After disaster, waiting is one of the hardest parts

We’ve flipped from May to March in the northeast U.S. but it’s offering a needed (if short) break for many storm-battered regions.

Weather Watch

May nor’easter. Low pressure will strengthen off the Northeast coast Thursday, before passing close to Cape Cod tonight, then shifting to Down East Maine on Friday. Coastal flood and wind advisories are in effect for much of the New England coast, where wind gusts of 35 to 50 mph are forecast. Rainfall totals of 1 to 3 inches are also anticipated from New York City to Boston and beyond.

Lightning links

I made a radar loop of the outbreak sequences just concluded. It will be the first billion-dollar disaster since Trump tried to cancel them.

After disaster, waiting is one of the hardest parts

More than 100 tornadoes will end up being recorded from the attack of severe weather that spanned May 14-20. Two consecutive dips in the jet stream created daily outbreaks across the eastern two thirds of the country, leaving few locations entirely untouched by severe weather.

It has now been confirmed that at least two violent (EF4+) tornadoes struck on May 16. They were both EF4s — one in southern Illinois and the other that devastated locations nearby London, Kentucky. At least 34 strong tornadoes of EF2+ have been tallied and surveys are ongoing.

Violent tornadoes kill a majority of those impacted by twisters, despite making up about 1 percent of events. Historically speaking, about 60 percent of EF4 tornadoes kill, while about 90 percent of EF5s do so. Tornadoes rated a 4 make up the most deaths overall at 40 percent, as they are a good deal more common than 5s, a handful occurring most years.

In other words, it is more of an anomaly when such a powerful tornado is confirmed, and deaths do not occur. Nighttime compounds the threat significantly.

As the full picture emerges, some of the early storylines are of increasingly less value to the conversation. At the heart was an idea that the warnings could have been better.

It is correct that the NWS office in Jackson is severely understaffed and needed to scramble to crew the overnight shift when tornadoes were in the forecast for Kentucky. This is the fault of Trump administration cuts but somehow did not significantly impact the crisis response of those involved.

With lead times of 28-40 minutes in Somerset and London, warnings were better than average. It could partly be that the supercell involved had trekked about 500 miles from southern Missouri at that point.

But it was a violent tornado that careened into hundreds of houses and other structures along its path, only occasionally visible in the nighttime sky among flashes of lightning.

With the tornado striking near midnight, people were in bed. While strong tornadoes happen in the region, a nighttime EF4 is exceptionally rare there. Those killed are very much skewed to the elderly who may not have had time to react despite the good warnings.

There are many factors involved in the events that are nearly impossible to fully understand in the immediate aftermath.

The full process is a lot more involved than looking at opposing colors on a radar screen and later confirming major damage. But we live in an immediate aftermath world, now more than ever as instantaneous video is shot across the globe at the shift of a thumb.

I always think back to Hurricane Katrina and horrific reports of beaches full of bodies after the storm. It did end up quite horrible, but largely in a different way as New Orleans flooded, and too many people died in their homes after the winds stopped blowing. It was as bad as it gets on the coast further east, but the initial reports were never confirmed.

The fog of war is thick after a big, deadly weather event. Waiting for facts on the ground can be among the hardest parts. This is especially so among those not directly involved.

Now a number of days removed from the worst of the outbreaks, a key truism from the week is that the cuts to the Weather Service are absurd and will damage lives, property and commerce.

Perhaps since seeds of today’s NWS were planted in the war department, there is still apparently something of a warrior ethos among those in the warning seat. Unfortunately, the longer we operate in the current mode, the more it will turn into captains going down with their ships.

These committed public servants aren’t looking for praise, just a job well done and a feeling like they accomplished the critical mission they were given. The current world where NWS is attacked unnecessarily and often in an underinformed manner, treated like villains, and left to swim in a pool of lowered morale cannot be sustained forever.

Despite living in D.C. for nearly 20 years now, I have never considered myself anything close to an activist. While I’ll do my best to keep my mind right in the process, it’s hard not to turn into one for this cause.

I again urge the sharing of news about this key, valuable and under siege group of professionals. The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121.

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Weekday morning newsletter by a journalist/forecaster. Connecting weather and climate change dots while occasionally stirring the pot.

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