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After Trump administration job cuts, nearly half of National Weather Service forecast offices have 20% vacancy rates—twice that of just a decade ago—as severe weather chugs across the nation’s heartland, according to data obtained by The Associated Press.
Detailed vacancy data for all 122 weather field offices show eight offices are missing more than 35% of their staff—including those in Arkansas and Kentucky where tornadoes and torrential rain hit this week—according to statistics crowd-sourced by more than a dozen National Weather Service employees. Experts said vacancy rates of 20% or higher amount to critical understaffing, and 55 of the 122 sites reach that level.
The weather offices issue routine daily forecasts, but also urgent up-to-the-minute warnings during dangerous storm outbreaks, such as the tornadoes that killed seven people this week and “catastrophic” flooding that’s continuing through the weekend. The weather service this week has logged at least 75 tornadoes and 1,277 severe weather preliminary reports.
Because of staffing shortages and continued severe weather, meteorologists at the Louisville office were unable to survey tornado damage Thursday, which is traditionally done immediately to help improve future forecasts and warnings, the local weather office told local media in Kentucky. Meteorologists there had to choose between gathering information that will help in the future and warning about immediate danger.
“It’s a crisis situation,” says Brad Coleman, a past president of the American Meteorological Society who used to be the meteorologist in charge of the weather service’s Seattle office and is now a private meteorologist. “I am deeply concerned that we will inevitably lose lives as a result of the added risk due to this short-staffing.”
