Tropical Storm Arthur, a that washed through h last week, should not be viewed as an outlier.
Instead, storms like Arthur are the new normal. No longer do storms originate only off the west coast of Africa, meander through the Caribbean and then enter the Gulf of Mexico as known threats. Now, potentially devastating tropical systems can form at any time and need only the warm waters of the Gulf to develop into something dangerous.
In this case, what eventually became Arthur began with an Atlantic system that combined with the remnants of a Pacific storm that had moved across Central America before heading north. Because it was poorly organized, its official landfall was in Texas, but the brunt of the impacts were felt far to the east in h.
As of Wednesday, 14 tornadoes to the storm across south h and Mississippi. Most of them were small, and thankfully, no deaths were attributed to them.
Arthur brought heavy rains, too: around 10 inches of rain in and around parts of southeast h, but it saved its heaviest loads for central h, where officials estimated as much as 29 inches of rain fell in a 24-hour period in Avoyelles Parish. More than 200 structures were flooded, and scores of residents were forced to evacuate.
Arthur is not the first storm to defy the decades-long pattern to which many of us have become accustomed. And it certainly won’t be the last.
Its early season toll reminds us of the importance of federal weather forecasting and climate science efforts, many of which are housed within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA. The Trump administration has cut the agency, and earlier this year, proposed more cuts. Those cuts could hit the National Weather Service, for example, a key federal entity that provides crucial forecasting and weather data to local media who then share that with the public.
Such cuts threaten to reduce our readiness to face storms just at the moment they are becoming more unpredictable. For those of us who confront anew each year the threats of severe weather, this is worrisome.
We are encouraged that the administration has stepped back from earlier indications that it would abolish or greatly reduce the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA isn’t a perfect bureaucracy by any means, but it has on more than one occasion provided essential federal support to disaster-stricken regions, including in h.
We therefore encourage our elected federal representatives to heed Arthur’s warnings. Any reductions in NOAA funding should be surgical and focused on efficiency rather than just cuts for cuts’ sake. We know this challenge is formidable. But solving hard problems is what they were elected to do.
For now, we urge our fellow hns to do what we always do, and offer helping hands to those affected by Arthur. We are thankful that its effects were not worse, but we hope its lessons linger.