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LLcoolK says
That's called weather.
"Warning Coordination," that's not an important job in a disaster, is it?
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.
