After the huge success of the National Transportation Safety Board , in 1998 Congress established the    U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazards Investigation Board . The CSB's mission is to investigate accidents such as those at oil refineries and chemical manufacturing plants. Like the NTSB, it has authority to investigate and make recommendations but it has no enforcement power.  Via Grist  I learned this morning that President Trump's Administration is proposing to eliminate the CSB as part of balancing the federal budget. This is a terrible idea!  I am a small-government conservative but both the CSB and NTSB produce huge returns on investment, not to mention the lives saved.  Its budget is just $15 million per year. That amount is just  one-quarter  of a single NOAA pork barrel grant to a global warming group in Maine (below). And, of course, NOAA makes many of these grants. To save money, let's get NOAA completely out of the pork-barrel busin...

The horror on Maui continues . The news media has largely forgotten the victims of the August fire that killed 101. It is difficult to determine whether their plight is due to incompetence (Hawaii doesn't know how to handle the aftermath of wildfires) or evil (they are trying to force the victims to sell their valuable land for below-market prices). Three days after the fire, it was obvious that a Natural Disaster Review Board would have been tremendously valuable in this case . The NTSB, after which I want to pattern the Disaster Review Board, offers family assistance  to the victims of airline crashes and similar events. That would be an especially valuable service in this case.  We are 9 months after the fire and Fox News is reporting: FSRI investigators are still trying to get some records from the Maui Emergency Management Agency. Research program manager Derek Alkonis said Wednesday that they requested incident activity logs and other records from MEMA on multiple occas...

Today's Wall Street Journal  has an article about the current chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) operates behind the scenes.  As many of you know, the NTSB has been amazingly successful at making aviation and all types of travel safer. I would like the proposed Natural Disaster Review Board to be modeled after the NTSB in most ways. 

Investigative Report   © 2023 Mike Smith Enterprises, LLC Update: December 20.... https://twitter.com/katymorganwx/status/1737602283494396379 Fox Weather, Nashville The tornado's length turned out to be nearly 48 miles. Tragically, four people were killed by this storm. The NWS warning of this tornado left a lot to be desired. That story is told below.  --- original posting --- If I was a resident of Tennessee, I would be writing my congressional delegation demanding a congressional  investigation  into the National Weather Service's increasingly serious tornado warning issues -- and, that Congress create a Natural Disaster Review Board modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board. Yesterday, I wrote about the tornado near Sharon , TN Saturday that was on the ground 13 minutes before a tornado warning was issued – even though it was an  obvious  warning situation.    Today, I want to inform you that the fatal tornado that struck Clarksvi...

I'm very pleased to report the local National Weather Service did an outstanding job with the tornado warning for the Chicago suburbs last night. That tornado was of sufficient intensity that people might very well have been killed but for the tornado warning, especially since the tornado occurred in darkness. Unfortunately, effective warnings of powerful tornadoes are not always available these days.  Damaged home in Jay County Indiana Photo: National Weather Service May 21, the  Washington Post’s  Capital Weather Gang (CWG) published an article I had written pertaining to the regression in tornado warning quality since the 2011 Joplin Tornado. The article is  here . I made four primary points:   -         Errors by the National Weather Service (NWS) and local emergency management lead to 161 deaths in Joplin on May 22, 2011. Weather science has never fully examined what went wrong that day and how we can ensure that type of t...

U.S. Coast Guard The Washington Post's  Capital Weather Gang has an insightful story on the NTSB's findings pertaining to the July, 2018, sinking of the duck boat at Table Rock Lake that killed 17. The story more than speaks for itself but I do have a couple of comments to add. 1) The NTSB said Branson Ride the Ducks' (the company that owned the boats, BRTD) operating rules were vague. After 47 years of working with people and businesses to mitigate the effects of extreme weather, I found that if there weren't well-defined, explicit rules, weather warnings are disregarded. That was the case in the sinking. It is absolutely essential the operating rules for weather emergencies match the verbiage in the storm warnings, e.g., "for a tornado warning, stop all operations." If the instructions say, "stop operations for a tornado alert " then nothing will occur except confusion (there is no such thing as a tornado "alert"). Otherwise,...