Weather Family Badly Hit

This is rather hard to write because the impact of Katrina has become a lot more personal.

I just got off the phone with Ken Graham who works at the National Weather Service (NWS) Southern Region Headquarters, formerly the Meteorologist-in-Charge of the Birmingham NWS office. Ken is leading a Southern Region team from Fort Worth to Slidell, LA, to assist the people at the NWS office there. Ken had reached Baton Rouge around 1 pm today and they had stopped to buy gas at $3.15 a gallon, probably their last opportunity to do so.

He told me that all NWS Slidell employees suffered damage to their homes. One person on the staff there is unaccounted for at this hour. The office is not in good shape with leaks in the roof. Of course, the communications from that office went through New Orleans so all communication with the office is out including the flow of radar data.

NOAA, parent agency to the NWS, also has a Data Buoy Center in Slidell or Bay St. Louis. Only seven of 39 employees at that facility have been accounted for so far. As Ken said, we really don't know what that means because of the lack of communication.

Being a federal agency, the NWS can't and the employee's union is not allowed to do anything to raise money to assist the people who live and work there. So I've volunteered to try to start an effort to raise money for the NWS employees who have been devastated through the Alabama SKYWARN Foundation. This is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization that I started before retiring from the NWS to promote severe weather safety in Alabama. This is a natural fit to try to help out members of the weather family that have been devastated by a storm of immense magnitude. Please check the SKYWARN Foundation web site - www.alabamaskywarn.org - for additional information about charitable giving.

And let's pray that all of the staff there will be found safe.

-Brian-