Weatherman faces up to six months.

January 5, 2002 5:45 PM

Weatherman faces up to six months. Rio de Janeiro Mayor Cesar Maya has asked prosecutors to seek charges against Luiz Carlos Austin, claiming his weather forecast was irresponsible. The city's acting chief prosecutor, said he would likely charge Austin with sounding a false alarm, which is punishable by up to six months in prison. Was it really irresponsible to report that the storm could hit? And who listens to weathermen anyway? I say if you want to find out what the weathers going to be like, stick your head out the window. Major storm warnings are the only things I want to hear about.
posted by mikhail (5 comments total)

Well there's little for us to go on since the article is short on the description of what really went on. We don't know -what- exactly the weatherman said ('Run for your life!!!' or something like that?) but I would normally say that to prosecute a weatherman for having given a bad prediction is just incredibly absurd.

Now, if you tell me that there was OBVIOUSLY nothing there, that there was indeed no chance in hell of some storm happening, that all the other weathermen are going 'huh? storm? where?', then, considering the problems they seem to have with flooding and the possibility of panic, then I am listening. Something like that is not giving a bad prediction, its more like saying there's a bomb in a plane when there isn't.
posted by oneiros at 6:00 PM on January 5, 2002

slap that politician up the side of his face. then, investigate his finances.
posted by quonsar at 6:24 PM on January 5, 2002

This reminds me of the book, "Isaac's Storm". That guy never got prosecuted for ignoring signs of a storm that killed thousands because many people in 1900 believed that predicting the weather was blasphemous. You weren't allowed to predict what God might do, etc. This guy would never get prosecuted in the U.S. because nobody lives at the airport. Poor guy. Wrong place, wrong time.
posted by colt45 at 6:34 PM on January 5, 2002

I thought this was about Bill Ayers when I first saw the link...

There's gotta be more to the story than they reported though. Forecast errors are a given in meteorology.
posted by mdn at 9:35 PM on January 5, 2002

Cesar Maya is a major dickhead. He's more interested in doing his own personal marketing and focusing into his populistic and demagogic deeds.

Every january is the same in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo (our biggest cities). It's rain season, followed by floods and landslides that affect lifes from the same known areas, most of them living in poor neighborhoods. Instead of doing something about it, the mayors would rather blame it on the weathermen.

But this shouldn't surprise me, since we are facing a major risk of energy blackouts because our federal government didn't act quickly about building some new powerplants and energy transmission lines and them blamed it on 'Saint Peter' for not sending enough rain to refill our hidrolectrical resources.
posted by rexgregbr at 1:15 PM on January 7, 2002