When Amy Hendricks was hired by the National Weather Service in January, she came stocked with ideas for weather-themed movie nights and community temperature-blanket making workshops. And while cute and crafty, they were also ways to get at something bigger.
“So I had this idea coming out here, reopening up the weather office, I told the guy that was training me that I wanted couches and I wanted a nice seating area because I wanted people to come in and talk about the weather,” Hendricks said.
Hendricks' position as a social scientist stationed in Bethel was newly created. It was designed to learn from Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta communities about what weather information they use and how they’re using it, to help the National Weather Service create more specific and useful reports.
For Hendricks, after pursuing a PhD in climate variability on the Y-K Delta, it was kind of a dream job. She moved to Bethel with her husband, 3-month-old baby, and two dogs in tow. She said that she was excited to call Bethel home.
“Everyone was so sure that the National Weather Service was going to be safe, because it does provide life saving information for protection of life and property,” Hendricks remembered. “And so nobody expected the weather service to get hit as hard.”
Weeks later, at the end of February, Hendricks received a letter announcing that she’d been laid off.
“It was like living in a sea of unknown, living in the dark for weeks,” Hendricks said. “And so when it did come it was like, okay, like, now I know for sure this is a certain thing in my life.”
As of March 19, 23 National Weather Service employees in Alaska have been laid off across departments, according to reporting from Alaska Public Media. Like Hendricks, some terminated probationary workers have been reinstated and put on administrative leave, though that number is not currently known. That’s following a March 13 federal court decision which found the firings had been carried out unlawfully. The reinstatement is temporary, and one the Trump administration has said that it aims to see through to elimination.
Hendricks said that she’s nervous about the future accuracy of the National Weather Service’s forecasts with shrunken resources.
“It's like taking a chainsaw when you really need a scalpel to make these kinds of cuts,” Hendricks said. “Because, yeah, Alaska is a unique place, but none of the needs here are being considered in these federal cuts.”
Hendricks said that she isn’t hopeful the temporary reinstatement will mean she’ll eventually get to go back to work. It’s left her and her family in a kind of limbo and looking for more secure options.
"Both my husband and I are working on finding jobs,” Hendricks explained. “We're just applying to some positions that we see in Bethel. We're happy to do anything, pretty diverse skill sets. I think the biggest thing right now is just getting my 4-month-old baby on some health insurance."
They’ve also needed to find housing in Bethel’s tight rental market – Hendricks and her family were given a month to move out of their National Weather Service provided home. The reinstatement has only reset the clock, giving them another 30 days of housing.
On administrative leave, Hendricks can’t resume her work. Which means it’s also meant the loss of a step in connecting the weather forecast to the community it served.
The National Weather Service once had a fully-staffed station in Bethel, running manual balloon launches in addition to snowpack and climate reports. But over years of budget cuts the station was closed, switching to automated balloons. While the automated system isn’t necessarily less accurate, mechanical issues can require a human to fly out and fix them. Earlier this month, the automated balloon launcher in Bethel malfunctioned, missing seven balloon launches. It left an eight-day gap in weather data readings.
Rick Thoman is a climatologist at the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, but before that he spent over 30 years working for the National Weather Service. He said that these inconsistencies can be detrimental to the weather models for the region over time, even if the daily impacts aren't colossal.
“There are certainly going to be cases where the lack of that information from the weather balloons going into weather models is going to materially affect the quality of those forecasts,” Thoman said.
In February, the National Weather Service announced that it would be indefinitely suspending weather balloon launches in Kotzebue, a cut which Thoman said will be a dark spot in the data that inform forecasts.
Thoman said that these in-person weather stations served more than just a data collecting purpose, they were a dependable bridge between rural communities and the less and less predictable force of weather. The way Thoman describes it, these stations were the utopian opposite of automated: bundled up meteorologists saying "hello" as they measured snowpack levels and answered local calls to the station about the forecast.
“You had a handful of people that were there for a long time, part of the community, knew the ins and outs of the regional weather and were able to interface with the community,” Thoman said. “And that was all lost.”
Though Hendricks said that this job was the long-term vision, she and her family are planning to stay in Bethel regardless of how things pan out and find new ways to keep doing climate work outside of the federal job.
“I moved out here with the intention to be a tool or a resource for the region, and I'm hoping that I can still do that,” Hendricks said.
Since she was initially let go, Hendricks has applied to jobs from property manager to breast feeding consultant. She also launched a climate consulting business called Resilient Y-K. She hopes to use it as a way to work with communities and organizations in the Y-K Delta to prepare for and manage the impacts of climate change.
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