As the first major snowstorm of the year bore down on Rochester, my body was flung violently by irrepressible forces of nature as blasts of frigid air thrashed my face. Children cried. Their parents panicked. It was terrifying.

It was the dairy section at the supermarket two days before the first flake fell.

When I arrived, what looked like at least a third of the Rochester Metropolitan Statistical Area was circling the carcass of a clerk whose last earthly act was restocking the milk display. He couldn’t have been more than 17.

Another third was clamoring for eggs. Dozens of open cartons were strewn about, abandoned by survival-mode shoppers who, even in their haste, couldn’t suppress the impulse to check for a cracked shell. The same people peel back a husk of corn and leave the cob on the pile in summer.

The rest were pecking at skeletally bare bread shelves, fighting over the last loaf of pumpernickel like it was Tippi Hedren in The Birds.

Milk, eggs, bread. The holy trinity of winter storm panic-shopping. It was as if everyone in the six-county region simultaneously thought, “I know what’ll ward off this storm. French toast!”

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Entering the pre-storm supermarket vortex is one of the most dangerous excursions a person can take. The wallop of a blizzard pales to the wallop of a lake-effect shopper in Buffalo Bills Zubaz pants hauling 4,000 pounds of cat food and Genny Cream Ale.

Why is it we buy so much useless stuff in the hours before a storm? Take me, for instance. I always stock up on canned beets. I can’t get enough canned beets. Sliced, whole, pickled. Don’t ask me why. They only end up in the food drive box at my kids’ school each spring.

When it comes to snowstorms, there is no calm before the storm. Only pure hysteria. The TV meteorologists feed it.

One of the local weather teams uses a color-coded alert system like the one the Department of Homeland Security used to use to warn of terrorist threats. This storm got the same color DHS would’ve slapped on Osama bin Laden hang gliding into Times Square.

The weatherman called this storm “the perfect trifecta” of snow, wind and cold, any one of which he said would have warranted a “yellow alert, but combined forced us to issue a red alert,” as if he were in a hostage situation.

The weather experts are always bragging about their Doppler radars and their “most accurate” certifications. Then they stand in front of their maps and say things like, “This very ill-defined low-pressure system is going to drop anywhere from 2 to 48 inches of snow,” as western New York is swallowed by a purple blob from Cleveland behind them.

The National Weather Service on Thursday said Rochester would be the “epicenter” of the storm’s snowfall. But the agency later removed that reference, citing “continuing uncertainty about the storm’s precise tract.”

Let’s face it, none of these weather experts has any idea what they’re talking about until the blizzard is upon us.

Then everyone’s an expert. An expert who doesn’t know how to drive in the snow. Even experts in other fields suddenly become experts in snow.

The scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where drivers have been known to hunker in place on Interstate 95 at the first sign of snow, stop containing outbreaks of dengue and listeria to get in on the act.

The agency has a winter weather checklist of 77 items — seriously — you need to be prepared for a snowstorm like the behemoth approaching Rochester right now.

My personal favorites are the hair dryer, to be used to thaw frozen pipes, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather radio receiver, which, of course, everyone has lying around the house.

The checklist isn’t all hot air, though. It highly recommends having a week’s worth of canned food on hand.

Fortunately, I left the supermarket with enough beets to last a year.

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.

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