Friday, July 27, 2007
News

07/29/07 NEWS2: Riding out the storm

Riding the storm out Congressional committee investigates mutiny at the National Hurricane Center By Mark Woolsey With the pending reassignment of the director of the National Hurricane C...

National Hurricane Center director Bill Proenza gets into his vehicle as he leaves the center July 6. The director has been under fire since center staff issued a statement in early July calling for his immediate dismissal. CREDIT: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Riding the storm out
Congressional committee investigates mutiny at the National Hurricane Center
By Mark Woolsey

With the pending reassignment of the director of the National Hurricane Center after an unprecedented mutiny, some may have thought the resulting personnel hurricane had blown itself out. But testimony on Capitol Hill paints the opposite picture. Now the tempest may accelerate to a Category 5, swirling around officials of the National Weather Service and parent agency the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

On July 19, Congressman Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who chairs the Investigations and Oversight subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology, convened a hearing on the case of Bill Proenza, whose six-month tenure as NHC head was marked, in some minds, by staff dissatisfaction over his maverick statements on such issues as the deterioration of QuikSCAT, a weather-monitoring satellite he claimed was needed for accurate tropical storm prediction. Staffers say his statements were a distraction from their jobs.

But some are wondering if the same six months weren’t marked by a concerted campaign to oust and discredit Proenza—a campaign that might have originated among NOAA’s top power-brokers in Washington.

TROUBLING DISCLOSURES

Proenza has lobbied for replacing the worn-out QuikSCAT satellite, which would cost $400 million, and has taken his concerns to the media. In a story in June, the Associated Press wrote that he was “one of the loudest voices” warning that not replacing QuikSCAT would endanger lives.

That same month, according to Congressional minutes, Mary Glacken, the director of the National Weather Service, sent Proenza a scathing memorandum instructing him to stop talking to the press about QuikSCAT without getting an official consensus about what he should say. The memorandum stated that Proenza’s “recent statements … may have caused some unnecessary confusion about NOAA's ability to accurately predict tropical storms … taking valuable time away from your [Proenza’s] public role as the NOAA official responsible for instilling confidence in our tropical storm predictions.”

The BBC reported last week that the weather community is divided on the usefulness of QuikSCAT. As hurricanes approach land, the NHC relies more on reconnaissance planes and radar. Some NHC officials have said their ability to accurately forecast hurricanes making landfall in the Atlantic and Caribbean will not be compromised when QuickSCAT fails. However, the satellite, which helps detect changes in wind speed and direction that lead to the formation of hurricanes, is more important for tracking storms far offshore in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific, where planes don't fly.

Conrad Lautenbacher, a retired U.S. Navy vice admiral and an administrator at NOAA, sent an assessment team to Proenza’s office on July 2. Proenza told the Congressional committee he received a call from Lautenbacher informing him the team had been dispatched; they arrived at his office while the call was still in progress.

Does Proenza, who has been placed on administrative leave, think he was railroaded because he spoke out about QuikSCAT and against downsizing thoughout the weather service?

“I really don’t have what I would consider a comfortable assessment to give you at this point,” he tells The Sunday Paper. “Clearly they [senior management] were not happy with my disclosures.”

The House committee has subpoenaed hundreds of pages of paperwork, and Alisha Prather, committee communications chief, says the probe is far from over. The committee is considering two troubling questions. The first: Was Proenza targeted because, among other things, he was the only top level NHC manager to oppose a plan to downsize the agency—a plan that would have closed forecast offices? And, perhaps more importantly: Will the tumult affect the center’s forecasting ability as the heart of the hurricane season approaches?

“COMPLETE CONFIDENCE”

On that second score, Georgia officials say they’re in good hands.

On the front line of a potential Georgia landfall, Phillip Webber of the Chatham (County) Emergency Management Agency in Savannah says flatly, “I have 100 percent” confidence in the NHC’s forecasters.

“I know most of them and have complete confidence in their program, and their technology and their process,” he says. “They are consummate professionals.”

Buzz Weiss, spokesman for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, also feels that the internal storms at the NHC won’t affect his office’s confidence in the center.

In fact, the impact may turn out to be positive, rather than negative, among the troops, says Dr. Luis Martins, an associate professor of management at Georgia Tech
and frequent business consultant on executive change in the workplace.

It’s unusual, he says, to see such an open mutiny in a federal agency, but notes that Proenza was an outsider, having come from the National Weather Service’s Southern Region headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was director. Martins says the outcome may energize the “mutineers.”

“A WELL-RESPECTED GUY”

That doesn’t square with the assessment of such veteran NWS employees as Tampa-based forecaster Daniel Sobien, who doubles as the head of the NWS Employees Association, the forecasters’ collective bargaining group.

“He is one of the few managers in the weather service who actually belonged to our union and has been around for a long time and is a well-liked and well-respected guy,” Sobien says. “So there’s a lot of irony in this situation.”

Proenza himself points to his tenure at the National Weather Service as proof that he can get along with people. From 1998 to 2006, he says he earned an “outstanding” ranking
as a senior executive each year. He also says he’s not going to resign.

When asked about the hurricane season, now in full swing with some accelerated activity predicted, the exiled director still talks as though he’s at the helm.

“I feel that everyone, all of us, will deliver our mission always, and deliver it well,” he says. “We want to save lives. There is no higher calling.” SP

Freelance writer Mark Woolsey is a radio broadcaster for the Weather Channel in Peachtree City.