Tornado warnings are credited with saving countless lives in Oklahoma. NOAA still plans forecaster furloughs

Congress isn’t rushing to stave off looming furloughs for federal weather forecasters, even after they issued tornado warnings credited with saving countless lives in Oklahoma.

Some lawmakers are open to looking at sequestration’s effects on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, home to the National Weather Service and its 3,500 forecasters. But they said it’s too soon to know whether Congress has an appetite for making a sequester fix for the forecasters, similar to the ones lawmakers approved for air-traffic controllers and meat inspectors.


“We need to look at the facts to see if that’s a leap we can make,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), whose state lost 162 residents in the 2011 tornado in Joplin. “We have to monitor this and find out from NOAA whether there is any impact, how it is prioritizing cuts, and whether it can get children to safety.”

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Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), whose panel oversees NOAA, said a legislative fix to address the agency’s budget cuts hadn’t yet crossed his mind. But he questioned why scores of families affected by the mile-wide twister hid out in bathtubs rather than basements.

“What they need is basements. Nobody has a basement — what the hell are you gonna do?” Rockefeller asked. The solution, he added: “Infrastructure, paying attention to infrastructure.”

NOAA has yet to furlough any employees because of the across-the-board budget cuts, and the agency says it was able to give Oklahoma residents ample warnings about the tornado, which killed 24 people and injured dozens of others.

But even before sequestration came about, some scientists and other experts have been cautioning for years that NOAA isn’t getting the money and resources it needs to track and predict life-threatening storms. They’ve pointed to lags in spending on supercomputers and satellites, as well as complaints that the models used by NOAA’s National Hurricane Center lagged behind a European model last year in predicting Hurricane Sandy’s devastating left hook into New York and New Jersey. (The hurricane center still nailed Sandy’s track four days before landfall.)

There’s no way of knowing how the agency will perform once it starts furloughing employees, the union representing the forecasters says.

“When national tells you everything went just fine, they’re forgetting there were no furloughs yet,” said Dan Sobien, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, who also is a forecaster in the Tampa Bay area.

NOAA has proposed furloughing all 12,000 employees for four work days over a two-month period starting July 5 because of the sequester, spokeswoman Ciaran Clayton said. That’s a little more than a month after hurricane season starts.

But the agency will be able to shift workers around to maintain life- and property-saving functions, including severe weather forecasting and maintaining satellites, she said.

“With 7 percent budget cuts, we’re going to have to make some hard choices,” Clayton said, “but we’re doing everything we can to mitigate the impact on employees and ensure mission-critical services are maintained.”

The agency also will be trimming back on travel, training and research.

Other agencies that gather crucial data used to study the climate or predict possible disasters are also being hit by sequestration. For example, the science journal Nature reported Tuesday that the U.S. Geological Survey is shutting down some stream gauges in states like North Dakota that can help forecast flooding, while an Agriculture Department program that measures snow depth in the West is also having to make cuts.

Republicans in the Senate said they’ve been advocating for months for giving more federal agencies broader flexibility to shift funds around to deal with sequestration — something that could help NOAA and the weather service.

“I think we have to maintain the level of savings that we achieved in sequestration,” Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) told POLITICO. “But I’m one of those who believes we need to create flexibility for the agencies to manage their funds without impacting their critical functions.”

Experts say NOAA played a critical roll in Moore, Okla. — that the death toll could have been much higher if not for the weather service’s early weather alerts and tornado warnings.

As early as last Wednesday, NOAA had sent alerts about a severe weather system expected to move across the Great Plains over the weekend and into Monday. In fact, members of Congress received emails notifying them about a high tornado risk Sunday and Monday, from the Illinois-Iowa-Wisconsin border to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex area.

And on Monday afternoon, the NOAA Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., issued a warning a full 16 minutes before the tornado developed, setting off sirens in and around Oklahoma City.

“That saved lives,” Clayton said.