[Outages-discussion] National Weather Service outages?

[David Eddleman]

Unfortunately the NWS isn't a priority in Washington. There's a lot of
government agencies that are like that. "Direct action" ones like the FBI
and ATF get priority. NWS is more of a rounding off kind of deal it seems
like. Same with the FCC.

As I told the other gentleman that was asking about the storms here the
other day, I'm a storm spotter. I deal directly with both the NWS and FCC
as a result, former for weather reports, latter for my radio licensing.
Both get shoestring budgets to meet their scopes.

The Dallas weather radio system has been down, pending parts, for a few
days now. There's a good portion of Dallas that's not covered by
neighboring KEC55 (Fort Worth), Cumby (KWN31), or Corsicana (KXI87). So the
only way they could receive alerts is if their city has the ability to push
out alerts via Code Red, Everbridge, etc. and they signed up for it. WEA
alerts are also used but those are only issued for direct threats to life,
typically for rotation with a confirmed or suspected tornado. And Dallas
isn't the only one, there's a good dozen radio transmitters that are down
across the country, some have been down for months.

On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 8:44 AM Andy Ringsmuth via Outages-discussion <
outages-discussion at outages.org> wrote:

>
> https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/other/weather-service-radar-and-warning-systems-failed-tuesday-during-a-severe-storm-outbreak/ar-BB1kWWoL
>
> "It was not the first instance of such a network failure — more isolated
> outages occur as often as once a month, Herzmann said — but was perhaps the
> most consequential in recent memory. Meteorologists around the Midwest were
> without key information that would normally be at their fingertips, and
> many severe-weather warnings went out to the public late, if at all.”
>
> WOW
>
> So the national agency responsible for literally saving lives in severe
> weather situations has MONTHLY outages and they just accept it as normal?
>
> If Amazon or eBay or Twitter or Microsoft goes down, yeah, it’s incredibly
> inconvenient for a lot of people, but lives probably aren’t literally in
> danger. Those outages get massive press. And yet the NWS has monthly
> outages and no one cares?!?
>
> Mind Blown.
>
> ----
> Andy Ringsmuth
> 5609 Harding Drive
> Lincoln, NE 68521-5831
> (402) 202-1230
> andy at andyring.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Outages-discussion mailing list
> Outages-discussion at outages.org
> https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/outages-discussion
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages-discussion/attachments/20240403/256fd2a9/attachment.htm>