National Weather Service has hundreds of vacancies, 'exhausted employees'

The National Weather Service was created to protect people and property. (NOAA graphic)

On any given day, the National Weather Service deploys staff to research, predict and issue warnings for weather activity across the United States, which covers a total of roughly 3.8 million square miles. However, after losing 600 employees this spring, the agency is now stretched thin and may struggle to meet the demands of fall weather, which includes a busy hurricane season.

"Exhausted employees have maintained weather monitoring and forecasting almost without interruption, staff said. But many are wondering how much longer they can keep it up," report Hannah Natanson and Brady Dennis of The Washington Post.

Despite receiving an exemption from the federal hiring freeze and working to replace lost staff, the agency still has hundreds of vacant positions, an active Atlantic hurricane season, and a possible government shutdown to manage.

Tom Fahy, legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents the agency’s workers, told the Post, "We have a strained and severely stretched situation. . . .There’s a breaking point.” 

A spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offered reassurances that the Weather Service is “'equipped to meet its mission of protecting American lives and property through timely forecasts and critical decision support services,'" the Post reports. "But even before this year’s losses, the Weather Service was considered understaffed."

Since NWS shortages have been extreme, the Trump administration gave the agency permission to "list and hire 450 positions," Natanson and Dennis add. "But it won’t be an immediate fix. . . . Federal hiring is often slow. . . .Government work may seem like a bad option, since Trump has stripped away the guaranteed job stability that once made up for the lower pay."

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."