Beware The Donner Party Scenario

Forecaster Committed To Long Term Mental Health Care, Still Ranting About Weather

Toronto (CP). It is an occupation where you can be wrong 90 percent of the time and still keep your job. It usually requires an affable personality and reassuring tone of voice. Occasionally it attracts those to the job who possess those qualities and don’t panic at the drop of, well… a snowflake. Other times it draws in those who do panic.

Of course, we’re talking about the television weather forecaster.

Harry Benning came to work at the Weather Network in 2009 after several years at a CTV station in Victoria, British Columbia, doing the same job. Perhaps it was living in Victoria that spoiled him and left him unprepared. After all, winters in Victoria are mild, with more rain than snow. And yet even that shouldn’t have been enough to bring out the issues that sprang up in the years that followed.

Because Mr. Benning was working in Toronto. A city that doesn’t really get the hard winters that much of Canada faces. And yet he took a job as one of the network’s daily forecasters, repeating the same forecasts every few minutes for the country as a whole. Probably a boring job, one that makes you wonder: do we really need such a network on television?

However it began, it was slow at first. Benning was known to come across as somewhat anxious when the first snows started, and would only be more or less calm when the spring finally melted the last of the winter’s snowpack. Was it seasonal depression, as some viewers started to ask. Plenty of people have that. He would predict ten centimetres of snow falling in one place or another, and he’d come across as nervous and on edge. Later in the night, another forecaster saying the same forecast for that spot would be calm and reasonable, telling viewers to be careful on the road, but no hint of anxiety.

As time went on, the anxiety seemed to grow, and more viewers noticed that about Benning. And it was no longer confined to winter. He would prattle on about tornados if there was a story about tornados elsewhere in the world. He would give a list of statistics and tell you a dozen different ways a tornado could kill you, as if the tornado was out there stalking you. A volcano erupting across the planet? He would warn you that it could happen in your backyard, even if geologists would tell you that’s simply not the case.

And then came the on-air calls for cannibalism.

It first happened over three years ago. A blizzard was bearing down on eastern Ontario and through Quebec. Benning came on air looking like he hadn’t slept in three days. His tie was askew and his hair was dishevelled. He looked, in short, like hell. He talked about thirty five to fifty centimetres in places, raising his voice at times, warning that what he was calling “Snowpocalypse 2016” could drop three times as much as forecast if it decided it wanted to. As if the blizzard was a living, thinking thing.

Benning told viewers that they had to do whatever it took to stay alive. Loot the stores for bread, milk, and maple syrup. Eat from the dead if that was what it took to survive. He was quickly yanked off the air by producers and assessed for his own mental and physical health. Eventually they let him back on the air. And from time to time, if there was a blizzard forecast, and if he was on the job, he would find himself describing Donner Party scenarios and advise about drawing lots as to who would have to sacrifice themselves so the others could live.

Finally the network had enough. Benning was pulled from the air while in mid rant last month. This time he was remanded to mental health care in a more stringent facility at the request of his wife and children. Crofthaven Mental Hospital treats the most hopeless cases, according to the founder of the Kingston based institution, Doctor Jeremiah Crofthaven. “Our mission is to get the deeply disturbed out of their delusions, their despairs, their conditions, to heal their minds and their hearts and their pancreas and their…. wait, forget the pancreas. It may seem that someone is beyond hope, but our staff have been trained to take the steps needed to give them hope.”

Crofthaven can’t speak of individual patients or their conditions, but this reporter did see Benning escorted by orderlies out of a session with his therapist. “They’re coming!” Benning yelled back to this reporter. “You have to tell them all! They’re coming for us all!” Benning seemed like a man so far out of hope, screaming like the utterly deranged. What he said next just seemed to confirm it.

“The frost giants are going to kill us all!”

Benning was taken down the hall. This reporter noticed Crofthaven beside him. The doctor had seen enough, and sighed, shaking his head. “I’m afraid some of our patients pose more of a challenge than others.”

To say the least. In the opinion of this reporter, Harry Benning is batshit crazy.