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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   25729 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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EDIT: I no longer endorse this post. USA Today and NPR for Northern, Central and Eastern Kentucky have both run stories that confirm that the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office was staffed the night of the tornado:

Fahy said Jackson workers were called in May 16 work the overnight shift to coordinate with emergency management personnel and issue warnings throughout the night. The Jackson office had a full staff that he described as an “all-hands-on-deck” situation due to the extreme storm.

“The deaths were not attributable to the staffing cuts,” he said. “Everybody was there last night. We had a full team.”

In a statement, the weather service said the Jackson office had additional staffing and support from neighboring offices through the weekend.

As USA TODAY reported before the Kentucky storms, the weather service has had to scramble to cover vital shifts. For the first time in decades, not all forecast offices have “24/7” staffing, according to the weather service union.

I still believe it is irresponsible to leave offices unstaffed, even if there is some ability to move neighboring employees around when they're expecting storms, but this is much less bad than I initially believed. I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.

On May 15th, the New York Times ran a story about how DOGE cuts had left parts of Eastern Kentucky vulnerable while it was under moderate threats for extreme weather:

Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees, said the office in Jackson, Ky., was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that is reshaping the federal bureaucracy. (emphasis mine)

This morning, May 17th, it became apparent that eastern Kentucky had been hit by an overnight tornado that killed dozens.

I was honestly speechless when I read that.

This is what London, Kentucky looks like after the tornado. To quote someone who put it much more eloquently than I can:

Of all the disasters I’ve studied, tornadoes scare me the most.

They come with little warning and can erase entire communities in minutes — even seconds.

There’s no four-day lead-up to prepare like we often have with major hurricanes, and the winds of these storms can far exceed the most violent tropical cyclones.

In those few moments before one hits, especially if you’re sleeping, you’re at the mercy of your local weather station.

If someone is watching, they can issue a warning in those critical minutes before it’s too late.

Those few minutes after an emergency alert is issued are the difference between life and death.

[...]

Tornado warnings were delayed because of reduced staff. Those critical moments — a midnight warning to your phone waking you up, giving you precious seconds to find shelter — came too late for some.

My political stance has been evolving, but I'd describe myself as a state capacity libertarian.

To me disaster preparedness and relief are obvious, bread and butter, parts of the federal government. Sure we do stupid, wasteful things like give people flood insurance that lets them build and rebuild houses in the same vulnerable spot over and over again, when we should probably just heavily incentivize them to rebuild in a less risky area. Sure, with any given disaster there's going to be criticisms about how Biden did this or Bush did that. But I've always felt mostly positive about my tax dollars that go to disaster relief and preparedness.

I've had a growing sense of unease over the last few months as I saw reports of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announcing Trump administration plans to end FEMA, and reports about National Weather Service cuts back in April. I'm gutted that the easy predictions of these moves leading to unnecessary deaths has come true.

A part of me had hoped that Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would cut a lot of genuinely unnecessary spending from the government. When it was drag shows in Ecuador, even I as a rather Trump-skeptical person could admit that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But it was also clear to me that they were cutting with a chainsaw, not a scalpel. The images of Elon waving a chainsaw at CPAC feel a lot more hollow now. The man has blood on his hands. 27 people are dead in Kentucky because DOGE and Trump thought that it was "more efficient" to just let people die, instead of keeping overnight forecasters on staff.

Back in 2020, FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at $7,500,000. By that standard, when doing the cost-benefit analysis the government bean counters are supposed to value 27 deaths as a loss of $202.5 million. I wonder how much it costs the government to staff permanent overnight forecasters in eastern Kentucky?

A: What evidence is there that any/some/all of the dead died because there was no overnight forecaster? I checked the stats for 2023, a good Biden year, and there were 87 dead from tornadoes that year, including 23 from a single storm. 27 doesn’t seem wildly out of line with those numbers.

B: Was the NWS mandated to cut permanent overnight forecasters, or did they choose to cut that position to save other preferred bureaucratic spending priorities, or did they just go straight to malicious compliance and make the worst possible cuts?

C: Did the former overnight forecaster just take a buyout, possibly? You can’t force people to stick around on the job, and I wouldn’t be surprised if NWS offices have gone without permanent forecasters for a while in the past.

D: How many NWS offices surround the Jackson office’s area of responsibility? While tornadoes are notoriously localized and unpredictable, if the permanent forecaster has been gone for longer than a week or so, it seems like any serious agency would have taken steps to get as much forecasting ability as possible from other supporting offices.

E: At a minimum, the following:

As the MAGA-rampage against science continues unabated, how many more will pay for the ignorance of this administration?

With an above-normal hurricane season starting in two week, how far will Americans let these threats to public safety go?

Does not strike me as the sort of phrasing used by someone who is simply expressing scientific concerns without fear or favor.

A: What evidence is there that any/some/all of the dead died because there was no overnight forecaster? I checked the stats for 2023, a good Biden year, and there were 87 dead from tornadoes that year, including 23 from a single storm. 27 doesn’t seem wildly out of line with those numbers.

This is a fair question, and the same basic point was raised by /u/meduka. I agree that one storm is not conclusive. We will need to see the long run trends before my pronouncement is rigorously defensible.

Your other questions are ones I do not currently have an answer for. I am trying to see what data is available on this topic.

E: At a minimum, the following [...] Does not strike me as the sort of phrasing used by someone who is simply expressing scientific concerns without fear or favor.

I don't fully endorse what Rebekah Jones of Mesoscale News said in the full piece I linked. I just thought that the part I quoted did a better job than I could have laying things out, and I didn't see the point in reinventing the wheel.

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