S1: Welcome in San Diego , it's Jade Hindman. After tragic flooding in Texas , with little to no warning , we're checking in on our own warning systems. This is KPBS Midday Edition. Connecting our communities through conversation. So far , more than 100 people have died as a result of the floods. In central Texas , a river there swelled more than 26ft and less than an hour early Friday morning as search and rescue efforts continue. Many are thinking about what went wrong. Texas officials have suggested the National Weather Service didn't adequately warn them of the extent of the danger. The weather service denies this. In light of this catastrophic event. We wanted to look at how our own weather warning system here in San Diego County. Works. Alex Tardy is a meteorologist with the Weather Echo and retired warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego County. Alex , welcome back to Midday Edition.
S2: Jade , thanks for having me on again.
S1: Always great to have you here. So , you know , I think a lot of us saw the tragic flooding that occurred over the holiday weekend in Texas , and really wondered how a severe weather event like that would play out here.
S2: A catastrophic event , a true disaster. I was actually traveling through Texas Dallas-Fort Worth Airport on July 4th. So I was monitoring the storm pretty close. The radar imagery , the rain gauges , the river gauges , and then the media reports. And they became pretty clear that it was devastating. My reaction was , wow , this is going to be , you know , the worst , maybe flood event we've seen with fatalities , especially with the young people that was involved. So I was in shock for a while. And even meteorologically looking at how the river and the creeks responded was unprecedented. Yeah.
S1: Yeah. It was a once in a century storm , as I understand it. You know , San Diego saw extreme flooding just back in January of 2024.
S2: They had five inches of rain in three hours. That's almost identical to what we saw in San Diego on Choy Creek , which caused all that major flooding in the San Diego region. So meteorologically it was quite similar. Now the differences were in that area of Kerrville. It's very hilly. The event was also at night. And then finally the rain. Even though it poured at 1:00 in the morning , 3:00 in the morning , the rain didn't end like it did in San Diego in that event. And that spared us even more damage in San Diego. The rain just kept coming. And they ended up with about a foot of rain in that area on the Guadalupe River headwaters.
S1:
S2: And I think that's the true definition and they're very difficult to predict , I think. You know , we are in good shape and we had maybe strong evidence in that January 2024 because we didn't have any fatalities. The flooding was real. In San Diego. Cars were floating down the water , trash , large steel , metal. It was severe flooding and we didn't have lives lost. So I think we are prepared and we have a good warning system , but there's always room for improvement because these disasters , they're going to get you off guard somewhere. Yeah.
S1: Yeah. Well , can you explain a bit about how a weather forecast becomes a warning and how that makes it to the public ? Yeah.
S2: So we start with notifying everyone that , hey , heavy rains expected and that's a few days before it actually starts. It could be sunny outside. And then we move forward to what's called a flood. Watch that. Hey , something unusual is coming. We did that in January 24th , in San Diego , and that's what the San Antonio office did for this flooding in central Texas. That's about two days in advance , sometimes one day in advance , and it still may not be raining yet. Now , when it starts to unfold , we watch the weather radar closely because when we're making a forecast like a flood watch , we are using computer model data like simulated predicted data and even artificial intelligence. But when it comes to the whites of its eye , we're looking at the radar. And that's what they were doing at midnight on July 4th. And when they issued that first warning at 1 a.m. , it's because they saw on radar that the rainfall had exceeded the thresholds , not a threshold for the United States , a threshold locally for that creek for that area of Kerrville. And then they keep monitoring. They may have to increase the messaging , which they did later that morning. They called it a flash flood emergency. These messages are public. Not only are they public in real time , people can get them on their phones without even subscribing. They can get them on no weather radio , but all of us can go back and look at Iowa State University , and all this data is just sitting there showing exactly when the National Weather Service pulled the trigger that night , that morning. How the message was worded. Did it say catastrophic flooding ? Was it descriptive ? Did it mention the Guadalupe River ? So it's very public. We're very open in terms of how we we do our process. But there's a lot of work that we do behind the scenes that leads up to these actual products.
S1: Well , many questions are still being raised about how authorities responded to the flood risk.
S2: A lot of the media reports which which are great , um , are information , like I said , is publicly available. So it's really easy to pull up. Um , it's harder to pull up communications like phone calls. Did an emergency manager call the office ? Did the office call an emergency manager ? Did they have a briefing ? For example , in the San Diego event , I held live webinars before the rain even hit. I provide the number to our office , to all emergency management , Sheriff fire , and they have my cell number. And often people would call me. So tracking that type of intimate communication for the event in Central Texas , that's going to be harder. Um , it's going to be possible , but that's going to be harder because we don't know exactly what was going on on July 3rd , which would have been a critical time when the flood watch was out. Um , was there any discussion of evacuations ? I've had many , many dozens of times where I've talked to emergency management , and there's a long pause in that , and they're asking me questions about how hard the rain is going to be. Should we move to an evacuation warning , which is voluntary ? Should we move to an evacuation order , which is mandatory ? And this is common in Southern California , especially with post wildfire burn scars.
S1: You know , but even the mayor in Kerrville , down there in Texas said he didn't receive a warning at all. What about the inconsistency in and the warnings that some people receive and don't receive over their cell phone , for example ? Yeah.
S2: So the power of the cell phone , there's a few ways to receive warnings so you can have your TV on , you know , watching local media. That's the emergency alert system , which hasn't been talked about much. Um , interesting. Not sure why. Also , radio stations will be interrupted with EA's emergency alert system. Since this was nighttime , um , you're probably going to rely more on a cell phone. The cell phone doesn't use data services. It actually uses radio waves. So once the National Weather Service forecaster hits the button on the warning , it goes in seconds , uh , through a public alerting system run by FEMA. And it's hard to believe they didn't get it now. If individuals turn off those notices , and I've had many people walk up to me and chuckle and laugh and hey , Alex , I turn off the Amber alerts. They're so annoying. If someone went into their phone and turned off those alerts , that is correct. They would not get them. So the system doesn't override that. And that's what's nice about a weather radio , is that it can be turned off and it can turn on. So there are two pieces to the puzzle. The user with the device like a phone or with some other type of radio system. And then there's the other end when the National Weather Service pushes the button and it goes through. Mhm.
S1: Mhm. You know also at some point to unfilled positions in the National Weather Service in Texas , wondering if that played a role in the large number of deaths.
S2: It was a variety of cuts , as we know. Some were probationary employees that were let go. That means like an entry level or a new , new employee. Some were voluntary retirement like myself. Some were actual full retirement , meaning they were already eligible by age. Some were even voluntary separation. But the bottom line is the National Weather Service has 3800 employees. They've lost about 600 over the past few months , and they had a few vacancies even before that. So now you're getting into the territory where you have 15 to 20% nationwide of staffing shortage. You don't have any new jobs being filled. So after I retired on May 1st , they should be filling the position like normally in a natural process. And here we are over two months later in the position is not even on USA jobs. So I think , you know , forecasters , meteorologists , managers like myself , they're having to fill in. My understanding is with San Antonio , which is a normal process. They brought in extra meteorologists even during the night shift. When I lived in Corpus Christi , we would bring in 3 or 4 extra meteorologists with a hurricane. So I would expect in San Antonio they were fully staffed. But when you don't have a warning coordination meteorologist , which , by the way , it's part of the Weather Act , which was passed by Congress in 2017 and repassed in 2023. The Weather Act says every office should have a warning coordination meteorologist , uh , in that position , uh , full time , because that position is so important for working with local state officials.
S1:
S2: Uh , potentially worse down the road. But they are a response agency , right ? They're not involved heavily in the prediction part , even though we do provide them with daily briefings , hey , there's going to be flooding somewhere in Texas. Hey. A hurricane formed in Atlantic. We provide them with daily briefings , but FEMA is a response agency , and they've had similar all the agencies that I've talked to , whether it's the USDA , whether it's U.S. Forest Service , whether it's FEMA , they've lost employees largely through early buyouts and retirement. Once you lose people , like with any business or any job , other people have to step into the roles , work overtime , cover the duties , eventually. Eventually , over a few months and a year , it becomes a little more exponential where , you know , you start to miss duties , you have burnout and other type of problems with your staff.
S1:
S2: Like , what if I was the emergency manager in San Diego or the emergency manager in Kerrville ? Um , I would not if there was a flood watch in effect. And I was a camp leader , camp counselor , emergency manager , police , fire. I would be watching the radar all night or have someone do it for me if I needed sleep. Um , it's the same situation that goes on with California with wildfires when we have a Santa Ana win. There's a lot of people that aren't sleeping. They are watching with cameras , aircraft , other devices. Where is the next fire so that we can jump on it and not and not see it take off into thousands of acres and cause all the destruction like we have seen in the past. I would be doing that the day before , talking to the National Weather Service , maybe even talking to private meteorologists to get a second opinion. Um , how concerning is this ? And that night , I would have a watch duty officer not on call watching the weather radar. I've seen that in Southern California , like in Riverside County , where emergency managers will be up all night watching the radar as if they are a meteorologist , because sometimes you only have 30 minutes , sometimes you only have an hour. Um , where you go from a little bit of rain to just extreme rain and time to evacuate. Think about how unsafe it is to evacuate when it's dark. It's pouring rain and there's already flooding , so you don't have a lot of time to work with. And you have to be situational aware all night. Wow.
S1: Wow. You know , you recently spoke with KPBS about your decision to retire from the National Weather Service after 32 years there. In that interview , you said this is the first time where I was restricted.
S2: There's a lot of things going on in the federal government. Some of it's , you know , make sense. Some of it's on the news , some of it's not. Um , a lot of the , you know , restrictions that are not on the news or not common knowledge was , for example , my position is to go out to meetings , to go out to public and do outreach , to go out and educate people , to go to schools , to talk to an emergency manager before disasters. And I was told and restricted to where I had to stay in the office. I couldn't travel , I couldn't go to a meeting , and if I did go to a meeting or asked to go to a meeting , it had to be critical. It had to be like earth shattering disaster , like like the one we had in San Diego in January 2024. You can't get a lot done that way. You can't just work when there's significant weather. You have to be working when there's not any weather. That's how you develop relationships. That's how you educate people. That's how you prepare better. So I was restricted to going to all type of activities and that's never happened before. The only time I'd seen that happen was with the continuing resolution when the government shuts down and can't agree. But that's usually temporary. That's usually like one week , two weeks. And then the other thing going on is the research. So when we have a disaster , like what happened in Texas , the only way we're going to have better forecasts and better warnings and be more accurate is to do extensive research for the next few years on that , and then retrain our computer model predictions. And a lot of that currently. And the new budget in 2026 is being cut. So you had the research being cut and then you had the intimate personal relationship activity like meetings , conferences that was also actively being cut and restricted. Uh , that's my job. So basically my job was being cut or choked off. Mhm.
S1: Mhm. Well , you know , before we go , I know that this week , starting Wednesday morning , parts of San Diego County will be under a heat advisory.
S2: We had a heat wave in June and then things cooled off. We're looking at excessive heat for at least a couple of days this week. That means temperatures could get up to around 100 in Ramona. Uh , temperatures could get to 90 , 95. And a lot of our coastal communities along I-15. You'll get some relief on the beach , but our , uh , desert areas will be well over 110. We could even see between 115 and 120. Um , and this is going to be the type of heat wave where it backs off a little bit this weekend. So it cools off a little bit by a few degrees , and then it comes back uh , early to mid next week. So we've been seeing a trend of this over the past several years where it's not just like a 1 or 2 day heat wave , it's a heat one two day heat wave. Then it backs off , dissipates , and then it comes back and sometimes comes back even stronger. What this all means is not just the heat. Think about if you leave something outside in this sun or in this heat , it quickly deteriorates and and is stressed. Our vegetation , our brush fuel without any rain. With this heat. This means that after this heat wave over the next couple of weeks , fire weather conditions which already are sensitive , they're going to become more severe as we go into August. And so heat waves are a big impact on wildfire and fire danger. So that's going to just be increasing regardless of whether the temperatures go up or down a little bit over the next few weeks.
S1: Well , I've been speaking with Alex today. He is a meteorologist with Weather Echo and retired warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego County. Alex , it's always great to have you on and thank you so much for your insight.
S2: Thank you Jade.
S1: That's our show for today. I'm your host , Jade Hindman. Thanks for tuning in to Midday Edition. Be sure to have a great day on purpose , everyone.
