Officials in Texas are casting blame on the National Weather Service (NWS) for failing to forecast catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 27 people.
NWS was among the government agencies targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency in its effort to gut the federal bureaucracy, losing approximately 600 staffers.
After the cuts, the agency—which was already understaffed—began to prepare to offer “degraded” forecasting services, facing “severe shortages” of meteorologists, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times in April.
“The original forecast that we received Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6 inches of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches in the Hill Country,” said Texas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd at a press conference Friday. “The amount of rain that fell at this specific location was never in any of those forecasts.”
Sudden thunderstorms dumped more than 10 inches of rain on the area, causing heavy flooding from the Guadalupe River.
Dalton Rice, the city manager for Kerrville, Texas—who also spoke at the press conference—said that the catastrophic flash flooding happened because the skies “dumped more rain than what was forecasted” on two of the river’s forks.
The flooding has killed at least 43 people so far, including 15 children. More than 25 young girls from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp that sits near the river, are still missing.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One Friday, Trump called the catastrophe “shocking” and “terrible.”
“They don’t know the answer yet as to how many people, but it looks like some young people have died,” he said.
In May, all five living directors of the NWS issued a letter warning that Trump’s cuts “leave the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit ... just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes,” the directors wrote. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
In a statement to the Daily Beast, a spokesperson for the NWS said: “The National Weather Service is heartbroken by the tragic loss of life in Kerr County. On July 3, the NWS office in Austin/San Antonio, Texas, conducted forecast briefings for emergency management in the morning and issued a Flood Watch in the early afternoon. Flash Flood Warnings were also issued on the night of July 3 and in the early morning of July 4, giving preliminary lead times of more than three hours before flash flooding conditions occurred.”
The Times reported in June that, just months after the Trump administration had forced out hundreds of staffers, the National Weather Service was granted a waiver to the administration’s government-wide hiring freeze.
A spokesperson told the Times that the 126 staffers it planned to add—about a fifth of the number cut—were intended to “stabilize” the agency.
