Heckuva job, Puppy Slayer!
EXCERPT:
Trump put his own self-exculpating spin on the floods, saying they were impossible to foresee: “Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it.” In fact, almost anyone who knew the slightest thing about the area known as “Flood Alley” saw it coming. Because it had already come, more than once. Previous recent floods had killed 10 people in 1987, 31 people in 1998 and 26 people in 2015.
The hill country of central Texas contains some of the most flood-prone valleys in the United States. The Guadeloupe River was so flood-prone that the Kerr County sheriff had recommended installing a flash flood warning system back in 2016. And the Obama administration agreed to the request, only to have the Texas Division of Environmental Management refuse the offer.
Climate change has made the extreme rainfall episodes that have plagued this region of Texas for decades even more frequent and more lethal. In central Texas, the intensity of extreme rainfall events has increased by 19% since 1985. “Generally, extreme rainfall is intensifying at a rate of 7 percent with each degree Celsius of atmospheric warming. But recent studies indicate that so-called record-shattering events are increasing at double that rate,” Dr. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA told the New York Times.
On July 3, remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which had whacked the gulf coast of Mexico earlier in the week, settled over central Texas, eventually dumping four months of rainfall on the Texas Hill Country (about 1.8 trillion gallon) in the next three days. That afternoon, the depleted ranks of the National Weather Service issued its first alert, warning of flash floods in the Guadalupe River valley, predicting rainfall totals of more than 6 inches in 12 hours. The predictions were made by a seriously understaffed NWS office in San Antonio, which lacked both a chief meteorologist and a warning coordination meteorologist.
It’s not just the National Weather Service that finds itself overworked and understaff as the warming climate unleashes stronger and stronger storms. The senseless slashes to NOAA’s budget and staffing are going to dangerously degrade accurate and timely predictions of the threats posed by tropical storms, cyclones and hurricanes. According to Dr. Frank Marks, a 45-year hurricane veteran, the staff needed to fly NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft is down by 50% this year.
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