Firing of 800 NOAA Employees

[John Farley]

I can "second" your comment and observation about Mike's time in the "crowded" OKC met market in the early 1970s. "The OKC Legend" Channel 9's Gary England and Channel 5's Ross Dixon were tough competition in that market, but I always remember Mike's weathercasts, particularly on weekends in April-May tornado season, even though Jim Williams was on air more frequently weekdays. Ditto for Mike's KARD/KSN weathercasts from ICT which I could get in AYS during the late 1970s.

My comments were in regard to the St. Louis market later, but the situation was similar. He was up against Dave Murray, a very popular (and also very good) TV met, but IMHO Mike's weathercasts were even better than Dave's. St. Louis was fortunate to have such good weather coverage back in those days. By the time I retired and moved away, it was not as good, although probably still better than some other markets.

 

[Randy Zipser]

• Governor Ron DeSantis and his emergency management team have done simply amazing work in the field of disaster recovery, In the wake of Cat 4 Ian (poorly forecast by the federal government, by the way), his repair of the unusable Pine Island Bridge ( Florida completes repairs on Pine Island bridge in just 3 days ) was simply amazing. One of the primary purposes of the NDRB is to promulgate "best practices." The feds would have taken months to repair the bridge. Ian's too-high death toll of 161 would have been even higher without the bridge to move aid in and out.

So as not to stray too far off topic, the Pine Island Bridge replacement three-days after Hurricane Ian is a good example of how a state governor, in this case, Ron DeSantis, was able to demonstrate more decisive leadership skills in the face of that natural disaster than the bureaucratic federal government could ever have done! It just takes the desire and know-how "from the top down" to lead in a crisis! One of the very best examples of this in recent memory was how several agencies of the federal government failed to act decisively or effectively following Hurricane Katrina in September, 2005. The following link is from a U.S. Senate report on findings about how several federal agencies horribly bungled their responses and lessons learned: http://www.disastersrus.org/katrina/senatereport/KatCon.pdf.