe it doesn’t. It certainly got the attention of a multitude of people in the Gauteng area yesterday.The South African Weather service issue a thunderstorm warning yesterday morning for the greater gauteng area. They could not predict the exact location until closer to the time of the storm, but some enterprising person decided that they would embellish a little on the details of the warning.
I suspect the warning started off innocently, very similar to the warning issued today on their website: (Just found the actual warning http://www.weathersa.co.za/Pressroom/2007/2007oct08severeweather.jsp)
”
| National Warning - Issued on Tuesday, 9 October 2007 at 16.00 |
| Very cold conditions are expected on the north-eastern part of the Eastern Cape and western interior of KwaZulu-Natal as well as southern highveld of Mpumalanga Province. |
”
Seems innocent enough, but it caused unbelievable chaos over Gauteng. By 3pm companies were closing doors, buildings had been evacuated, and ER24 emergency medical services were receiving urgent pleas from parents to rescue their children from school.
If anyone doubts the power of the social network mentality, this is a prime example. Millions of people tried to verify the warnings directly from the SA Weather service, however the servers were simply not capable of handling that amount of traffic and collapsed under the load. Unable to verify people decided to err on the side of caution and sent warnings via email and sms. I personally sent a mail to a number of my friends stating the following:
“Although the below mail is beautifully crafted to model a classic hoax mail, I have independently confirmed the story in the beeld (http://www.news24.com/Beeld/Suid-Afrika/0,,3-975_2197644,00.html) and thought you guys should be aware that abnormal storm activity is predicted for today.
Here is an interactive weather map, http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/map/interactive/SFXX0023?from=36hour_map_large&animation=true&zoom=5&interactiveMapLayer=sat, looks like we are in for some interesting weather. (See the clouds coming in from the east with a central…um, vortex like characteristic) Some people say tornadoes are a possibility, others deny that tornadoes will develop but that a severe storm is imminent.Unfortunately I was unable to verify this with the South African Weather service as their web server seems to be offline (possibly due to the million or so other South Africans trying to verify this story)”
As you can see in my mail, I mentioned that my Hoax alarm had rung while reading the mail. But it just looked so impressive, the Beeld article was confusingly laid out, the author had moved from one thought into the next and back to the previous thought which made it seem that tornados were possible. I also looked at the weather radar and saw cloud formations coming in over the ocean. Of course I now know that I don’t have a clue how to read weather radar 
Well if you didn’t know it was a hoax, here is a confirmation from the SA weather Service stating that the warnings spread through unofficial (and some official news stories) were “wildly exaggerated”.
http://www.weathersa.co.za/Pressroom/2007/2007Oct08huricane.jsp
Well thats it for now
I am JMR and this is My Little Corner on JMRPub.com
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