Transcripts

JOHN BIEWEN: Stangeland charges that the National Weather Service was slow in issuing a blizzard warning during Saturday's storm. The Fargo office of the Weather Service began issuing travelers advisories early Saturday morning, warning of blowing snow and poor visibility. But the Weather Service didn't issue a blizzard warning until nearly 6 o'clock.

By that time, planes at the Fargo airport had been grounded for more than two hours due to zero visibility, and area roads were lined with cars stuck in snowdrifts. Herb Munson, head meteorologist with the Fargo Weather Service office, says a blizzard warning wasn't issued earlier because the snowfall was relatively light.

HERB MUNSON: For a true blizzard, we're looking, usually, for moderate to heavy snowfall, along with the high winds that will block all roads and make travel virtually come to a standstill, no matter where you are. And what was happening here was the winds-- if I could show you a bunch of maps, I could show you why here, just in the valley, the winds were about 10 to 20 miles per hour, stronger than anyplace else.

And so it picked up a lot of the snow that was on the ground, and broke the ice crust that was on the snow pack from before, and picked up a lot of the snow and brought it up into the air. And this is what was causing the visibilities right down to zero.

JOHN BIEWEN: Another problem, Munson says, was that the area where the winds were especially strong, and they reached nearly 60 miles per hour in spots, was too narrow for forecasters to spot. But Stangeland says forecasting was the least of the problems. He says Weather Service employees could have issued a blizzard warning much earlier just by looking out the window.

ARLAN STANGELAND: It's one thing to estimate what the velocity of wind is going to be in a storm as the storm is building, but when the storm hits, it's pretty easy to know what the wind velocity is. That storm hit in Grand Forks at 2 o'clock, half an hour after I arrived there. And within five minutes, visibility was less than a half a block in town.

And I just want to find out, are they depending on computers to tell them what things are? Do they have some ludicrous rules that certain things are blizzards and certain things aren't, and there's no flexibility? And I think sometimes, we ought to interject a human element into this thing and just let somebody with some common sense say, hey, this is a blizzard.

JOHN BIEWEN: The Republican Congressman has asked the House Subcommittee on Natural Resources to hold a hearing with National Weather Service officials within a week.

ARLAN STANGELAND: I want the opportunity to testify and also to question the Weather Service so that if there's something lacking, if they're going to claim that we have cut their funds, so they can't do a decent job, then I want to know about it. I want to know where they place their spotters and how their spotters are supposed to report. And what can we do to improve it?

It's not a witch hunt. It's, how do we work with them to improve it? If you just turn your back on this, it could happen again, and maybe we can prevent it from happening again.

JOHN BIEWEN: Congressman Arlan Stangeland. Weather service meteorologist, Herb Munson, meanwhile, says he's not worried about the investigation. He says the Weather Service did all it could. Last summer, President Reagan informally proposed a reorganization of the National Weather Service, in which parts of the Bureau would be sold to the private sector. Stangeland says he's not recommending any such move, at least for now. This is John Biewen reporting.