Name: Victor Wiggert

Q: Where in NOAA do you work now?
A: In Miami, for the Hurricane Research Division of AOML, but at the National Hurricane Center.

Q: Looking back, what events stand out as the most memorable during your time with NOAA?
A: I was working for ESSA one day; then the next day it became NOAA. At the Experimental Meteorology Branch, in Miami Florida.

Q: Looking back, what events stand out as the most memorable during your time with NOAA?
Hurricane ANDREW, August 24, 1992: a Category 4 [and almost a 5] at landfall. I [and many others] experienced a Defining Moment in Life, at home and at work. ANDREW's maximum storm surge was 16.9 feet above National Geodetic Vertical Datum, in a very small area where its eyewall [and maximum winds] crossed the shoreline. The WSR-57 radar was torn from the roof of the building that housed NHC; that ended the 57's 33 year career. Yet ANDREW was such a compact and fast moving storm that it did not strongly affect important places, like Miami Beach, so it was days before the media -- and, apparently, the nation and the White House -- actually became aware of the extent of this catastrophe's destruction and human suffering and the enormous amount of help we needed in south Dade County. The NOAA Volunteer Assistance program has my undying gratitude. A NOAA station wagon appeared in my driveway, and these wonderful people asked if my family and I were all right, and then lent me a portable motor generator. [These memories cause my eyes once again to flood with tears.] This generator supplied us, in daytime, with electric power sufficient to run the refrigerator, wash machine and a fan -- and so to live far more comfortably than we might otherwise have done. We continued to cook on our camp stove. Overnight we did not run the generator because, with all the windows open [no A/C], it was quieter that way. Three weeks elapsed before Florida Power & Light got the power poles up and the lines reactivated. The portable generator was retrieved and, I believe, sent off to help NOAA folks affected in Hawaii by hurricane INIKI.

Q: From your point of view, what have been the most significant changes NOAA has experienced during the past 30 years?
A:  I seem to see a decline in funding support for the research sector in NOAA. Indeed, public funding for other - than - weather data gathering by NOAA seems to be barely staying level, when inflation and COLA's are included. Privatization seems to me a splendid way for the taxpayer to pay a second time for that which he's already paid for; it is not a bargain. Yet NOAA can and should be the source of much of the environmental research that the Nation needs. On a positive note, the manifold increase in speed and capacity of computers for acquiring and dispersing data -- especially from those incredible weather satellites, from computerized numerical forecast models and from radars -- is nothing short of miraculous. These technological improvements have helped every citizen / taxpayer, and their per capita cost a mere pittance. A huge bargain, as is NOAA.

This page updated on: Monday, 07-Jan-2002 21:42:02 GMT
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