The search for the missing victims from the July 4th flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas isn’t over, and the toll of fatalities has risen to over 100 as of 6pm on Monday, June 7th. 27 of that number, including children, were in attendance at an all-girls Christian summer camp, are among the dead. There are no words, including offering the requisite “thoughts and prayers” that can suffice in this moment of heartbreak for the families of those victims and the missing still being sought in the aftermath of the torrential rain that would raise the Guadelupe River by some 22 feet in a matter of hours early on the morning of July 4th.

Any lack of words has not extended to local and state officials, who were apparently quick to begin pointing fingers towards what they characterized as a lack of any warning about the flooding, or at least a lack of a forecast that specified just how much flooding there would be. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said last Friday that he “didn’t know this flood was coming.” Austin’s KXAN reported that Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice reiterated that apparent lack of awareness, telling the media Friday: “This rain event sat on top of that and dumped more rain than what was forecasted.”

KXAN’s Investigative team detailed the timeline of notifications from the local National Weather Service office in New Braunfels that covers the Austin-San Antonio area, which includes Kerr County. The first notification from that office of a potential for flash flooding was issued as an outlook on Thursday morning, July 3rd. There were updates throughout the day, including two messages in the 6pm hours that used language indicating the potential for flash flooding from “an excessive rainfall event.” The NWS issued a Flash Flood Warning, which triggered emergency notifications on NOAA Weather Radios, Mobile Phones and Broadcasters at 1:14am on Friday morning, July 4th. By 4am, the National Weather Service had issued a “Flash Flood Emergency,” its highest level of notification, across those same outlets for portions of Kerr County.

It’s believed that the Guadalupe River flooded over its banks by 5:00am on Friday morning, sweeping everything in its path downstream from cars to homes to the many still missing.

The National Weather Service has been working shorthanded since 800 or so employees were fired from the NWS’s governmental parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, earlier this year as part of the sweeping DOGE reductions in the governmental workforce. Most National Weather Service offices had been hiring to replace positions that were open in the past few years. Anyone hired by the NWS in the past two years was considered “probationary” in governmental parlance and were the bulk of those terminated by the current Washington administration.

In the Austin-San Antonio office of the National Weather Service, they presently have 6 vacant positions on their normal staff of 26 people. So a bit under a quarter of the staff isn’t available at present. KXAN’s Investigative Reporter Josh Hinkle detailed the fact that State and Local emergency officials did not go so far as to implicate any personnel or financial cuts in their criticism of the lack of forecast details which might have prompted them to be more prepared for the devastating flood waters. The station has requested records of communications between state and local officials as well as asking additional questions of both the National Weather Service and the meteorologist from the Texas Department of Emergency Management.

July 7th evening update: The NWS has acknowledged that while it has open positions in the Austin-San Antonio and San Angelo weather offices (both were involved in alerting the area of Central Texas that experienced the July 4th flooding) the service employed a “surge staffing” model to bring in more personnel than would be normally scheduled during the warned period last Thursday and Friday. It believes that its performance was not impacted by any staff shortages. The political impact grew on Monday. U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat from New York, called for a congressional investigation into whether staffing cuts at the National Weather Service had “any correlation into the level of devastation.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt challenged that narrative on Monday, flatly stating that “Blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie and it serves no purpose during this time of national mourning.”

Which brings us back to our original question: “What if there wasn’t a National Weather Service anymore?”

Before you scoff at that notion as political rhetoric, let’s return to the much discussed “Project 2025 playbook” that has seemingly been the blueprint for the actions in the first months of the second term of the Presidency of Donald Trump. Aside from the DOGE-implemented staffing cuts, the Project 2025 document details some four pages worth of actions targeting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a primary component “of the climate change alarm industry” and said it “should be broken up and downsized.”

One of the parts of NOAA that current budget proposals suggest could be cut is the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. The OU Daily reported last week that the NSSL and an associated center at the University of Oklahoma are set to be gutted and 220 more people would join the unemployed. Rock on, student journalism!

Of course that budget proposal does represent what might be considered “a two-fer” by whacking a government program that hasn’t done much except radically improve the warning times on severe weather events over the past fifty years it has been in existence AND a higher-education research program committed to the same goals. Government Efficiency in action!

Before we stray too far out of our lane of covering the local television news business, let’s focus on why we keep asking the same question about what happens if there is no National Weather Service? Local broadcasters, like every other institution that is involved in tracking and forecasting the weather, depend on the National Weather Service for the core data and information that is the foundation of their meteorology operations. No matter what vendor they may contract with, what the National Weather Service does each day is what everything else is built on.

So what happens when that foundation crumbles after being weakened by a proverbial “death by a thousand cuts?” On the one hand, you have rivals such as AccuWeather who wasted no time in putting out a press release touting that they provided “most advance notice and most accurate warnings” for the destructive flash flooding in Central Texas to their business customers. No word on whether the State of Texas is an AccuWeather Business customer, but AccuWeather did acknowledge in a statement to SkyNews that warnings from both the State College, PA based company and the National Weather Service “should have provided officials with ample time to evacuate camps such as Camp Mystic and get people to safety”.

Not to be too crass in the midst of what is still an unfolding tragedy, but we want to strongly suggest that every local television station with a weather department needs to spend some time thinking about–and maybe even advocating more strongly for–the future of the National Weather Service. As the scope of the Texas flooding was being determined over the weekend, the National Hurricane Center-another part of NOAA that is on the budget chopping block-was putting our warnings about Tropical Storm Chantal that quickly spun up off the South Carolina coast. Growing up in that part of the world, we have seen the ability to track and warn about Tropical Storms and Hurricanes save countless lives, thanks to the work of the National Hurricane Center and local National Weather Service offices on the coastlines of this country.

The threat to the National Hurricane Center prompted veteran broadcast meteorologist John Morales of NBC O&O WTVJ in Miami to post a scorching opinion piece on his station’s website about the proposals to cut the NHC and multiple programs within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

He posted his opinion piece last Thursday, July 3rd. The day before the flash flooding in Central Texas.

One more Monday update to this article: John Morales of WTVJ weighed in on Monday about the question of NWS staffing levels in Central Texas last weeksaying “I don’t think any of the cuts going on with NOAA and the National Weather Service had anything to do with the quality of the forecast [or] the advanced warning of the potential for flooding and damaging rains.” But Morales also added “I’m on the record as stating that I think this degradation in particular in regard to the coordination is going to be a slow degradation.”

As we said in the original version of this: That countdown clock in the control room isn’t the only one ticking down to zero.