The flooding in central Texas caused by extreme precipitation last week has killed more than 100 people, and more than 160 people are still missing.
Reporting in recent days has attempted to uncover what actions local officials took to warn those in the path of the storm in Kerr County.
To learn more about the tools used by forecasters and how weather warnings are communicated, Lucas Willard spoke with Nick Bassill, director of the New York State Weather Risk Communication Center at the University at Albany.
So, there are a few important national weather centers, National Weather Service weather centers that days in advance, may highlight a particular area as being perhaps prone to flash flooding, and then eventually, when you get to, say, a day or two days out from the potential flash flooding. The local National Weather Service office will generally issue a flash flood watch, and that says, just like what it sounds, ‘Hey, there's, there's the likelihood that we could get flash flooding in this area over the next, you know, day or two.’ And then as the event is about to unfold or unfolding, they will issue flash flood warnings or something similar. And depending on your mode of communication, if you're, say, a local emergency manager, presumably you are in direct contact with that National Weather Service person. It could be via calling up their office. It could be a Slack channel, or some sort of other shared communication channel that multiple people can access. If you're a member of the public, it's possible that you may see them as alerts on your phone if it's a truly catastrophic event like this one was, they may issue something called a flash flood emergency. That's basically when people are in imminent danger of death right now, and when those are issued that generally sends a push notification to people's phones in that geographic area if they have that enabled, and crucially, if they have cell phone service in that location.
And that's, what you're getting at, is there is an inconsistency in the kinds of warnings that people are able to get. Because, yes, there's a larger federal system, but it filters down through local, more local organizations.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so ideally, the National Weather Service would be communicating this flood risk, and then that would percolate to, you know, say, a county emergency manager or some other appropriate person. And then that person could then take action with their constituents, and, you know, alert their summer camps or churches or schools or hospitals or whatever else that is considered sort of a key and important vulnerable location to the risk and then they could follow up with questions, and it could just continue from there.
Now, there's been some reporting that's come out in the day since the tragedy in Texas with regards to the equipment that was available, how and if people were warned about the flash flooding. What have you observed as somebody who specializes in this emergency response area, what have you observed in the reporting that's been published since then about what actually happened? And do you view any sort of obvious failures when looking at this incident?
Yeah, I think I'm a little hesitant to call something an obvious failure, just because of some of the challenges with this particular incident in terms of its time of day and holiday, you know, sort of weekendish nature. But if there's the risk of flash flood that's been communicated regardless of time of day. So, I know this happened overnight, largely. But if you know that there's a likelihood of a flash flood, and you are a local person responsible for your citizens, I would expect you to be monitoring the situation closely, or have some intermediary doing that for you overnight so that you can communicate that. And so, from my admittedly biased meteorology perspective, the event seems to have been fairly well forecast. And so, when we see the sorts of kind of non-action or non-response, or perceived non response from local officials, that may frustrate us, right? And so I am heartened to see that it seems like in the wake of this disaster, perhaps after some, you know, initial indications of the contrary, local officials and the governor of Texas seem to have embraced the need for more warning infrastructure of some sort, whether it be physical in terms of sirens or something like that, or sort of like a chain of command in terms of sharing information from National Weather Service to other key people who need it.
Now, do you think that any federal cuts proposed, or otherwise could greatly impact emergency response or forecasting ability when it comes to large storms like this?
Yeah, and this is the obvious question, right? We've seen story after story about how there have been cuts to the National Weather Service and NOAA labs and so on. And we know it's indisputable that the National Weather Service has fewer employees on staff collectively now than they did just a few months ago. So, then the obvious question then is, ‘Did that cause somehow a decreased lead time or inability to forecast this in a way that would have prevented the loss of life?’ I don't really think that is the case here, and I'll say that for a couple of reasons, but I also have some caveats to that that'll that I'll include here. That local office, while it is true that they were missing some key people, their “MIC,” which is their sort of boss of the local National Weather Service office, as well as a couple other key positions were missing. However, all of the personnel there are generally trained in the same activities. They're all equally capable, excellent forecasters. And for that event, as they often do, they brought in additional staff than are normally scheduled, and so I don't really have any reason to think that that event was poorly forecast, or somehow something was missed in real time, or anything like that.
My two caveats to that are, it's possible that with the loss of some of those key positions who had the most experience, not necessarily with the weather, but perhaps connecting with the community, it is possible, and I'm speculating here, but possible that there was some loss in terms of connections, as in the forecast was good, but perhaps, a local person on the other end of the receiving end of the forecast might have called up their former MIC, the boss at the NWS office, and that position was vacant. And so perhaps there was a missed double checking of information. I'm purely speculating there, but I would not be completely surprised if that were the case. But normally what I say when we're having this conversation about this particular event is, it's not that I think that the forecast was poorly communicated. It's that if we want to prevent events like this in the future, which would mean that we'd have a longer lead time of a forecast, or say, more specificity of exactly where it was going to get hit, rather than a general region, what we'd want to do is fund the NOAA research labs who are developing the next generation of forecast models, the next generation of tools to predict flash flooding. And currently those labs are also down staff, just like the National Weather Service is, and additionally, proposed future budgets from President Trump have dramatically slashed or even eliminated many of those labs.
And so, if that goes forward, then regardless of whether or not the National Weather Service is fully staffed, will be sort of stuck with our current toolkit, right? And so that will mean that we will be just as susceptible in the future if we have these future events, which in all likelihood, we will continue to have sporadically.
And you're sort of leading to my next question, [which] is, are these kinds of large volume storm events becoming more common? And does a sort of denialism of that fact harm people's lives?
Yeah, I would say yes to both of those, one of the things that we expect most with a warming climate is an increase in the frequency of extreme rainfall events. And that goes back to just pretty basic physics, which is that warmer air can hold more water, and so if you have the same thunderstorm in a slightly warmer air mass, you can theoretically get more rain from that thunderstorm. And so, as our planet slowly warms and we continue to have thunderstorms or hurricanes, any other sort of thing that produces torrential rainfall, we can get more water out of those. But the land is staying the same, and so we're just making ourselves a little bit more flood prone because of that change. And for people who, and I get that it's uncomfortable to talk about and depressing, but if we are not thinking of these things, their increased frequency, will not care whether or not we want them to happen or not, or want to think about them or not, right? And so collectively, if we view these sorts of tragedies as bad events, which I think we all do, it's imperative that we tackle that head on.
So, here where we're speaking, in upstate New York, how do the systems that are in place in New York State differ from the warning systems or the infrastructure that is being utilized right now in the state of Texas?
That's a good question. So here in New York, Governor Hochul a few years ago, in concert with Commissioner Bray at the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, created a what's called State Weather Risk Communication Center located at the University at Albany, and that center is tasked with adding an additional layer of translation of sorts for weather hazards between the National Weather Service and state emergency managers. And so, what we've heard in the wake of the storms in Texas, with some local officials saying, ‘Well, the Weather Service said that there was going to be 10 inches of rain here and here, but there was really 15 inches of rain, 18 inches of rain in this other spot.’ Now, to meteorologists, we understand that if the weather service is saying 10 inches of rain, they may likely be saying 10 inches of rain on average over a large area, but really that indicates the potential of, say, 15, 18, inches of rain in one, you know, unique area, as we saw in Texas. And so having that extra little bit of context that you can provide to an emergency manager can remove that possible point of confusion and ideally, hopefully prevent these sorts of tragedies here in New York.
