A few days ago, sun.

A few days from now, likely gloom, despair, rain, snow.

That’s the outlook for the weather season ahead delivered to the Kirkland Chamber of Commerce from someone who should know: Andy Wappler.

Wappler now is a vice president at Puget Sound Energy, but before that, he was a TV meteorologist, as was his father, Harry Wappler.

Of course, Wappler told a chamber luncheon Tuesday at Carillon Point, that often doesn’t mean much. Between his dad and himself, Wappler explained, he figures they did 40,000 weather forecasts in about 40 years.

“Six were correct,” he added.

But jokes aside, Wappler filled a projector screen with facts and figures and photographs to make his point about emergency preparedness.

“The message here is to be ready for weather as it changes,” he said.

Wappler went through a little bit of weather history, including showing photos of devastation along the Woodinville-Duvall Road in the winter of 2006, and last November’s “incredible change” from temperatures in the 70s early in the month to 15,000 customers being without power a few days later, to emphasize the need to get ready.

Besides that, Wappler said all the analysis suggests what’s coming will be a “La Niña winter.”

That generally means a colder- and-wetter-than-average winter is ahead, he said.

For PSE and its customers, that also means a “very difficult combination” of trees, wind and rain, leading to power problems, which Wappler stressed PSE crews are poised to correct.

Businesses and individuals also are urged to take steps of their own to make such hardships more survivable, he added.

Those can include preparing to make it possible for employees to work from home, keeping businesses from shutting down, and making sure emergency supplies are available and up to date.

That should possibly take in such steps as filling prescription medicines, since pharmacies may be closed, to the radical step of writing contact information on pieces of paper, which, unlike cellphones with dead batteries, can be accessed when the power’s out, he added.

What’s most important, Wappler stressed, is getting ready early, not when the lights have failed.

“It’s much easier to find the flashlight now,” he said.

More information

For more information about the Greater Kirkland Chamber of Commerce, please visit  www.kirklandchamber.org/.