Free When Science Goes Wrong by Simon Levay Page B

weather-chart symbols. Fish had a love-it-or-loathe-it kind of style; fittingly, he was once voted Best Dressed Man and Worst Dressed Man on television in the same year.
    Of course, I wanted to know the story behind the woman who called in to ask whether there was a hurricane on the way. This is a question that Fish has been asked many times before. In 2004, when he was interviewed for an article on the BBC Weather Centre’s website, he answered it as follows: ‘Nobody called in... My remarks referred to Florida and were a link to a news story about devastation in the Caribbean that had just been broadcast. The phone call was a member of staff reassuring his mother just before she set off there on holiday.’
    Fish gave me pretty much the same account, and he went on to bemoan how the often-shown video clip had been edited to make him seem as if he was talking about the weather in England. ‘If you had the complete clip there it would be painfully obvious it was nothing to do with the situation [in England],’ he said. ‘The rest of the broadcast went on to say, “Batten down the hatches, there’s some extremely stormy weather on the way.” Which to me is a very good forecast.’
    This account is at least partially incorrect, according to a study of the television and radio forecasts before the storm that was published in 1988 as part of the report of the official investigation. Fish didn’t say ‘Batten down the hatches...’ on that broadcast at all. He uttered that remark, or something like it, in the course of a different forecast that he gave 30 minutes later. This was a forecast for the European satellite television Superchannel. His exact words were, ‘It’s a case of batten down the hatches, I think, for some parts of Europe; some very, very stormy weather on the way indeed.’ In other words, Fish was saying that exceptional winds would occur over continental Europe – something that all the models were agreed on – and not that they would affect England. Later in that broadcast, he specified France and the Low Countries as the areas at risk.
    On the BBC broadcast, Fish did say that it would get very windy, but he gave less emphasis to the wind than to the prospect for rain, in line with the existing concern about flooding. The charts that accompanied the television forecasts that day indicated sustained wind speeds of up to 50 mph, but only for the English Channel and North Sea, not for land areas.
    What about the woman who called in? Was she really the mother of one of his colleagues who was planning a trip to Florida? Not at all, according to the Daily Mail . In the aftermath of the storm, that newspaper posted a monetary reward for the name of the woman involved. The answer soon came in: it was a Mrs Anita Hart from Pinner in northwest London.
    I tracked down Mrs Hart and spoke with her by telephone in 2006. ‘Oh no, no!’ she cried in mock despair when I told her why I was calling. ‘This has been haunting us for the last 20 years.’
    She told me that she saw the Mail ’s reward offer but didn’t respond to it because she valued her privacy. ‘But we were shopped by one of our son’s friends. To get the reward he called the newspaper and identified us.’
    Mrs. Hart’s story started a few days before the storm. She and her husband were planning a trip to Wales with their caravan. Their son Gaon was then studying meteorology at Manchester University. ‘We were in the habit, if we wanted to go away for the weekend – we would phone him and ask what the weather was going to be like. On this particular occasion he said, “Don’t laugh, but I think there’s going to be a hurricane.” He had tapped into the French computers, because our computers were not up to it.’
    This was on Monday. By Wednesday there were still no storm clouds on the horizon, so Anita called the BBC Weather Centre and asked whether there was indeed going to be a hurricane as she’d been warned. A man whom she took