GAS PRICES AT 4 YEAR LOW! THANKS PRESIDENT TRUMP!

Several NWS offices around the country are worse off than San Angelo or Austin-San Antionio, working with such thin staffing that they no longer operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Many NWS forecast offices have ceased launching their twice-a-day weather balloons, which provide critical data that can alert forecasters to the potential for flooding and other hazardous weather.

NWS was among the government agencies targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency in its effort to gut the federal bureaucracy, losing approximately 600 staffers.

After the cuts, the agency—which was already understaffed—began to prepare to offer “degraded” forecasting services, facing “severe shortages” of meteorologists, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times in April.

“The original forecast that we received Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6 inches of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches in the Hill Country,” said Texas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd at a press conference Friday. “The amount of rain that fell at this specific location was never in any of those forecasts.”

Sudden thunderstorms dumped more than 10 inches of rain on the area, causing heavy flooding from the Guadalupe River.

Dalton Rice, the city manager for Kerrville, Texas—who also spoke at the press conference—said that the catastrophic flash flooding happened because the skies “dumped more rain than what was forecasted” on two of the river’s forks.

The flooding has killed at least 27 people so far—18 adults and nine children. About 25 young girls from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp that sits near the river, are still missing.

... In May, all five living directors of the NWS issued a letter warning that Trump’s cuts “leave the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit ... just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes,” the directors wrote. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

Kerr County, Texas, had lots of history to go on — as Kelly went on to explain: “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.” The National Weather Service had even brought in extra staff that night. Most important, the service had issued three increasingly dire warnings early that morning — at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m. and 6:06 a.m.

What Kelly didn’t mention, but which has since become well known, is that the Weather Service employee whose job it was to make sure those warnings got traction — Paul Yura, the long-serving meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination” — had recently taken an unplanned early retirement amid cuts pushed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was not replaced.

. . . Disaster preparedness is among the trickiest public services. Natural disasters happen regularly and everywhere, but they don’t happen predictably, which means being ready for them requires extra precautions: It requires a lot of people on duty even when nothing is going wrong, to ensure they will be able to act when something inevitably does. It requires expensive infrastructure that does fairly little during normal times. That makes it a very good indicator of state capacity and wisdom. Will leaders have the foresight to prepare for outcomes that may not be at the top of voters’ minds? Or will preparedness fall victim to the political theater of cutting anything that can be portrayed as extravagant or redundant?

. . . In a situation as extreme as the Kerr County flood, where the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, we can’t know for sure that things would have gone differently if Paul Yura had still been on the job. But we do know that after the National Weather Service started sending out warnings, four hours passed before the City of Kerrville’s Police Department issued one, in a post on its Facebook page. That was 5:16 a.m. The Kerr County Sheriff’s Office posted at 5:32, again on Facebook. As late as 6:22, Kerrville City Hall was posting, also on Facebook, that “much needed rain” had swept through the region and might affect “today’s scheduled July 4th events.”

It was only at 7:32 that the city posted, “If you live along the Guadalupe River, please move to higher ground immediately.” By that point, according to survivor accounts, many evacuation routes had been impassable for hours.

Trump lovers....notice which loonie lefties get triggered by this post. They can't help themselves.