Hour by hour
The headline above appeared on the Weather Channel’s site Friday night. We on the east coast are bracing for whatever Mother Nature has in store later today. Whether it will be “catastrophic” where I live remains unknown. (Commercial weather forecasters love to hype big weather events.) Still, there could be widespread tree damage and power outages due to an expected ice storm followed by temperatures in the low single-digits on Monday night. And we’re still cleaning up the tree damage from Helene’s visit on September 27, 2024.
A 3:13 a.m. email from The Guardian carried the subject line “A(nother) week where decades happen.” That’s after a year where decades happened, including for civil servants like those at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS).
Hurricane Musk fell upon Washington, D.C. last February. A gleeful Elon Musk precipitated rounds of staff cuts to the agencies Americans depend on to warn us of impending weather disasters like the one forecast for this weekend. By April 1 over 1,000 lost jobs with more expected as the purges rolled on.
As The Guardian reported April 1:
“Dysfunction is the polite way of putting it, you could also say it is incompetent chaos,” said Andrew Rosenberg, formerly the deputy director of Noaa’s national marine fisheries service.
“This administration is paying people on administrative leave and asking staff to name five good things they’ve done but they get email bounce backs when they do because the inboxes are full. If you were looking at the inverse of efficiency, this would be it.”
Then came the whipsaw as — whoops — Musk’s ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) realized that, hmmm, maybe we need some of the people who warn the public of tornadoes and hurricanes. By August, DOGE was backtracking. NOAA received permission to refill 450 positions at NWS “after a summer of deadly, extreme weather.” That is “nearly all” the “critical positions” lost in the spring to Musk’s college-age hackers.
My ice storm warnings are changing by the hour. Maybe that’s NWS experts staying atop changing weather data and fine-tuning forecasts as the storm develops. Or maybe it is because like Helene survivors here in Western North Carolina, NWS is still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Musk.
Politico reports, “The monster storm that’s threatening to dump snow across much of the U.S. could be a test of the Trump administration’s willingness to help states after natural disasters.”
Help? We’re still waiting for the help Trump promised us last January. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under Joe Biden, he said, was “very bureaucratic” and “very slow.” As of September, we’d received “less than $5 billion of the estimated $60 billion needed for full recovery.” The promised aid is still dribbling out.
Politico again:
With heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain forecast to begin falling Friday and continuing into Monday over a massive swath of the country, from the Rockies to the Atlantic, governors from dozens of states could be forced to navigate shifting policies under President Donald Trump, who has set efforts in motion to reduce the flow of disaster aid to states. As governors declare emergencies ahead of the storm, some are wondering whether the White House will reject their requests for federal funding to help pay for cleanup and repairs if predictions for over a foot of snow in some areas prove accurate.
“They’re preparing for the worst,” said a former senior Federal Emergency Management Agency official who was granted anonymity to describe discussions with state officials. “They’re preparing for no grants, no money.”
Ice is bad, but is I.C.E. worse? The Trump administration thinks so (CNN):
Homeland Security officials have urged disaster response staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency to avoid using the word “ice” in public messaging about the massive winter storm barreling toward much of the United States, according to two sources familiar with the directive.
The concern is that the word could spark confusion or online mockery, given the ongoing controversy surrounding US Immigration and Customs Enforcement — also known as “ICE.”
The guidance, informally delivered to a group at FEMA Thursday by officials from the Department of Homeland Security – which oversees both FEMA and ICE – comes as states across the South brace for potentially devastating ice accumulations, with some areas expecting a quarter -inch or more.
Head : desk. Mock away.