Rude, Spam Email To All NOAA Employees Exposes Shoddy

Federal NOAA staffers, hard at work despite a failed 
Trump administration new email system that is prone
to hacking and spam. 

All 13,000 or so employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been spammed with dozens of rude emails and messages due to a dumb move by someone in the Trump administration. 

One email with the subject header "Resign" said in part, 'Aren't you tired of working for a complete cxxt?"

 Others had even more lewd messages. There was a fake invite to join Scientology, and another that read, "Important weather alert: The next four years have a 99% chance of shit showers."

The whole thing was really juvenile, obviously. The emails appear to be an effort to mock the Trump administration's rollout of a new system that allows all 2.3 million federal employees to be mailed from a single address. 

The emails and messages seem to prove that the system is very insecure and could be deployed by bad actors, hackers and those who want to invade the privacy of workers. There's also a lot of questions as to whether the system was properly vetted, or even vetted at all. 

It's unclear why NOAA in particular was targeted.  I'm sure other federal agencies will be getting this flood of spam, too, if they aren't already. 

There's not much so far that can be done about it, apparently. As Mediaite reports, NOAA Deputy Director of Communications Scott Mullen said in a memo to staff: "I'm sorry this happened to us.... I will report it."

Like reporting it would actually help when dealing with the Trump administration. But at least Mullen is trying. 

The ostensible goal of Trump and his wing man Elon Musk was to cut down on spending and waste in government. Way to make everybody work more efficiently by setting up a system that spams NOAA employees with nonsense when they should be spending their time on forecasting dangerous weather or other similar tasks. Not that they aren't already, but the spam has to be an annoying distraction. 

As Houston-based meteorologist Matt Lanza said on X, "The people working for NOAA and the NWS deserve so much better than this."

Another person commented: "You can laugh, but if their cyber security is problematic, that's a huge target for foreign threats. I'd be foaming at the mouth if I were Russia or China."

Everything is chaos when it comes to the Trump administration. Add this to the pile of mess ups we're sure to see in this administration. 

 

 

Did Florida Botch Hurricane Ian Evacuations, And Did That Result In Unnecessary Deaths?

Extreme storm surge destruction from Hurricane Ian in 
Fort Myers Beach, Florida.  Should evacuation orders 
come sooner before the storm?  That's a hot debate
going on right now. 

Amid the rising death toll in Florida after Hurricane Ian, there's been a lot of chatter over whether evacuations ahead of the storm were botched, leading to additional casualties. 

The focus here is on Lee County, Florida, which contains the hardest hit communities, such as Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Sanibel and Pine Islands. 

As of yesterday, the death toll from Hurricane Ian had climbed to 109 people, including 55 deaths in Lee County. This toll is expected to rise further. 

The quote I keep hearing from people who didn't evacuate because forecasts had the storm going further north, toward Tampa.  I think this highlights how people don't understand the nuances of National Hurricane Center forecasts, despite their efforts to make things clear. 

National Hurricane Center forecasts include a projected path of a hurricane, along with something called the "cone of uncertainty."  Meteorologists draw a line suggesting where they think the eye of the storm will go.  Their maps include a shaded area on either side of this line.  That's the cone of uncertainty.  It indicates forecasters' suspicion that the storm could actually travel to the left or right of the projected path. 

The future paths of hurricanes are notoriously difficult to forecast. Every time the NHC updates their forecast, they update the expected path and also change.

On top of all this, the National Hurricane Center will often note, as they did in their forecasts for Ian, that dangerous conditions could well occur outside the "cone of uncertainty."

The storm hit on Wednesday, September 28, For more than five days before Ian hit, Lee County was within the "cone of uncertainty" or at the very least on the edge of it.  The National Hurricane Center also issued a storm surge watch at 11 p.m. Sunday, which raised the real possibility of that destructive storm surge in Lee County. The storm surge watch was upgraded to a warning at 5 p.m. Monday, September 27, which meant a life threatening storm surge was inevitable. 

However, Lee County officials, apparently clinging to earlier forecasts that Ian would head toward Tampa, did not order evacuations until Tuesday morning, just a day before the storm hit. 

That didn't give much time for people to get their act together, gather their stuff, pack their cars, and crawl through bumper to bumper traffic to get out of Dodge.  Meanwhile, to make things more difficult, tropical storm conditions had already started in the area by Tuesday afternoon.

Also, the National Hurricane Center did not extend hurricane warnings southward to include Lee County until Tuesday morning, the day before it actually hit.   The late breaking hurricane warning might have contributed to complacency in Lee County. 

As the Washington Post reports, both Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and President Biden's FEMA administrator, Deanne Criswell defended the delayed evacuation.

"Just 72 hours before landfall, the Fort Myers and Lee County area were not even in the cone of the hurricane,' Criswell said on ABC's This Week.  'And is continued to move south, the local officials immediately - as soon as they knew that they were in that threat zone - made the decisions to evacuate and get people to safety.'"

Again, this appears to me to be people who should have looked at the details and known better. It's true that at one point about 72 hours before landfall, Lee County was on the edge of the cone of uncertainty. 

I'm aware that I'm Monday morning quarterbacking, but honestly, local and federal officials should have recognized that Ian was an unusually large storm, so it would have wider ranging impacts than other storms. 

I think officials were remembering Hurricane Charley, a ferocious Category 4 hurricane that hit the same region back in 2004. However, Charley was much smaller in size than Ian.  Charley was essentially a grotesquely overgrown tornado that carved perhaps a 20 to 30 mile wide path of extreme wind damage. But the storm surge with Charley wasn't all that bad. 

Small-sized storms like Charley can't generate a daunting storm surge like a much bigger storm like Ian can. 

Another thing that should have been considered: Even if Hurricane Ian traveled well north of Lee County, its position would have still placed it in a storm surge danger zone.  On the east side of a northward traveling hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, strong south to southwest winds would push an enormous amount of water toward the Florida Gulf Coast. 

This surge would hit well east or south of the hurricane's eye. For instance, Naples, Florida is a good 43 miles south of Fort Myers. Naples still got nailed with destructive storm surges. 

Here's one thing the Washington Post reported that I was unaware of, and I guess emergency officials in Lee County didn't know:  Generally speaking, there's still a 30 to 40 percent chance that any given hurricane will travel outside the cone of uncertainty. I'm wondering if this fact should have been better known. 

Hurricane Ian was tied for the fifth strongest hurricane on record to strike the United States. Life saving evacuations ahead of such an extreme storm are incredibly complex.  Meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center are among the best of the world, but science is not there yet in terms of accurate forecasting the power and path of hurricanes.  

Despite superhuman efforts, forecasts of the strength and track of hurricanes are usually a little off even 24 hours before they hit, never mind three or four days ahead of the strike. This alone makes evacuation decisions hard.

Hurricane Ian hit a low-lying section of Florida whose population is rapidly rising.  This also makes evacuations and planning more difficult. Plus, climate change is making hurricanes even more unpredictable. More of them are rapidly intensifying just before landfall, like Ian did. Climate change is making the hurricanes even wetter, so flooding can be worse with these things. 

We'll continue to see plenty more finger pointing about evacuations ahead of Hurricane Ian.  It's too late to save anyone who died in the hurricane.  It's imperative we learn the lessons of this one. Powerful hurricanes can hit the United States coastline anywhere between Brownsville, Texas and Eastport, Maine, along with our island territories.

We will see plenty more Hurricane Ians in the future.  Lessons learned from Ian may one day save your life.  

Nominee For World's Most Moronic Snow Plow Operator

Video still showing a clueless snow plow driver in Ohio 
blithely spraying chunks of ice and slush into 
the opposite lane of the Ohio Turnpike, damaging 50
cars and injuring 12 people. 

 I live on what is officially a Vermont State Highway, (Route 36) so trucks from the Vermont Agency of Transportation plow snow and spread salt on the road that runs in front of my house. 

I'm always impressed by how professionally and promptly clear the roads at all hours of the day. 

I'm also pretty sure highway crews in other states are just as good at their jobs.

But there's bad apples everywhere. Which takes us to the Ohio Turnpike in Erie County, Ohio. There, a clueless plow truck driver and moron decided to cause some havoc.

The stuff he was clearing from the westbound lanes of the Ohio Turnpike consisted of heavy slush and chunks of ice.  The driver could have arranged the plow to push the slush off the right side of the highway, or at least go slow enough so the ice wouldn't go all over the place if he wanted to clear it in the opposite direction.

Instead, the oblivious idiot went fast enough to propel the slush and ice over a median barrier and onto traffic in the eastbound lanes of the Turnpike. For two whole miles at least.  

He did this without seeming to notice he was wrecking car after car and causing a number of accidents. By the time Moron Plow Driver was done, at least 50 cars were damaged and 12 people had injuries. Luckily, none of the injuries were life threatening.

Which is a miracle. Video of the incident showed numerous tractor trailers on the highway, which could have lost control during the incident and flattened smaller cars.

News video, which includes a video of the slush and ice being dumped on the highway and smashing into cars and causing crashes, is at the bottom of this post. 

Needless to say, the motorist affected are wicked pissed. People were stranded without cars.  Owners of damaged cars were told to file a police repot and the the Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission would deal with insurance claims.

But other than that, everybody was on their own. One woman from Youngstown with a damage car was just dumped at a local McDonald's and told to figure out on her own how to get home. 

The Commission put the Moron Plow Driver on administrative leave pending an investigation. They also did some drug and alcohol checks on the guy.

The Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission statement, included in this news report, is a triumph of vacuous PR damage control attempts, but it's so florid that whoever wrote it was really desperate.

They smell the lawsuits coming.

I don't mean to disparage that whole commission, as I'm sure most of them are cool and know what they're doing. But yikes!

By the way, the vast majority of crashes involving snow plows are not the fault of the snow plow drivers.  Seems like other motorists can't seem to avoid smashing into what we would think are highly visible, big trucks with flashing lights. But what to I know?   

Despite my high confidence in Vermont snow plow drivers, I'm going to be more than a bit careful when I see the plow's wave of snow coming my way. 

Here's the news video that includes the images of the plow spray that snow and slush. The video report says 40 cars were damaged but that was later updated to 50 or so.   Either click on this hyperlink, or view below: