EDHS Contemporary World Affairs

Another question - in this era where all government spending is threatened by our rising debt, increasing number of entitlement payouts, and general disdain for paying taxes, and science and infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) funding is particularly precarious, do you think disasters like these will galvanize Americans to demand, or at least not object to, increased funding for science and infrastructure, or do you think people will continue to just take their chances with what we already have and hope that they themselves are not daily driving over one of the 25% of bridges that are presently considered substandard?

Another excerpt: "In sounding the alarm on Monday, Rick Smith relied on a flood of signals unimaginable when President Ulysses Grant founded the Weather Service in 1870. The U.S. has up to 30 satellites at any given moment that spend at least part of their time gazing down on weather patterns. It has 122 Doppler radar systems scattered across the country to look up from the ground. There are 114 climate-data centers to monitor every region of the country. And the computers that process this information were recently upgraded to increase their data-crunching power thirtyfold, at a cost to taxpayers of $25 million.

But this weather-forecasting infrastructure is much more wobbly than it seems, and without attention the whole thing could start to come undone. Last October, in the run-up to Hurricane Sandy, one of the feds' two vital weather satellites--known as GOES-East--went briefly off-line, effectively blinding the nation's forecasters when they needed eyes the most. A patch was rigged using a backup satellite and some data from European governments. It happened again two days after the Moore disaster: GOES-East went on the blink. With GOES-West and other U.S. weather satellites also nearing the end of their lifespan, these failures offer a harrowing glimpse of the price we'll pay if we don't invest in the next generation of weather-watching technology."