Freezing weather and earthquakes in 1994 - 21 January 1994

There have been many momentous things happening both here and abroad this past week, this month and I hope we'll take up one or two of them. But if ever there was a fortnight when you have more pressing things on your mind and body than momentous events, this has been that time.

Simply the weather, mostly quite beautiful to look upon, but just about as beautiful and deadly as those pictures of Scott or Amundson on sparkling cloudless days at the pole. About two-thirds of north America from the north-west and Pacific coast down through the Midwest and the east, but then amazingly south almost to the Gulf of Mexico paralysing, Arctic cold.

Because I live in New York City, I can report that New Yorkers like other metropolitans – like Parisians, like Londoners – think they are at the centre of the earth, so they grow hysterical when the temperature drops below, below zero. And let me say it once for people and journalists in temperate countries, that below does not mean below freezing, it means below zero, 32 degrees below freezing. So for many nights in the city, we had about 37/38 degrees of frost, frightful. But then you look around at the rest of the country, the big cities of the Midwest and beyond, Chicago 28 blow zero, Minneapolis to whom 28 below is normal winter life but this time 48 below zero, 80 degrees of frost – not imaginable to, say, west Europeans. My wife and my daughter up in Vermont usually talk to each other, every second or third day and when we complain that the thermometer is at zero, she usually says "well we're hoping it'll climb up there". This week they had 30 below every day. If you cover your ears and nose and the rest of you, it can be a tonic experience just to be alive and moving.

We've had most days during this dreadful month January have been brilliant, diamond bright, ice-pick cold, but it's not just the extreme cold around most of the country that's caused all the miseries, but a perverse sequence of weather. First snow, light or massive, then a following thaw, but then a deceitful day of rain and then suddenly the thermometer toboggans and hundreds of thousands of roads, main, sub-main, county, back- country roads are immense ice slides.

I imagine this past week or two, more millions of Americans were unable to get to work than at any time in memory and the consequent griefs – burst pipes collapsing ceilings, no power, no light. This and not Iran-gate and not Mr Yeltsin, not the resignation of Admiral Inman, not even the bizarre Lorena Bobbitt trial, this is what most people were either talking about or having to cope with across the area of western Europe.

Now most of the country, the northern half of it has this sort of weather every winter, but lately there's been a drastic shift in the route, the passage of the prevailing westerlies. Normally they come in from the Pacific turn up north into Canada dip down through the upper Midwest and then go on straight east through upstate New York and New England bringing much cold and masses of snow and brilliant days and icicle nights to what is the top third of the continent.

The climate of mainland America is controlled by the currents of the central Pacific Ocean and for the past six, seven, maybe 10 years some shift of that controlling current in the central Pacific has produced a dramatic switch in the direction of the westerlies' flow across this continent, they still blow in from the Pacific, turn north-east go up into Canada along into the Midwest but then, for reasons the best meteorologist cannot wholly explain, they swoop directly south sometimes sparing the east coast completely and roar on down through the south, the Deep South all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. A temperature of 12 below freezing in northern Florida is bizarre, 20 inches of snow in South Carolina is ridiculous and nobody I'm sure ever sings anymore that old song about Dallas, that "Texas town that never seen ice or snow".

The trouble is throughout this great sweep of the Deep South, about a third of the area of Europe, they're not equipped, they've never been prepared as the north is for this unusual, to them, weather. I doubt very much whether in this disastrous arctic visitation any of the Southern or mid-south towns have for instance stores of sand and salt. So its the combination of the big shift in the route of the westerlies with the constant ice storms that have caused most of the massive interruptions across the continent of work, play, transport, the practice of building, of deliveries, of medicine and all the other services, all compounded by temperatures everywhere of 15 to 20 below the normal in any given place. It's a miracle and a sign of how splendidly well organised from long experience most cities are that so far there are no more I believe than about 150 dead. For us sissies in New York, there is tremendous news that word has been flashed like the flares that signalled the approach of the Spanish Armada by next Monday we may see 40º Fahrenheit. Glory be and God save the homeless.

I'm sure some of you are astonished by my not having even mentioned southern California and the earthquake. Everybody I imagined has seen the pictures, they sufficed to plant a true impression of damage and destruction and hint at the far-ranging lack of light, power, food, water and a roof over their head. Poor old California, first the recession, when everywhere else seems to be climbing out of it, the government comes along and fires a quarter of a million people who work in and around the military and naval bases shutdown by Congress, which affects the economy of many more than 250,000. And then the ghastly riots and the trials and then the usual hazard of a long drought, the arrival of the dreaded Santa Ana,the hot crackling wind coming in from the desert and making tinder of 1,000 homes on the coast – and now an earthquake. And worst, an earthquake erupting not from one of the three infamous faults but from an unknown fault 80 miles long, which is only now for the first time being traced.

For me, perhaps as a chronic onlooker or a heartless reporter, the memory that will stay green is a roving television camera shot through a dense section of Tokyo and groups of thoughtful quiet Japanese hearing about the new fault and thinking that below them a mile, half a mile, lies their own all too well identified fault – when would that crack and explode? The Japanese weatherman said, "we really must do what the Angelinos do, educate our children better in earthquake lessons what to do, where to lie, to collect food, candles, so on." Why should this image be so much more poignant than that of people without a home, I don't know.

Well, once cosily indoors looking out on the great beauty of Central Park, the great reservoir and ice pond, the rolling fields of snow, the trees sharp and black and the children sledging down the hills. The whole thing like a marvellous canvas by Breugel called Little Ones at Play, then it's possible to think of one momentous topic.

After seven years of an investigation costing about $40 million, the special prosecutor appointed to get to the bottom of the dreadful Iran-Contra mess, the secret trading of arms to Iran in the dim hope of getting those American hostages back and then the illegal use of the funds, the cost of those arms to finance the rebels fighting the leftist government of Nicaragua or such aid either in money or the weapons the money bought had been banned by act of Congress.

Well, after seven years, the prosecutor came through with a final report, it reminds us that though 11 men went to jail for criminal behaviour, the two ringleaders of the underground diversion of Iranian funds were indicted, tried, convicted and by the force of a couple of fine technicalities on appeal were acquitted. Mr Walsh, the prosecutor has produced devastating judgements on President's Reagan and Bush, he believes Mr Reagan knew what was going on, not the diversion of funds, but connived at the illegality because he truly believed he was acting in the national interest. Mr Walsh on the contrary believes Mr Bush has no altruistic excuse acted shabbily and knowingly.

So in the end, what that $40 million worth of taxpayers money has proved I think beyond all reasonable doubt is that the Iran-Contra plot was conceived in the White House, involved both the president and vice president of the United States and was not just a reckless secret foreign policy conducted by a rogue hunter in the White House basement. It's a disheartening miserable judgement and you might expect outcries for reform, bills to give Congress sharper powers as a watchdog of the presidential initiative in foreign affairs, all sorts of political even constitutional cures might have been expected to see that nothing so brazenly illegal could happen again inside the White House. But I'm afraid it's taken so long, seven years to arrive at this judgement that it's had quite the worst possible effect, the public is weary and doesn't care anymore.

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