[RoninLB]

I found the mid Oct article. This is all I have. I don't know of any congressional result.


"Fact and Comment
Steve Forbes, 10.17.05, 12:00 AM ET

Hurricane "Grasping Government"

The prominence that hurricanes Katrina and Rita have given the National Weather Service will prompt this agency to continue its insidious assault on the country's commercial weather industry. The prime mission of the NWS is to give warning of tornadoes, hurricanes and other weather hazards. The service is also supposed to provide basic forecasts to the public, as well as essential marine and aviation forecasts. The private sector has created a variety of commercial weather products that range from specialized forecasts for weather-sensitive businesses, such as resorts and commodities traders, to those consumer-friendly weather maps seen in newspapers and on television.

But a few years ago the NWS decided to compete head-on with such private outfits as AccuWeather, the Weather Channel and WeatherData. At the end of last year the Commerce Department's National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), parent of the NWS, formalized this taxpayer-subsidized attack by repealing its policy of noncompetition and nonduplication with the private sector. This is a classic bureaucratic power grab that should be halted. It's the equivalent of the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics deciding to formally compete with Wall Street firms and other private entities that do economic analyses and research, or of the U.S. Postal Service using government money to drive UPS and FedEx out of business.

Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has proposed legislation that would force the NWS to get back to its basic purpose--producing warnings of tornadoes, tsunamis and the like.

Contrary to NWS propaganda, private-sector weather companies don't simply take the government's data and repackage it. As the head of WeatherData, Mike Smith, puts it, "We create original content because our clients demand it. For instance, we assist Toyota's logistics department in managing their world-famous, just-in-time inventory system around snow and ice storms. We help BNSF Railway prevent accidents by precisely informing them in sufficient time to take precautionary measures where a tornado or flash flood will occur along their right-of-way."

The public gets most of its weather forecasts from commercial providers, including the Weather Channel. Joel Myers, founder of what has become the world's best-known commercial weather service, AccuWeather, pioneered ready-for-air color weather graphics for TV stations and print-ready weather pages for newspapers.

Several years ago Canada's government weather service took a similar course and went into direct competition with the private sector. Once the government achieved a monopoly, the price of its raw data went up--just what you'd expect from a monopolist. To its credit, however, the Canadian government recently has reversed itself. The government service has returned to its core mission of providing raw data, such as warning of hurricanes and tornadoes, and leaves the more specialized work for specific industries and companies to the private sector.

It's not as if the National Weather Service has been a model of efficiency. At least two of its six tsunami-sensing buoys stationed in the Pacific Ocean were out of service on the day the notorious Indian Ocean tsunami erupted last December. The NWS' Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, in fact, was unmanned at the time. Granted, there was little the NWS could have done to prevent the loss of life caused by that wave, but had a similar tsunami erupted farther west, we would not have been fully prepared either.

Another example of the NWS' ineffectiveness took place during the 2004 hurricane season. As Senator Santorum ruefully observed, "As Hurricane Charley hit southern Florida, the United States' most sophisticated research aircraft for collecting data on hurricanes, two P-3 Orions, were nowhere near the eye of the storm. Instead they were studying monsoon effects in Mexico and air pollution in New Hampshire. Had the hurricane-hunter planes studied the path of the storm, NWS could have helped to prevent the upheaval of many Floridians from their homes and assisted the millions of Floridians impacted by the uncertainty of the path of a dangerous and deadly hurricane."

The Santorum bill deserves prompt passage. "