The former agency directors say current employees will face an “impossible task” to maintain service just as hurricane season begins.
Five former National Weather Service directors have taken the unusual step of signing onto an open letter warning that cuts to the organization by the Trump administration may soon endanger lives.
“N.W.S. staff will have an impossible task to continue its current level of services,” they write in the letter, dated Friday. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
Hundreds of Weather Service employees, or about 10 percent of the agency’s total staff, have been terminated or accepted buyout offers since President Trump began his second term, according to the letter.
The letter notes that the coming weeks are “the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes,” and it points to a wide range of activities that rely on accurate forecasting: “Airplanes can’t fly without weather observations and forecasts; ships crossing the oceans rely on storm forecasts to avoid the high seas; farmers rely on seasonal forecasts to plant and harvest their crops which feed us.”
“Perhaps most importantly,” they write, “N.W.S. issues all of the tornado warnings, hurricane warnings, flood warnings, extreme wildfire conditions and other information during extreme weather events.”
The loss of staff is already affecting local forecast offices, said Joe Friday, who led the Weather Service from 1988 to 1997 and who signed the letter. “You have offices that cannot maintain their balloon launch schedules,” he said. “You have offices that cannot maintain 24-hour-a-day operations fully staffed.” The more than 100 Weather Service offices around the country have traditionally launched at least two balloons a day to collect data that helps them produce forecast models.