NWS predicts the perfect storm and sends the office into a frenzy

Fran Ostendorf, EditorAs you read this column, we’ll be on the other side of what the National Weather Service predicted could be a “storm of historic proportions.”

For most of us, that really didn’t happen, did it?

On Sunday, a blizzard was predicted for Tuesday. Of course, the bread-and-milk people came out in full force. I drove by a grocery store in Cranston at 8 p.m., and the parking lot was packed. Apparently, the crowds hadn’t let up all day. Someone I talked to in the early afternoon had been at another market in the morning; “chaos” was the word she used to describe the scene.

Now, I didn’t grow up here, so I don’t quite understand the bread-and-milk mentality. But apparently, I missed something in my youth in Virginia. An acquaintance of my sister, now living in Israel, posted about “bread-and-milk buying” in Jerusalem before the recent storm there.

Ahhh, that’s the Jewish tie-in, you might be saying. Nope.

So why is this storm worth a word in The Voice?

Because, you should be receiving this paper pretty near to on-time despite a storm that shut down production for more than a day. And the day of the shut down is a critical one to our paper.

If you follow The Voice and its deadlines, you know that we are geared up for production on Tuesday of the week the paper comes out. The threat of a storm really sent us into frantic mode on Sunday when we still had many pieces of the paper outstanding. What would we do? How would we put it all together?

Did we get the predicted monster storm? Not really. We got a huge storm with lots of wind. Snow totals fluctuated between cities and towns and proximity to the water. Governors in three states, our primary circulation areas, declared states of emergency and shut down everything – roads, businesses, travel, you name it.

You may even still be digging out.

But there didn’t seem to be the power outages predicted because the snow wasn’t nearly as heavy, and the winds were not quite as strong. And that was a good thing for us.

Our offices at the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island closed Tuesday. But we were able to work at home via computer and email. That wouldn’t have been possible without power. You may be reading a little more news from the JTA and JNS than you usually see. And a couple of articles in the works were moved to future editions. But our team adjusted, and for that, I thank everyone. Our paper usually goes to the printer Wednesday night. But even the printer was closed Tuesday, so all the other printing clients needed to be moved around, and that affected us a little.

So, if you get your paper a day or two late, remember, in the end, the paper always comes out. Let’s raise a cup of cocoa to that.