The incident meteorologist training for the National Weather Service was canceled amid “short staffing” and a severe reduction in how much employees are allowed to spend on travel, according to an email viewed by The Hill.
An agency source expressed concern that the cancellation of this session would delay new incident meteorologists from being certified — leaving the weather service less able to respond to disasters like fires and putting an even greater strain on the existing workforce.
The source said that employee purchase cards were reduced to $1, so people were unable to book travel and some who had already booked travel had to cancel their flights.
Incident meteorologists are specially trained forecasters who have typical meteorology jobs at the weather service but also volunteer to work on disasters, said Larry Van Bussum, national fire weather operations program manager at the weather service.
They get 250 hours of training to give weather information to incident managers as part of an effort to keep response crews and the general public safe.
Meanwhile, this also does not appear to be the only government training that has recently been canceled.
A senior Department of Homeland Security official confirmed to The Hill that fire trainings at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were also being canceled, saying via email, “The bottom line is we are no longer paying for non-employee travel. We are only authorizing travel for mission critical programs, this isn’t one.”
Read more at TheHill.com.
