Emergency managers in southeast Georgia are facing this hurricane season with a pared-down staff at the Jacksonville National Weather Service office. Two leadership positions at that office, which serves 14 Georgia counties, including Camden and Glynn, remain unfilled six months after long-time employees retired.
Both Al Sandrik, the warning coordination meteorologist, and Peter Wolf, the science and operations officer, retired in December. They are two of the 36 vacancies in these positions across the agency’s 122 local offices nationwide, according to a NOAA list of regional and field leadership.
The loss of key employees like these came into sharp focus after the deadly flash floods in Texas earlier this month. The NWS office serving hard-hit Kerr County has the same two leadership vacancies as Jacksonville. As of Tuesday the death toll in the July 4 Hill Country disaster had risen to 133, with 101 people still missing.
A NOAA spokeswoman said the bulk of the openings nationwide are the result of voluntary early retirement offered by DOGE earlier this year. NOAA is now taking steps to fill those positions.
“We have started with temporary duty assignments, so that means that people can say, ‘Hey, sure, I’ll help out at this other office for 60 days, 90 days, 120 days,” NOAA spokeswoman Erica Grow Cei told The Current on Friday. “We also are in the process of conducting a series of reassignment opportunity notices. What that is, is where there are openings at a weather forecast office. Those that have the greatest operational need were advertised internally throughout all of NOAA.”
NOAA will begin hiring for its vacant leadership positions soon.
“The next step is that we were granted an exception to the Department of Commerce-wide hiring freeze, and those mission critical field positions are going to be posted within the coming weeks,” Grow Cei said.
The National Weather Service office in Charleston serves 12 counties in Georgia, including the coastal counties of Chatham, Bryan, Liberty and McIntosh. That office has no leadership vacancies and its long-time warning coordination meteorologist, Ron Morales, remains in place.
It’s the warning coordination meteorologist in particular who is important to emergency managers. “This position is fully responsible for planning, coordinating, and carrying out areawide public awareness programs designed to educate the public to ensure the mitigation of death, injury, and property damage or loss caused by severe natural hydrometeorological events,” the National Weather Service states on its web site.
Sandrik, who now works in the private sector for AtkinsRealis Engineering, said his retirement from NOAA was not political.
“The one thing I will tell you is my decision to retire so it had nothing to do with DOGE, it had nothing to do with who became president,” he said. “I stayed three years longer than I had intended.”
Sandrik declined to comment on the importance of his former role or the possible consequences of it remaining unfilled as hurricane season unfolds.
But emergency managers in Glynn and Camden, who worked closely with Sandrik for years, are acutely aware of what the vacancy in his position could mean.
“Having a meteorologist in his position with his insight and institutional knowledge is critical when our decisionmaking process could affect hundreds of thousands of people and millions of dollars daily, not just government supplies, but private industry as well,” said Brunswick Emergency Management Agency Coordinator Alec Eaton. “Any gap created from the loss of their positions, it challenges us quite substantially.”
Camden County Emergency Management Director Chuck White finds consolation in the fact that Sandrik, who had worked for NWS for 39 years, and who he called a “premier tropical forecaster” had built a capable team in Jacksonville.
“The team has a bench, and that bench is very competent people, and Al was always in the process of making sure that the other forecasters were going to be as up to speed as he was,” he said. “I am completely confident that the team that is in place of the National Weather Service Jacksonville will not miss a beat.”
Glynn County Emergency Manager Andrew Leanza also praised the staff that remains at the Jacksonville NWS office. “You still have some rock stars that are there,” he said.
They stay in touch with daily briefings as well as spot weather reports. But he worries that tropical weather could stretch the staff’s ability to respond. “I just don’t know how much they’re stressed,” he said.
The Jacksonville office referred The Current to NWS spokeswoman Grow Cei to discuss staffing. The Georgia Emergency Management Agency did not respond to a request for comment.
Brunswick has tried to fill gaps with technology, including the installation of a weather station run by the for-profit Weatherstem, Eaton said, though that installation was complete before Sandrik retired.
Chuck Watson, a Savannah-based hazards researcher and founder of Enki Research, said it’s hard to get an honest assessment of troubles at the National Weather Service, in part because even private weather companies rely heavily on the information it collects.
“Even though there’s known problems with the weather service, criticizing the weather service, you risk it being used as leverage to further damage the weather service,” Watson said. “And, of course, anybody that’s currently working for NOAA, they can’t comment, right?”
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