Tired in Tornado Alley

Yahoo

06-06-2025

DAVENPORT, Iowa — The message at the Quad Cities National Weather Service, which keeps an eye on the flood-prone Mississippi River and the heart of Tornado Alley, is that everything is fine.
Yes, two of the office's three top positions are vacant. No, the office doesn't have a hydrologist, despite its proximity to the mighty Mississippi, which flooded Davenport for 96 days in 2019. And, sure, the staff is down by about 42% from its typical 24 to 14, according to former employees familiar with the office.
Those left are putting on a brave face.
'We feel good to meet the mission,' said Matt Friedlein, who is normally the office's science and operations officer but has been filling in as the acting meteorologist-in-charge.
The mission here is crucial. This is tornado country, where the warnings that come from this office can be matters of life and death. On Tuesday, eight tornadoes roared through the region, downing trees, derailing rail cars and snapping utility poles.
Like National Weather Service offices across the country, the Quad Cities office is dealing with deep cuts after the Trump administration laid off probationary workers. And while the Trump administration has claimed everything is OK — while also saying it will be refilling more than 100 NWS roles across the country — even some Republican members of Congress are sounding the alarm.
'We're fixing it,' said Rep. Mike Flood, R-Neb., who introduced bipartisan legislation Friday that would classify NWS employees as critical public safety workers and protect them from future cost-saving federal cuts. 'We're going to make them public safety. We're going to fund them.'
Last week, before the administration acknowledged it planned to hire new staffers, NBC News joined a congressional tour — at the invitation of Rep. Eric Sorensen, D-Ill., Congress' only meteorologist and a critic of the administration — to see the effects of the Trump administration's cuts at the Quad Cities forecasting office for Iowa and Illinois.
We found a dedicated but short-staffed office scraping by as best it could and politely avoiding a few of the most pointed questions.
Were there plans to hire a new hydrologist? What would ideal staffing levels be?
'I'll have to refer you to public affairs,' Friedlein said.
Ray Wolf, who retired from the Davenport office in 2023 but has kept in touch with his former colleagues, said that they were 'hanging in there' but that the nationwide cuts had left the system vulnerable to a failure.
'How long can they keep on before something invariably breaks down?' he said. 'If you keep stressing a system beyond its limits? Eventually, there's going to be an issue somewhere that's going to show up.'
The National Weather Service is down about 560 employees since the Trump administration laid off workers and offered buyouts and early retirements to others, according to Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash, who held a news conference Wednesday opposing the cuts.
At least eight offices have stopped operating 24 hours a day. At least 10 of 122 NWS forecasting offices this year have halted or suspended the release of weather balloons that provide data to predict the weather; they simply didn't have the staff to manage.
Real-time weather data collected and analyzed by the National Weather Service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — from balloons, radar, maritime buoys and satellites — forms the basis of almost all public and private weather forecasting. Meteorologists at forecasting offices are responsible for analyzing the modeling data and sending alerts to the public. Improvements to weather models are the result of applying the agencies' research.
The agency has been spotlighted for cuts for months. Project 2025, a road map for conservatives ahead of the election, suggested dismantling many of NOAA's functions and privatizing that work, placing it under state control or sending it to other agencies.
Staffing levels at the weather service have become a political pressure point — but even as the Trump administration approved hiring more than 100 additional staffers for critical roles, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted the agency had enough resources. NOAA and NWS are part of the Commerce Department.
'We are fully staffed with forecasters and scientists,' Lutnick said Wednesday at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. 'Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.'
At a House Appropriations Committee hearing Thursday, Lutnick suggested that some regional centers within the National Weather Service could be consolidated and that more balloon launches could be automated.
Now, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are pushing for change as tornadoes tear across the Midwest, hurricane season ramps up and the peak of wildfire season out west nears.
Sorensen, who worked for 22 years as a TV meteorologist, has signed on to co-sponsor Flood's bill, along with Reps. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., and Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif. Sorensen said he's concerned a mistake by a worn-down meteorologist will lead to unnecessary deaths. He compared the situation to a used car — once trusty and now headed for a lapse.
'It's not running the way that it was supposed to,' Sorensen said of the service. 'Meteorologists, we're human, you know. We will make mistakes, and I don't want to ever see us in a situation where funding or a lack of funding has now caused there to be a loss of life.'
Some help is on the way. The administration recently approved the agency's hiring 126 new staffers, including meteorologists, hydrologists, physical scientists and electronics technicians, a measure CNN first reported Monday.
'A targeted number of permanent, mission-critical field positions will soon be advertised under an exception to the Department-wide hiring freeze to further stabilize frontline operations,' Erica Grow Cei, a meteorologist and spokesperson for the National Weather Service, said in a statement. The National Weather Service has also opened a period of reassignment for current staffers to relocate and fill more than 150 critical positions.
The union that represents weather service employees says hiring is welcome news, but hardly enough.
'It's a Band-Aid,' said Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization. 'We're still doing triage. We're still plugging the holes and unnecessary vacancies across the country, and 126 [hirings] only starts to provide the healing we need across the country.'
In addition to making weather service employees public safety employees, Flood's bill would require an assessment of the NWS workforce and prioritize hiring staffers who regularly launch weather balloons.
The Quad Cities forecasting office has been able to keep up with weather balloon releases only because it has gotten help from visiting NWS staffers on temporary assignments.
In Sorensen's district, forecasting dictates when farmers plant crops or apply pesticides, when riverfront businesses lay out sandbags to meet Mississippi floodwaters and how pilots approach Quad Cities International Airport.
But forecasters earn their keep during this time of year, when the air occasionally becomes heavy, sirens howl and the sky darkens or even turns green.
About two weeks ago, on May 20, funnel clouds reported near the Quad Cities airport forced travelers to take cover in the basement and federal air controllers to leave the glass tower that overlooks the landing strips.
Schoolchildren at Geneseo Middle School nearby huddled against the wall with hands covering their heads for about 45 minutes,
'Midwest life,' Nathan Dwyer, 12, said of the well-rehearsed ritual, which is directed, in part, by meteorologists who analyze federal radar systems and then send off warnings that light up smartphones and provide the radar images you see headlining TV newscasts.
The cuts to weather service staffing has left some in the community — including Nathan's mom — wondering whether they will continue to have the same level of safety and emergency information as in the past.
'I want to be confident that if there is severe weather heading my way that I'm informed,' said Megan Dwyer, a farmer near Moline, Illinois. 'I want senior meteorologists that are behind the scenes making sure that these models are being updated and accurately reflect what's happening.'
On May 20, that's exactly what happened. Alex Gibbs, the lead meteorologist at the Quad Cities National Weather Service, fired off tornado warnings after he recognized a 'typical setup' for tornadic rotation on radar.
'I've been doing it for 15 years. It's like riding a bike, honestly,' he said.
Much of what makes up a tornado warning comes from the specialized computer systems and decades of data that now power the weather models that can forecast extreme weather — but not all of it. Meteorologists like Gibbs remain a crucial piece of the system.
Gibbs said he honed a 'gut' instinct for recognizing the patterns that develop into tornadoes when he was chasing storms in graduate school. In the end, nothing touched down, and the event was just a scare.
On Tuesday, the region counted eight small twisters, which downed trees and derailed train cars.
Some in the Quad Cities are concerned that there will be little margin in a major severe weather outbreak and that long hours will grind down the 14-person staff down over time, leaving the community vulnerable.
Wolf, the retired Davenport meteorologist, said he's worried. As many as 12 employees used to simultaneously staff severe weather outbreaks, he said. The cuts leave fewer people for reinforcements, particularly if other forecasting offices are tied up in their own weather crises.
'​When you have a staff of 14 and you need 10 people, now, all of a sudden, you're in a world of hurt,' Wolf said. 'If we have a big, severe weather event in the next week or two, I'm sure they will carry on and do a really good job with it as they have historically. The challenge comes when you're stressing the whole system time after time after time.'
Brian Payne, the emergency manager for Scott County, Iowa, who works closely with the office, said that it was providing a similar level of service so far and that he hadn't noticed any issues.
'We rely very heavily on them,' Payne said, adding that he was concerned about staffing and change at the agency. 'They sound tired.'
A former National Weather Service employee with knowledge of the situation in Davenport said the staff's professionalism and dedication were preventing worse outcomes.
'They all pitch in and work the hours and crazy shifts to get the job done,' said the former employee, who was concerned that speaking out would make the office a target. 'I just feel bad for the staff. There's a lot of weight on their shoulders.'
Sorensen said employees fear retribution and are scared to speak out.
'These are my friends. These are my colleagues. I went to college 25 years ago with the meteorologist-in-charge here,' Sorensen said, referring to Friedlein. 'They're nervous that what they say may have a political ramification, and then somebody much like a bully back in high school will come and knock them down for no reason, right?'
The concerns in the Quad Cities office reflect a challenging national staffing picture. The office is one of 35 of 122 forecasting offices without permanent meteorologists-in-charge to lead them, according to an agency list.
As of last month, about 43% of forecasting offices had staffing vacancy rates above 20%, according to Fahy. At least six offices have vacancy rates high enough that they have shuttered overnight services, leaving the areas they service vulnerable to overnight surprises.
Congressional Democrats from California, where offices in Sacramento and Hanford are closed overnight, have railed against the cuts, calling them the 'beginning of a public safety crisis with potentially catastrophic consequences.'
In Florida, John Morales, a meteorologist for NBC South Florida, said that the quality of hurricane forecasts would be 'becoming degraded' because of staffing shortages and weather balloon cuts and that he couldn't be confident in them.
Flood, the Nebraska Republican, said he found an office sapped of life when he visited with staffers in the agency's Omaha-area office as the federal government was offering early retirement.
'I could see it in their eyes. They were burnt-out. They were concerned. There were people there that, you know, have been there for 30 years that were taking the retirement buyout,' he said.
When the office could no longer launch weather balloons, Flood said, his constituents took notice, and he felt compelled to intervene.
'This is not a partisan issue,' Flood said. 'People understand how valuable the National Weather Service is. And a lot of times people take them for granted because they've always been there.'
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com