Turnpike's storm report is a snow job

The snows of January have long since given way to the rains (and occasional snows) of April, but Pennsylvania's slow thaw hasn't eased the peculiar form of brain freeze afflicting turnpike officials. Despite having taken a very long look at the latest snowbound stranding of hundreds of motorists on the toll road they ostensibly run, they remain incapable of acknowledging their failure. In fact, an untrained reader of the turnpike agency's "after-action report" could be forgiven for thinking officials were basking in the afterglow of a stunning success - a word that appears therein more than once.

The report, released last week, finds the Turnpike Commission and its consultants still determined to ascribe the debacle to acts of God, meteorological shortcomings, and scofflaw truckers. Given such obliviousness to their responsibility, it's no wonder this was at least the second surprise turnpike tailgate party in as many years.

Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of the agency's analysis is its persistent effort to blame the vagaries of the weather and the science of predicting it. In testimony before a state Senate committee in February, Turnpike Commission Chairman Sean Logan blamed a single AccuWeather forecast, issued on the afternoon the storm began, for his decision to send midday crews home instead of paying them overtime. Last week's report further commits to this strategy, pointing out that the storm dropped unprecedented amounts of snow in some places - like, say, West Virginia - and did not conform to the precise timing, amounts, and locations of the single forecast in question.

Turnpike officials are thereby taking advantage of the well-known difficulties of pinpointing snow totals to obfuscate the fact that this storm was extraordinarily well predicted. Meteorologists were warning of a major Northeast snowstorm a week in advance and treating it as a certainty by the time it arrived. Airport, bus, and most rail service was suspended in the Philadelphia region. And the day before the storm, as the Inquirer's Maria Panaritis reported, the state's chief meteorologist warned turnpike chief executive Mark Compton and others that the highway would see up to a foot and a half of snow.

Besides promising to expand the turnpike's "weather forecasting and situational awareness capabilities" - perhaps, one imagines, by equipping its executives with such cutting-edge technology as cellphones and televisions - the report takes umbrage at truckers who ignored lane restrictions and regrets that its 40-hour effort to remove stranded vehicles was "greatly hampered by the heavy snowfall." It also defends officials' decision to keep the highway open when the storm began as well as to close it the next morning, when it was too late for more than 500 vehicles stranded on a steep stretch east of Pittsburgh, in some cases for more than 24 hours.

While the agency does promise improvements in its emergency and other operations, it does so in the context of taking credit for preventing "a difficult and inconvenient situation from becoming a more serious event." But turnpike officials shouldn't need a weatherman to tell them this event was serious enough to merit acknowledgment and assurance that it won't be repeated.