I did a little research on what she was saying. She mentioned the following things that I found interesting:
I did a little searching for weather history on the day of the Cherry Blossom parade and assumed that the writer was referring to the 2006 parade, which occurred on 10:00AM, Saturday the 8th of April. According to weather data, it was raining in the morning, but accumulations were about 0.01 inches up to about 9:43, when the weather type switched from "light rain" to "rain". Temperature was hovering around 57 degrees at that time. It started picking up a bit as 10:00am approached, but I think bleak downpour is a deliberate embellishment on the part of the writer.
The parade was due to start at 10:00AM that day, with the parade route traveling down Constitution Avenue between 7th and 17th streets. I'm not sure where the Planned Parenthood clinic is actually located, but this raises a bit of suspicion to me.
The intensely personal nature of the writing, the anonymity of the writer, embellished details, and the blatant appeal to pity definitely places this piece in the suspicious column for me.
Heh, perhaps we need a color coded suspicion level chart for articles posted from the lame stream media.
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For those interested, I got my weather data and parade information from these two links:
"I did a little searching for weather history on the day of the Cherry Blossom parade and assumed that the writer was referring to the 2006 parade, which occurred on 10:00AM, Saturday the 8th of April."
And were you here in Washington that day? I was. I could barely see through the windshield with wipers going full tilt as I was driving my brother-in-law and his daughter to Union Station. We remarked on how sorry we felt for the parade participants. The ride home on 395 was pretty treacherous in the heavy rain.
So.... were you here? She does get that part of the story right, I can attest, whatever the problems are with the rest of her article.
You can think what you like -- and clearly you're going to anyway -- but your amateur detective work is flawed.
The weather data you cite was gathered at Reagan National Airport, and is accurate *only* to that specific location. This is about five miles away from the clinic she was presumably at (at 16th and L streets). As most people are aware, the amount of precipitation can vary a great degree between locations just a few miles apart, due to the fluctuating conditions in the storm cell. I've experienced endless cases of this myself. For example, once my wife and I had been hoping for rain, because there had been a long period without rain and our gardens and yard were seriously in need of water. As I was driving around doing errands one day, it finally started raining so hard that I had to have my wipers on their max setting and even then they were barely keeping up. I phoned my wife at home to give her a verbal "high five" -- but she reported that it wasn't raining a drop at the house, even though I was only a few miles away. That whole day, the house only got a very light sprinkle, much to our frustration, while other parts of town reported frequent downpours. And this was not a freak occurrence -- variability in rainfall from place to place over the city is something I have experienced quite often personally, and is a well-known fact of meteorology.
The author could easily have been in a "downpour" (and at 57 degrees, as you note, that would be pretty "bleak") when she arrived at the clinic "shortly before 10am" even if Reagan National Airport had not yet received much rain.
Worse yet, you "forgot" to point out that the 9:43 precipitation reading is unavailable ("N/A" -- which doesn't indicate zero, since other readings for the same day show "0.00" for an actual zero reading) for the period when the author would have been approaching the clinic, but the conditions indicator does say "RAIN" for that period, of unspecified volume. For all you know, it might have been a heavy rain, and your source can't answer the question either way, although you attempt to use it to bolster your presumption.
You also "forgot" to mention that although Reagan Airport received "only" 0.09 inches during the morning *before* 10am, it received a hefty 0.43 inches in the next hour, a very respectable rainfall. There was heavy rain that morning, despite your attempts to minimize the amount of precipitation by carefully choosing your period to cover many hours that weren't relevant (like midnight-9am).
But wait, there's more! And here we get to the most interesting data.
Also note that between the 9:43 reading and the 9:52 reading, 0.08 inches of rain had accumulated. This doesn't sound like much (and you attempt to imply that this is a minor amount), but 0.08 inches in 9 minutes is a rate of 0.53 inches per hour. 0.5 inches per hour is a rate that this site" describes as the sustained rate of a "50-year storm", this site defines "intense rainfall" as anything over 0.5 inches/hour, this site says that 0.5 inches/hour "surpasses the rule of thumb used by local forecasters for guidance in issuing flood statements" for Los Angeles, this site from the NOAA says that "0.4-0.5 IN/HR ARE THE FLASH FLOOD GUIDANCE VALUES", and so on. This page from the National Weather service speaks of a "brief downpour" producing up to a quarter inch of rain. A rainfall rate of 0.53 in/hour is *not* a light drizzle, it's coming down pretty hard.
Also, if the clinic is the one on 16th and L streets, the parade route you describe is only a few blocks away from it, and could easily have interefered with the travel of someone trying to reach it from the southeast.
So rather than "raise a bit of suspicion", your information actually *bolsters* the validity of her story. It *was* raining pretty seriously on the day described at the time described, it *was* cold enough to be a "bleak" rain, there *was* a parade in proximity to the clinic at that time. A story made up out of whole cloth would be extremely unlikely to contain so many interlocking details that match actual events, places, and times.
Postscript: I wrote the above before reading linda_22003's personal account of the heavy rainfall that day in post #147. I rest my case.