The hour without a number

Text: an original contemporary report-style practice extract.

The storm arrived during the weather station’s open afternoon. Rain struck the windows and the wind pushed visitors back from the observation platform. Inside, people gathered around the digital display, waiting for the numbers to leap. Instead, the reading beside wind speed remained fixed at 18 kilometres per hour. Outside, the trees were bending. The machine’s calm certainty was plainly wrong.

Priya, the technician, switched off the display and wrote the time in her notebook. A visitor suggested estimating the missing speeds from the movement of the branches. Priya shook her head. She could describe what she had seen, she said, but she could not turn that description into measurements. Several people looked disappointed. They had come during the most dramatic weather of the day and would leave without its most dramatic number.

In the monthly record, the row for that hour contained the words no reliable reading. At first, the gap seemed to spoil the page. Then I noticed how confidently I trusted every number around it. The record did not pretend that the equipment had worked simply because a complete table would look more impressive. We had lost an hour of data, but keeping the loss visible protected the value of everything we had genuinely measured.

In this extract, the writer tries to create a sense that admitting uncertainty can make a record more trustworthy.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.