Fatal Texas flooding leads to controversy over National Weather Service staffing cuts

The violent waters of the Guadalupe River flipped this
 motor home. (Photo by Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, NPR)

The fatal July 4th flooding in central Texas has led to questions over whether staffing cuts at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration contributed to the tragedy, which left more than 100 people dead. "The floods occurred along Texas’s Guadalupe River, roughly an hour’s drive northwest of San Antonio," reports Miriam Waldvogel of The Hill.

"The Austin/San Antonio Weather Service office’s warning coordination meteorologist, who organizes alerting the outside world about agency forecasts, took a Trump administration buyout in April," reports Rachel Frazin of The Hill. 

Rick Spinrad, who headed NOAA during the previous administration, "pointed to the absence of a warning coordination meteorologist," Frazin writes. Spinrad told her, "Information went out with significant lead time of several hours, and yet no action was taken. . . . In the weather forecast offices, the one who follows up with that is the position called the warning coordination meteorologist. And guess what, there is no WCM in the San Antonio/Austin weather forecast office, because that’s one of the positions that was lost in the cuts. . ."

A NWS spokesperson told The Hill that the Austin/San Antonio office and the San Angelo office "had additional forecasters on duty during the catastrophic flooding event in Texas’s Hill Country during the July 4 holiday weekend."

While Democrats want NWS cuts scrutinized for the part they may have played in the catastrophe, "President Trump said staffing cuts didn’t impact the handling of the incident," Frazin reports. Trump told reporters, "That was really the Biden set-up … but I wouldn’t blame Biden for it, either. . . . This is a hundred-year catastrophe, and it’s just so horrible to watch."

Trump will be in central Texas today, although "it’s not clear yet where he will visit," Waldvogel reports. "The deadly flash floods [swept through] Kerrville, Ingram, and Hunt, along with summer camps including Camp Mystic."