Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) mentioned Sunday that the potential position of Nationwide Climate Service (NWS) staffing cuts in current Texas flooding deaths ought to be investigated.
“Two Texas Nationwide Climate Service places of work concerned in forecasting and warning about flooding on the Guadalupe River are lacking some key workers members,” CNN’s Dana Bash mentioned on “State of the Union.”
“A director of the NWS union instructed CNN that the Austin/San Antonio workplace is lacking a warning coordination meteorologist because of the Trump administration’s buyouts,” she added. “Do you’ve gotten any indication whether or not these or different cuts helped play a job in the truth that the individuals within the flood zone weren’t ready and definitely not evacuated?”
Castro responded that he couldn’t communicate “conclusively” concerning the cuts, including later that he didn’t “suppose it is useful to have lacking key personnel from the Nationwide Climate Service not in place to assist stop these tragedies.”
“On most days, clearly, you are not going to have a tragedy like this, however when you’ve gotten flash flooding, there is a danger that you just will not have the personnel to make that — do this evaluation, do the predictions in one of the simplest ways,” he mentioned.
“And it might result in tragedy. So, I do not wish to sit right here and say conclusively that that was the case, however I do suppose that it ought to be investigated,” he added.
The Trump administration fired hundreds of Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) workers earlier this yr, together with some NWS workers. It later moved to reassign different staff to NWS places of work that have been “critically understaffed,” in line with an inner doc.
In the previous few months, the Trump administration has taken intention at a number of elements of the federal authorities, slashing workers and switching up the construction of departments and businesses in a dramatic style that rattled Washington.
The Hill has reached out to NWS for remark.