The National Weather Service plans to hire 450 meteorologists, hydrologists and radar technicians in an attempt to undo some of the impacts of mass layoffs the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency initiated several months ago. The hiring plan includes 126 “front-line mission critical” personnel to fill the gap left by staff reductions at weather service forecast offices around the country, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official told CNN in early August.
But those new hires won’t be in place in time for wildfire season, which is expected to be more intense than usual this year from August through October. That’s because it takes at least 11 months to train new staffers and get them placed, according to former NWS meteorologists.
“It takes 11 to 14 months to onboard somebody,” Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents the agency’s workers, as well as other units of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Capital & Main.
Fahy added that qualified staffers may take a private sector job while waiting to get placed. “You can’t expect people to wait around for more than a year. And meanwhile, those offices will remain understaffed.”
Currently, the two worst-staffed weather forecast offices in the country are in California, according to Fahy — the Hanford office, which covers the San Joaquin Valley, has five meteorologists and eight vacancies; and the Sacramento office has eight meteorologists and eight vacancies. That means that no one is available in the office from midnight to 6 a.m., with calls being handled by other offices in the state hundreds of miles away, Fahy said.
Those layoff-induced staffing shortages have prompted concerns from lawmakers as the state enters wildfire season, with recovery efforts still underway from January’s devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles County. The NWS’ 122 local branches — called Weather Forecast Offices — are responsible for providing forecasts and warnings to the public and to local officials that can be lifesaving during catastrophic fires, storms and other emergencies. Labor leaders and former employees are warning that the job cuts can’t be easily backpedaled and have damaged the National Weather Service’s ability to respond to the growing threat posed by wildfires, floods, heat waves and other climate-fueled disasters.
“During fire season, everybody goes into maximum overdrive, but in this case, we’d have to fly people in from different parts of the country to cover these shifts because it’s going to be a dangerous situation,” said Fahy, who described California’s Sacramento and Hanford offices as “criminally understaffed.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service did not respond to requests for comment.
The Sacramento office has played a crucial role in alerting the public to imminent danger during other disasters, such as the Camp Fire in November 2018 — the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history.
“The potential for critical fire weather conditions was messaged early and aggressively by [Weather Forecast Office] Sacramento and the Storm Prediction Center,” according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration post-disaster report on the fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed more than 13,500 homes. It also said that “during the initial response,” the Sacramento office’s workload “increased by several orders of magnitude as numerous requests for support came into the office.”
The current level of staffing “is not sustainable to maintain this public safety mission 24 hours a day,” said Brian LaMarre, who until recently served as the meteorologist-in-charge of the Tampa Bay Area office. The staff reductions made national headlines in the wake of the deadly Texas floods in July, when it was reported that the Austin/San Antonio weather forecast office was missing its warning coordinational meteorologist.
LaMarre said the staffing rupture has also “derailed” a plan long in the works to better coordinate National Weather Service efforts across the country by pairing meteorologists and hydrologists together with decision makers at emergency operations centers.
And because it will take so long to hire and train people, even for entry-level positions, LaMarre said, “It’ll take several years to truly get the agency back to where it needs to be.”
