Though Atlantic hurricane season officially starts on June 1, the National Hurricane Center begins issuing its outlooks on May 15 thanks to the increasing prevalence of early-season storms. This began on Thursday with a soothing whimper: “Tropical cyclone activity is not expected during the next 48 hours.”
Richardson, whose other job at Homeland Security (which houses FEMA) is as assistant secretary in the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, is the kind of person who shows up at the new gig and tells staff: “I, and I alone, speak for FEMA. I am the president’s representative at FEMA, and I am here to carry out President Trump’s intent.” The memo he requested, then, functions as both a warning and a beacon of Trumpian success, as most hurricane prep activities have “been derailed this year due to other activities like staffing and contracts.”
Meanwhile, according to reporting from the Washington Post, the National Weather Service — parent of the NHC, both part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — is desperately trying to staff up decimated forecasting teams in offices including those in Louisiana and Texas, places one might remember have dealt with some fairly bad hurricanes in recent years. The NWS is apparently hoping to fill 155 vacancies, which might plug some holes but won’t come close to making up for the loss of more than 500 people who have already been fired or accepted early retirement offers.
And double-meanwhile, cuts to National Science Foundation funding caused a critical if lesser known contractor called NSF Unidata to furlough “nearly all” of its staff last week, putting critical streams of weather data and forecasting infrastructure at risk. “During the furlough period… we will not have resources available to address any but the most critical issues,” read a notice on the move. “All other activities, including responding to technical support questions, will be suspended.”
For the moment, the system looks much as it always does if viewed from the outside — the NHC issuing its first reassuring outlook, a tacit promise that we’ll hear about it when things get worse; FEMA waiting in the shadows as always, a presence no one really needs to worry about until they do; invisible servers and systems humming along quietly in the background. But this is disaster season prep under the Trump administration. It takes the usual ingredients — forecasting and monitoring capabilities, underlying scientific expertise, emergency planning and preparedness — and sends it all through a kaleidoscopic blender, outputting some unholy approximation of what had been built up over decades into a reasonably good system aimed at minimizing death and loss.
Come November 30 when the season ends, and again a year later and a year after that and at all the interim milestones for disaster seasons without official start and end dates as well, it will present us with a counterfactual, an unknowable delta between the actual final tallies and what part of those could have been avoided if we had just not done any of this. If the know-nothings in Washington knew enough to just leave largely functional things alone, to let FEMA manage its emergencies and the NHC and the NWS monitor and forecast and the NSF fund the servers and databases that underlie some of that forecasting and more — who would be alive afterward, that isn’t?
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