NOAA cuts endanger us all

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

“”Showing the recklessness of the GOP’s budget, proposed cuts would gut funding for Hawaii’s tsunami warning system,” said Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), joining Democrats in trying to tie GOP budget cuts to threats posed by the recent Japanese earthquake.

But if you go through the GOP budget cutting bill, you won’t find any mention of cuts in tsunami warning funding, or in the National Weather Service, which has also been getting a lot of media attention about budget cuts as well.

The cuts – which right now have no chance to get through the Senate – would be in the budget of NOAA, the parent organization to both the tsunami and weather forecasting organs.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration would suffer a cut of 7% in its budget. If that was actually put into law, NOAA (and the Obama Administration) would be responsible for determining what gets cut, since the GOP did not detail what departments should get what amount of money.

If NOAA officials decided to cut across the board, then yes, there would be cuts to all parts of that department.

But that part of the story isn’t getting much play.

Pushing hard against the cuts in NOAA is the union that represents workers at the National Weather Service, which charges that Republicans “would set back weather forecasting decades.”

“Our organization firmly believes any effort to defund and dismantle our nation’s early warning system for all natural disasters is very unwise,” said union President Dan Sobien.

Sobien is doing what anyone organization might do in this situation, warn of deep cuts, layoffs, furloughs, degraded forecasts and equipment and raise the specter of people dying as a result.

Democrats are playing their role perfectly, eating up such information and putting it to use, skewering Republicans for their proposed cuts in the National Weather Service and for the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

But – as I wrote above – you can’t find anything specific

All of those broken bones in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and those broken homes prompt us to remember what in calmer times we are invariably minded to forget: the most stern and chilling of mantras, which holds, quite simply, that mankind inhabits this earth subject to geological consent—which can be withdrawn at any time.

His article foretells of that which is inevitable–the United States is due for a major earthquake; specifically in the San Francisco area.  Historically, earthquakes seems to come in clusters.  So far, there have been huge earthquakes recently in New Zealand, Chili, and now Japan.  If geological history repeats itself, California needs to be on the lookout. 

According to Winchester:

All three phenomena involved more or less the same family of circum-Pacific fault lines and plate boundaries—and though there is still no hard scientific evidence to explain why, there is little doubt now that earthquakes do tend to occur in clusters: a significant event on one side of a major tectonic plate is often—not invariably, but often enough to be noticeable—followed some weeks or months later by another on the plate’s far side. It is as though the earth becomes like a great brass bell, which when struck by an enormous hammer blow on one side sets to vibrating and ringing from all over. Now there have been catastrophic events at three corners of the Pacific Plate—one in the northwest, on Friday; one in the southwest, last month; one in the southeast, last year.

That leaves just one corner unaffected—the northeast. And the fault line in the northeast of the Pacific Plate is the San Andreas Fault, underpinning the city of San Francisco.