Even among natural disasters, only hurricanes can come close to inspiring the terror of a tornado. A powerful funnel cloud can form quickly, move unpredictably and often gives those in the path of destruction only minutes to take shelter.
So much depends on the timeliness of warnings from the National weather Service, whose alerts can be the difference between life and death. But recent outages have shown the fragility of NWS infrastructure, making its improvement a matter of national urgency.
A weekend of severe weather last year hampered the Something in the Water festival at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, cutting short the first night of music and washing out the third and final day, on April 30.
That afternoon, the collision of two weather fronts resulted in the formation of a funnel cloud over the eastern branch of the Lynnhaven River in Virginia Beach. It strengthened to an EF-3 storm, generating winds of 145 mph, as it traveled northeast for a little less than five miles through several neighborhoods, First Landing State Park and Fort Story before heading out to the Atlantic Ocean.
The tornado formed quickly, as they were wont to do, giving the NWS little time to react. Eric Seymour, warning coordination meteorologist with NWS, told The Virginian-Pilot that a thunderstorm warning was issued at 5:24 pm and a tornado warning issued to the area around Broad Bay at 5:47 pm.
A minute later, the tornado touched down. Five minutes later, it was gone after cutting a scar through the northeast corner of the city.
A large number of law enforcement, firefighters and EMS workers from across the region were already deployed to the Oceanfront for the festival when the tornado hit, allowing them to move quickly to the affected areas. There were no injuries, even though about 115 homes were damaged along with cars, boats and other infrastructure.
Some of that is surely attributable to the timeliness of the NWS warning, though it didn’t give residents much time to seek shelter. Some warning is better than no warning at all, and it is still very difficult to know when and where, with any precision, that a tornado will form.
But in this case, Virginia Beach was lucky. Other regions of the country have not been.
Earlier this month, a powerful line of thunderstorms moved through the Midwest that formed 19 funnel clouds and required about 50 severe weather and tornado warnings. However, a massive network outage limits the NWS’s ability to issue those alerts to area meteorologists and residents in danger.
Officials told The Washington Post that the breakdown lasted more than four hours and created “intermittent” disruptions at many of the NWS 122 offices serving those states. At one point, the St. Louis office was distributing hand-drawn tornado warning areas for release.
This wasn’t a one-time problem, but a systematic failure repeated time and again. A national NWS outage in 2021 limited forecasters’ ability to download relevant data and impeded the service’s ability to issue warnings. And a 2020 report from the NWS to Congress found that the spacing of weather radar equipment is inadequate in many places, leaving the service unable to provide accurate predictive warnings to some areas prone to tornadoes.
Yet, despite these repeated and concerning issues, precious little has been done to improve internet reliability, bolster data capacity and create redundancy in the system. The Post reported that NWS director Ken Graham, who took office in June 2022, said addressing crumbling NWS infrastructure is a top priority, but four years since the report to Congress and three years since that widespread outage affecting the Midwest, nothing has been done.
That’s unacceptable and demands urgent action from Washington. Virginia Beach was lucky last year, but other areas of the country may not be if the NWS cannot issue accurate and timely warnings about severe weather threats. This is a crisis and it must be fixed.
