The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center is located near the beach at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Realizing that it might be useful if the Tsunami Warning Center could survive the first onslaught of a tsunami, it is being relocated to
Ford Island, a small island in the middle of Pearl Harbor. "But that's ok." they said, "We plan to put it on the third floor."
At the time I thought it was just another example of typical bureaucratic bungling until I remembered one thing - AccuWeather.
AccuWeather is a private, for-profit corporation that supplies weather reports to TV, radio, and newspapers on a subscription basis. They have been lobbying to replace the National Weather Service. Besides being required to pay for a service that is being provided by our tax dollars (remember who put all those weather satellites in orbit), AccuWeather is also connected to the
Global Climate Coalition, a group that opposes all science and policy that tries to prevent global warming.
The National Weather Service is responsible to alerting the citizenry to hazardous weather conditions - hurricanes, tornados, sever thunderstorms, floods, heat waves, extreme cold - that kind of stuff.
The National Weather Service is also used heavily by the military in planning things like where to sail their ships, where to fly their planes, and where and when to invade. Anyone who doubts the national security implications of the National Weather Service need only remember one word - Crimea. During the Crimean war, the fleet sent by the British to re-supply their troops was sunk by a hurricane. The soldiers were left without food, ammunition, or adequate clothing. The British government tried to cover up the disaster, but when it was revealed, it took down the government.
What seemed like just an example of ordinary bureaucratic bungling before, now has the appearance of yet another attempt to discredit a government agency in order to justify privatizing it.
It's one thing to make mistakes - everybody does from time to time. It's quite another to deliberately and repeatedly foul up to self fulfill the prophecy that government can't do the job. It is especially egregious when it involves agencies whose failures can place people's lives in jeopardy.
The question I have is: Who would you rather trust for vital weather information that might just save your life; a government agency that is responsible to the people through their representatives, or a private business that is only responsible to their stock holders?