Down hundreds of staff, Weather Service ‘teetering on the brink of failure’
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> “It’s gotten so bad that we’re not going to be able to provide service that two years ago we were able to provide to public, emergency managers and media,” said Dan Sobien, the president of the union. “We’ve never been in that position before.”
It makes me deeply discouraged that something so vital to life in general is almost impossible to keep staffed (mostly because of a lack of funds), yet the military's budget increased by $54 Billion this year — to a total of $639 Billion for FY2018.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
>National Weather Service Employees Organization
>“The NWS leadership has been incapable of placing their budget priorities correctly,”
> “understaffing is not due to underfunding,”
> “unspent carry-over funds” in the tens of millions of dollars
You might have a program, say climate change, that the administration doesn’t like because politics and refuses to perform work in, despite the wishes of Congress.
You may have other programs like forecasting that have no money allocated at all.
This is mismanagement by design. The GOP types want to outsource the NWS function and have been trying to do so for many years through the budget process. The senator from Pennsylvania tried to prohibit free release of weather data to make some rain for Accuweather, which is a PA company.
“The Weather Service has faced different obstacles in trying to fill positions, including the 2013 budget sequester, related hiring freezes, and changes in administrations. In 2012, challenged to find funding to compensate its workers, it was embroiled in a “reprogramming” scandal, in which it moved around funds to cover payroll, without congressional approval.”
That's the pattern you'll find in many government agencies — they might in aggregate have the money available but it's hard to spend on the right things or there are policy changes needed for quality of life improvements which cause people to leave. People outside might not have appreciated that the sequester lead to things like mandatory furloughs — i.e. your boss telling you to pick the day you're going to stay home and not get paid, even if you need the money and have work to get done — which were really bad for morale.
Traditionally job security was one thing which lead people to endure some of those problems but that's been under attack for awhile and you had recent things like congress considering cutting retirement, all of which aren't going to be great for getting people to take jobs:
https://federalnewsradio.com/retirement/2017/10/house-set-to...
Those kinds of hit to long-term planning really crank up the stress and costs.
This is all pre-Trump
> An independent report from the Government Accountability Office showed staff vacancies increased 57 percent from 2014 to 2016. The overall vacancy rate reached 11 percent or 455 positions at the end of 2016 up from just 5 percent (211 positions) at the end of 2010, the report said.
The NWS says there are around 270 open positions. That is demonstrably true.
The union is saying there are about 700 open positions. They might think there are vacancies for which requisitions have not yet been made.
Perhaps, therein lies the discrepancy. And it speaks to the rest of the odd financing and accounting discussed in the article.
Government hiring doesn’t work like that. Positions are usually open to everyone (or at least US citizens) or only existing staff.
That's good. I wouldn't want that to be the case like in other industries with artificial scarcity and special power structures.
The actual Weather Service seems to think they are doing just fine.
“Let me state emphatically that we would never take an action that would jeopardize the services we provide to emergency managers and the public,” she said. “NWS is taking definitive steps to ensure the health and well-being of our employees through guidance to local managers on scheduling and flexibility.”
> The vacancy situation has not gone unnoticed by Congress. In its 2018 fiscal year budget markup for the Weather Service, the Senate Appropriations Committee wrote that the “extended vacancies are unacceptable — particularly when the Committee has provided more than adequate resources and direction to fill vacancies expeditiously for the past several years.”
It looks like Congress agrees that the Weather Service is understaffed.
> Martin said staff morale is in the tank. “Some people have been denied vacations, because there are not enough bodies to fill shifts,” he said. “I, myself, worked a 15-hour day about a week ago. You get a lot less sleep. You start to wonder if you’re safe on the road. You don’t see your loved ones, which eats into family life.”
If this is even remotely true, it definitely seems they're understaffed despite the statement from the Weather Service. Of course the Weather Service would put out a statement they're doing fine. I see no reason as to why we should take their word for it over the word of Congressional committees and actual employees.
> Whether the cutbacks will affect the quality of forecasts and warnings, “I can’t say for certain,” Martin said. “You’re working people double shifts, some people aren’t getting days off, and you’re grinding people down. There is that potential [to affect the forecast quality]. The longer this goes on, the more the potential rises. It’s a long winter ahead.”
> The Burlington Free-Press reported similar circumstances at the forecast office serving its region. “Given our staffing, our ability to fill our mission of protecting life and property would be nearly impossible if we had a big storm,” Brooke Taber, a Weather Service forecaster and union steward, told the paper.
> Susan Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the National Weather Service, pushed back on any notion the organization is neglecting obligations to constituents and the health of its staff. “Let me state emphatically that we would never take an action that would jeopardize the services we provide to emergency managers and the public,” she said. “NWS is taking definitive steps to ensure the health and well-being of our employees through guidance to local managers on scheduling and flexibility.”
Seems far from "just fine".
(I'd probably side with labor on this issue as well, but the headline is clearly biased)
Omitting that from the title doesn't really detract from message. I get what you're saying, but it's not propaganda, and the NWS isn't even saying they aren't understaffed (with the quote you offered as proof that they disagreed).
They are saying they aren't putting their staff in dangerous situations, which is clearly being disputed by the staff and their union. They aren't saying being understaffed is fine.
I would've recommended starting with this quote, then, if that's the point you were trying to make.
But still, "adequate to achieve core functions" isn't the same as "just fine".
It’s not like they’re an impartial observer in this.
They also provide forecasts that your airliner uses to plan safe flights.
"The Weather Service’s head count finally stabilized in 2016 [...] But the staffing dip resumed in 2017, falling from 3,425 in December to 3,368 in August,"
"Staffing had declined so much that the Government Accountability Office wrote in May that employees were challenged in their ability “to complete key tasks.”"
"“There's no question that the hiring freeze had an effect,” said Dan Sobien, NWSEO president. “But really it was the straw that broke the camel's back.” He added, “The camel was already weighed down to the ground.”
"The National Hurricane Center, a Weather Service division, has been led by an acting director since May. An acting career official is heading NOAA until President Trump nominates and the Senate confirms a permanent replacement. Trump has waited longer than any other president to fill that role."
"In either case, the vacancies at the Weather Service were numerous enough, even before Trump was inaugurated, for the GAO to audit the agency's hiring practices."
"In July, the Senate Appropriations Committee wrote in a report that lawmakers are “very concerned with the continued number of employee vacancies” even though Congress has provided enough money to fill them."
I'm guessing the private sector pay is better, wouldn't be surprised if they were poaching NWS employees.
They probably run all of it, I'm just not sure if there are any independent ones.
While this is true, it's probably also worth pointing out that those forecasts likely depend on NWS data in some fashion.
Lots of them say something sly about using the only radar network...
More specifically, what role do humans play in digesting the output of the computer model and producing the forecast? What adjustments or corrections are made to what the model says is going to happen, and based on what reasoning? "My gut tells me the tornado is going to move east, even though the computer says it will move west with an estimated 98% likelihood"?
Are the humans doing more than creating a human-consumable verbal summary of what the computer model says will happen -- explaining the severity and location of the predicted weather in human terms?
At each National Weather Service office, forecasters typically use model output to guide their daily forecast products, such as temperatures and precipitation probabilities. However, these forecasters are aware of smaller-scale nuances of their forecast area, such as topographic influences, land-sea interactions or urban heat island effects, which models may struggle to resolve. Human knowledge of model limitations helps to produce a better forecast.
A further example would be hurricane forecasting, where National Hurricane Center forecasts typically outperform most models (see http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/verification/verify6.shtml for starters).
There is separate reporting to the effect of staff becoming extremely stretched and overworked with the combination of hurricanes and fires that recently hit.
There are the reported proposed cuts to NOAA/NCAR budgets of 15+%. Cuts threatening to cripple current data collection efforts and ongoing innovation and developments in same. At a time when year-upon-year environmental and weather circumstances make increasingly clear that we need a better and more detailed understanding of what is going on (and of how we might deal with it).
U.S. Government weather services provide the backbone upon which private, commercial forecasting builds -- when they are not simply repackaging and repeating the government-provided information.
Those services are also critical to the ongoing management and execution of many commercial sectors within the U.S. economy. Agriculture, shipping, transport, even the "dirty old fossil fuel" sectors. Forecasting was wrong one one of our recent winters experiencing extreme cold spells particularly east of the Rocky Mountains, and propane supplies that had not been bolstered ran extremely low, leading to dramatic price hikes and shortages and considerable economic distress downstream not just to households but to businesses, i.e. other productive sectors.
These services are vital to a planful, productive execution of our economy.
But, as in many cases, the "government is bad" people refuse to acknowledge this.
Look at the EPA. Those folks now can't speak publicly without "official sign-off" of a political leadership. Politics before science.
Where present, set your sentiments about "unions" aside and look at why this may be the primary or only route via which you are hearing about problems, from the people in these institutions.
P.S. I forgot to mention: While I have mixed feelings about over-doing the "soft skills" aspects of the following, part of the head-count concern right now includes expanding efforts to translate data into communication that will make people take pro-active action to minimize their own risks. For a burgeoning emergency, making it clearer where may flood and what that will look like, so that, for example, people evacuate before they are stranded and at imminent physical risk necessitating risky and costly rescue. Reassessing and better communicating environmental risks for specific areas, to spur more pro-active zoning and other regulation as well as individual actions such as seeking flood insurance (before an uninsured person ends up needing a government-funded bail-out).
I also seem to be making more keying mistakes in my comments, recently. "that" as opposed to "than", for example, IIRC from another recent comment.
Maybe be a medication I started a couple of months ago...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line
(Still learning my native tongue at age 52.)