Sandra Anderson thinks the storm won't be too bad. When her grandson asked if she should bring the dog in, Anderson honored her and said they would be fine. But later that night, an alarm on her cell phone warned her tornado tore apart her hometown in London, Kentucky. After a few seconds it hit her neighbor.
“I roared up the hallway for my disabled son,” Anderson said. “The window was exploding. There was a terrifying howling sound before it hit.”
Tornadoes are measured using the so-called enhanced Fuji Scale, which ranks them in a ratio of 1 to 5 based on wind speed and potential for damage. A whirlwind of all mile blows away Anderson's windows and flattening the entire community, traveling over 50 miles and driving at the speed of the EF-4, making it particularly violent. Meanwhile, the EF-3 funnel cloud cut 23 miles of paths in the St. Louis area.
Both are part of a wider system that extends from Missouri to Kentucky that produced more than 70 tornadoes, killed at least 28 people and upgraded or damaged thousands of structures. Eastern Kentucky is the first to be hit. 18 people died. Seven more people were killed in Missouri.
President Donald Trump's administration has made in-depth cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) and its parent company, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Together, the two agencies provide meteorologists and others with accurate, timely forecasts and play a key role in predicting tornadoes and warning people of imminent dangers. Meteorologists and other experts warn that government cuts to the agency could cost lives.
According to the New York Times, the Northwest lost 600 people through layoffs and retirement, which has caused many local weather stations to scramble to fill the shortage. For example, the office in Jackson, Kentucky, has 1 out of 8 nationwide, and after losing its overnight forecast, it suddenly ended its 24/7 forecast and now has about 31% of its employees. Jackson’s office provides blockbusters for the eastern Kentucky area, a rural area that can be accessed through scattered cells and the internet, which has been repeatedly hit by storms and floods over the past five years.
All this is because private forecasting company Accuweather warns that the U.S. faces its worst tornado season for more than a decade.
Even as the twisted people in eastern Kentucky passed, people began to speculate that the NWS staff cuts resulted in deaths. Their suspicion stems from the escalation of tornado warnings to a particularly dangerous situation, a term directed at particularly serious situations that are imminent for life and property. Several officials told Grist that the warning was intended to convey that the tornado was shortly before it landed around 11:07 p.m.
The name is called PDS, and is in East Kentucky-based popular YouTube forecaster Ryan Hall Y'All urged everyone in the storm to seek shelter around the same time. “We just need to hope we do well because otherwise no one will know,” he told his audience around 10:54 pm without formal weather training.
Although the NWS issued 90 alerts on May 16, including warnings about flash floods and upcoming tornados, someone who determined they were a trained weather photographer in the NWS commented on Hall’s feed, saying the agency released the PDS only after asking questions. “I called the NWS in Wilmington, Ohio, who relayed my report to the Jackson Weather Office,” he said. “It has been upgraded to the PDS confirmed by the weather finder in the following minutes.” Many commenters attribute Hall to saving lives.
Neither Hall nor the commenter could identify with the person they were as weathered. London's tourism commissioner Chase Carson followed the storm's prediction live stream on Facebook. He spent the day the second day of volunteering at the City Emergency Response Center to deal with the crisis. “Your people have better homes, but still don't think the tornado will hit their area because we haven't received enough warnings before,” he said. “Only a lot of X, Y and Z are wrong so we can't be prepared.”
The National Weather Service defended the handling of the storm and the timeliness of warnings in Kentucky, telling Grist in a statement that its offices in Louisville, Jackson and Paddyka “provided forecast information, timely warnings and decision-making support in May 16 days and hours.
“The information is communicated to the public through a variety of conventional means, including official products, social media and NOAA weather broadcasts, as well as to the public through advanced conference calls and webinars. The adjacent offices provide staffing for the office in Jackson, Kentucky, as per pre-plan. In addition, the Jackson office has had numerous impacts through temporary staffing such losses, and the Jackson office still has numerous impacts on a comprehensive scale.
Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Service staff organization, said the offices are staffed and weather forecasts in multiple cities will usually work together when extreme weather is expected. “People make sacrifices,” he said. “You don't have a break, you have to go to work.” According to Faxi, this is part of the registration of NWS forecasters – which could be exacerbated as the office loses its staff.
People on the north side of St. Louis were similarly suspicious of the NWS reaction after not hearing the warning sirens went out, even though the system was tested the day before the tornado. But the city runs the system and Mayor Cara Spencer blames the problem on “human failure” because the municipal emergency management program is “not very clear” who will activate the system. To this end, New York City tested the warning sirens again Tuesday and Wednesday, and Spencer issued an executive order that puts the fire department in charge of activating the warning system.
Because of the St. Louis University emergency alert system, Aliya Lyons only knew to be asylum. “I heard no sirens,” she said. “It was a major failure in the city. Life was lost. I can't say if it was entirely due to the sirens. But it was really heartbreaking – the elders may not have a cell phone, and the cell phone might have been dead.”
She fears that things will only get worse. The Trump administration proposes to cut NOAA's budget by more than 25%. “Even the current National Weather Service, something terrible can happen – now isn't the time to get their guts. We should make it stronger.”
Faxi said the NWS and its unions are working together to adjust their employees to meet the “reduced service schedule.” It is expected that the radio station will work together to fill the gap as needed.
This may not help to alleviate Bobby Day's thoughts. He is the temporary police chief in London and worked with city officials and first responders a few days before the tornado. He has long counted on the NWS to get the job done and never had NOAA weather broadcasts. He still recalls a wild and destructive storm that hit London a few years ago on a clear night. The agency’s forecasts and warnings are crucial to the evacuation time.
“Almost until the moment they said it was going to happen, it happened,” he said.
NOAA and the National Weather Service will likely continue to provide this level of accuracy, even as the Trump administration cuts budget and staff. But meteorologists and others dealing with extreme weather fear that doubts and speculation after the tornado will only grow, and even if they become more important to public safety, it will undermine confidence in institutions. This foiled Jim Caldwell, a meteorologist at local TV station Wymt-TV, who fears people will stay away from reputable, even if nervous, resources that support social media figures like Hall, even though Caldwell doesn't take the name. Some of them are good forecasters, he said, but others favor sensationalism to prepare the audience or viral calm.
“With social media and these fake weather people arise, we need more government help to issue warnings, send watches and make sure these hype people are cut off because we need official words,” he said.
This article originally appeared in Grist AT, a nonprofit independent media organization dedicated to telling climate solutions and formal future stories. Learn more at grist.org.
