🛟Public safety

five warning systems live at once, and the distance between the warning and the water is different in every one

Five systems, five different lead times, and that is the whole job today. In eastern Japan the lead time is spent: a level-five landslide warning on the northern Izu chain and level four across Kanto sit on soil that has taken 426.5 mm in a day on Izu Oshima, so the work has collapsed to evacuation timing and slope watch tonight. In southern Brazil a red great-danger alert over about 699 municipalities runs all day across three states at once — a staffing problem before it is a weather problem, because the crews staged for hail in Parana cannot also be standing by for flooded arterials in Porto Alegre. In the American interior 32 flood warnings are already out on saturated ground, which is a county-road decision made before a driver finds the crossing. In north-east Bangladesh four rivers are above danger with the risk spreading to three more districts within 72 hours — the one place on this board where the lead time is still long enough to move people rather than rescue them. And off south-west Mexico the call has to be made while the storm is still a 40-mph tropical storm with a Category-4 forecast: the earliest and the hardest of the five. (Handled with care.)

carried on 41 of the last 67 editions — since Jul 18, the 10 most recent shown.