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- [00:00]
Emily Gracie
On July 4, as communities across America celebrated the national holiday, the Texas Hill country faced an unimaginable tragedy. Flash flooding claimed lives and forever changed families. The entire nation felt this blow, not just because of the loss, but because it reminded us how vulnerable we all are to the power of water and.
- [00:22]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Weather, the scale of the force of the atmosphere. It's beyond most people's comprehending. I don't think we really appreciate just how big.
- [00:31]
Emily Gracie
In the aftermath, a nation grappled with grief and anger, searching for someone to blame, somewhere to direct the helplessness.
- [00:39]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
When children are involved, it just always, always hurts so much more.
- [00:45]
Emily Gracie
Today, we're not here to relive the tragedy. We're here to understand how we move forward, how we learn, how we heal, both as individuals and communities that must face the reality of extreme weather.
- [00:57]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Every major renaissance of our field, every major technological development and investment, every major institution that's ever been built, they've all been built on the back of some kind of disaster.
- [01:10]
Emily Gracie
The numbers tell part of the story, but they don't tell us how to prevent this from happening again. They don't tell us how to build a better warning system, stronger communities or more resilient responses to extreme weather.
- [01:22]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Flooding is just. It's a complicated thing. We don't observe the water on the landscape very well. It's really important for us to think about those things as we think about our alerting systems and what it takes to make them effective.
- [01:37]
Emily Gracie
Today we're going off the radar with Dr. Kim Kloko McLean to focus on what's next.
- [01:43]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
It's been a hard, hard year for the weather enterprise. It's been a hard, hard year for the weather service in particular. I think we're about to see it get put back together.
- [01:51]
Emily Gracie
How do we turn tragedy into understanding? How do we transform loss into action? And how do we help communities heal while building a better future?
- [02:02]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
I think it's going to be really painful to go through, but we have to walk through the really painful things to make sure that we learn and that it doesn't happen again.
- [02:17]
Emily Gracie
I'm meteorologist Emily Gracey, and you're listening to off the Radar, a production of the National Weather Desk. On the show, we dig deep into topics about weather, climate, the ocean, space, and much more. Our goal is to help you better understand the weather and to love it as much as we do.
- [02:36]
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- [03:04]
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- [03:09]
Podcast Host/Producer
8 now boarding Premier Altitude Elite club members.
- [03:12]
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- [03:17]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Mid tier Altitude Elite feel free to.
- [03:19]
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- [03:25]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Now boarding groups one through seven. So close.
- [03:28]
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- [03:35]
Emily Gracie
In select markets it's been two weeks since the deadly flash flood disaster in Texas. I want to take a moment and pay our respects to the victims and their families. Our parent company, Sinclair Broadcast Group, has partnered with the Salvation army to help. The funds raised have provided critical emergency assistance, including mobile feeding units, meals, hydration shelter, cleanup kits, hygiene kits and emotional care to survivors and first responders. The effort is ongoing. You can still help by going to sinclaircares.com Today's episode is difficult, but it's also hopeful. We're talking about the Texas flooding tragedy, but this isn't just another weather story. This is about the invisible fractures and how we prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters. It's about the gap between what science knows and what communities experience. And it's also about finding hope in the aftermath of heartbreak. My guest today is Dr. Kim Kloko McLean from NOAA. She's a meteorologist and a social scientist who studies how people respond to weather warnings. She's also a mother who understands that behind every weather forecast is a human story. Kim has spent her career at the intersection of science and society, trying to bridge the gap between what meteorologists know and what communities need. In our conversation, Kim explains what made this flooding so deadly, why flash flood warnings are more complicated than other types of weather warnings, and what's broken in how we study disasters after they happen. She addresses some of the conspiracy theories and misinformation that inevitably surface after disasters. She also offers something crucial. Hope. Hope for better science, better communication and better ways to heal after these devastating events. You may leave this episode feeling a sense of relief, like walking out of a therapy session. I sure did I consider Kim a friend who has served as a therapist for me before. I think many people in Kim's life.
- [05:45]
Podcast Host/Producer
Must feel that way.
- [05:46]
Emily Gracie
It's a heavy discussion, but it's also an important one because understanding what went wrong is the first step toward making sure it doesn't happen again.
- [05:59]
Podcast Host/Producer
Welcome to the show, Kim. So glad to have you on today. You're such a wealth of information given kind of weather in your background. But then also this social science which has become, and maybe it's always been so important and you know that better than me, but I feel like in recent years is really people have gotten an understanding of like that last mile, as Neil Jacobs said yesterday in this confirmation hearing is so important to get the message out there. So let's talk all about the importance of social science. But I, I want to get a little background on YouTube because you are Dr. Kim Clo MacLean and your PhD though, you've kind of taken on this social scientist role. But your background's in weather too, right?
- [06:42]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
It is. I have a split background. For many years I didn't know what direction I was going to go with things, but I loved meteorology and I loved behavioral science, the science of decision making so much. I just kind of studied both at the same time. It all came together in grad school where I started to study things like the economic impacts of the mesonet, economic impacts, effects of tornadoes on communities and eventually looked at things like warning systems. How do people understand them, respond to them and how can we evolve them.
- [07:15]
Podcast Host/Producer
And warning systems so important to what we're talking about today because there is a lot of buzz right now going on of, you know, people, there's a couple of different conspiracy theories, but one of them out there right now, people talking about the warning and the heads up when it came to the flash flooding in Texas recently. But I want to better understand flash floods first because you, I know you've seen, spent a lot of time studying tornadoes, but can we talk about flash flooding and just like the impact of that and the power of that?
- [07:45]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Absolutely. I think this is an, honestly, it's an understudied problem. There's probably been more research done in the social sciences applied to things like warning systems for severe weather than for flooding, especially in this country. Interestingly, there's been more in Europe I've seen than come out of our own domestic system. And the reality is responding to a flood is just an order of magnitude more complicated than responding to a tornado. Think about it. You have to know in the, you know, the tornado situation, you're, you're staying where you are. The goal is to just hunker down for, for a lot of people, maybe find a stronger shelter. But it's not different in any given case. Like, there's just one kind of thing you should be doing, and you're watching the storm come at you, and it's just this one point of a tornado that you're looking for in a flood. You're not just looking at one point of a thing coming at you. You have to kind of know, all right, what elevation am I? And what does that mean for should I stay here or should I think about evacuating? Where is the water now? Where is it going? Those are often very complicated problems. So I was on the weather service service assessment team for Hurricane Harvey. And in that case, there was water across the whole landscape. And one of the challenges people faced was figuring out, okay, I see water rising over here. Can I, can I leave? Can I go somewhere else to escape this, or will I just hit more water? And for a lot of people, they did just hit more water. We lost a lot of people in cars trying to evacuate flooding from one area going to another. I think in this case, I heard some city officials talking about we live in a complex watershed that has a bunch of little tributaries. There's the main river, but there's all these other things. And we had some anxiety about telling people to just flee in a car. There are so many deaths in this country every year from people driving into flooded roadways. So one of our enemies in this case was flooding is just, it's a complicated thing. We don't observe the water on the landscape very well and we don't observe where it's going. It's really important for us to think about those things as we think about our alerting systems and what it takes to make them effective.
- [10:08]
Podcast Host/Producer
Okay, have you been able to come up with any answers to that? Because it sounds really hopeless.
- [10:13]
Emily Gracie
Like, what do you do?
- [10:15]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
You know, it's, it's, it is interesting. I don't want people to feel hopeless in the face of a big challenge. We just need to work on it. So, so there's a couple of big things that are coming along to help us. One is flood inundation mapping in the national water model. So this is something that's designed to map water across the whole land surface and in a short term forecast sense, enable a decision maker and, you know, especially local communities that are making decisions about do we close low water crossings? If we do want People to evacuate, where are routes going to be available? It would enable things like short term evacuation decision making that we just really. You can't even touch now. And so there's a technology piece to it that's useful in the case of this flooding, it's a very particular decision situation. When you're along a river and when you're in a canyon and the water is traceable, the glut of water is traceable down the river. Something that I noticed when I went back and looked at the river gauge data is you start to see in Hunt, the community of Hunt, you see the water start to rise at 250 and it's not until after 5 o' clock that the water starts to rise. Down in Kerrville, where so many of the camps that were really badly affected are, and it took a lot of time for the water to continue its rise up. A lot of time in a. An evacuation decision making sense for the water to rise. If there had been a detection system along the river that automated just sort of has a gauge and once water reaches past a certain height or a certain volume, then it automatically sends a signal downstream and has maybe a siren system it's attached to and goes off, then that simplifies the decision problem for people somewhat. You know, if the community knows the siren means there's water going down the river and it's really bad, it's going to flood this particular area right along the river, then you've simplified it too. There actually is a flood. So many flash flood warnings. We know, like we're not going to actually see the water and we don't know where it is and we don't know what to do about it. This would simplify those dimensions dramatically. We know it's the river, we know it's here, we know it's immediate. And I think that that has so much promise. I'm so glad that they're thinking about those systems there. They have a lot of potential value.
- [12:49]
Podcast Host/Producer
Are those systems in place anywhere else?
- [12:52]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
There are some communities in Texas even that have started to adopt them after they had their own lethal floods. In the Hill country under similar kinds of circumstances. There are globally some systems in place like this. A lot of them are run not just automated detection of floodwater, but a lot of them are someone making a decision. But there are sirens in communities for floods. I think here in Oklahoma, in Tulsa, it's a city that is really famous for flooding and for finding ways to mitigate flood risk. It's actually sort of known in land Use circles as, oh, this is a gold star city for finding ways to live around and mitigate flood. Um, and they. They have sirens, a siren system that has one tone for tornadoes and another tone for river flooding. And that has been really successful. We can do this something.
- [13:48]
Podcast Host/Producer
And I live on the CoastLine in Charleston, South Carolina, and, you know, a lot of the hurricane deaths, a lot of the rip current deaths are from people who don't live here. Were there a lot of visitors? It sounded like there were a lot of people camping, a lot of people on vacation. So I'm curious, how do you educate people from out of town when they're entering an area where it's a different type of weather hazard?
- [14:10]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Oh, that's one of the biggest questions of this. Everyone in those campgrounds, they're what we call situationally vulnerable. They're vulnerable by virtue of their circumstances. And there were camps where people literally had means of receiving warnings that were taken away. And it sort of becomes a question of who should then be responsible. Should there at least be thought given to, okay, we need to have a system where there's someone who's designated who's responsible. What information are they for sure getting? Do they have constant access to it? What are the procedures here? This is a. It's not just individuals left to make decisions on their own. In an ideal situation, we have organizations, sets of organizations that are managing all of those assets, managing the campgrounds, managing the cabin systems, the trailer parks, all of that. If you have a set of processes that happen at the city level, at the county level, where everyone comes together around this problem and says, okay, we're going to work together as a set of organizations who all manage stuff on the river. And if we're going to have a system, and that is where there had been an informal one. We're learning this in interviews as survivors are speaking. We're learning that there had been kind of a. Oh, you know, upstream communities, maybe closer to Hunt. If they saw water going up, they would call people in Kerrville and say, hey, by the way, water's coming up. You might want to get people away from the river. That works In, I guess, 90% of circumstances, and it just doesn't. When it's the middle of the night, those people aren't all awake. Or I. I'm horrified to think that it might be the case that people in Hunt who typically do communicate downstream, they were inundated so quickly, they were overwhelmed, and they were not able to fulfill that function of the informal warning system doing what it typically does, and there just need to be redundancies. And if you get together as a community and think that through and have a plan that it's not everybody fending for themselves, then, then it is more likely that those people who are from out of town are protected by your planning, your infrastructure. And we're not just leaving it to people who don't know a thing about where they are. They're in rural hills. You know, it's. It's hard to even have a sense of direction in places like that. And then that situational vulnerability that they are experiencing is taken care of by that organizational system holding them.
- [16:54]
Podcast Host/Producer
Gotcha. It seems to me that a game changer in recent years has been our phones all going off when something dangerous is happening. Has that been a game changer in saving lives or are we becoming too dependent on that? Is it sometimes a bad thing?
- [17:12]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
It's an interesting question. It's complex. So we are starting to see in some, some data that's routinely taken over time, so longitudinal data, we're able to see that a larger share of people over time are now getting their notifications about warnings from wea. And the landscape of the whole landscape of communication is shifting. In our world at large, it's a little bit less, you know, linear television. You know, this live in this world. We're, we're transitioning from a, you know, a lot of people get information from TV to, well, it's TV and it's these social media channels. It's all the kinds of stuff attached to your phone, not just your television. So there's a lot of opportunity in it. We can geotarget you. That's one of the really great things about wea.
- [18:00]
Podcast Host/Producer
Wireless emergency alerts.
- [18:02]
Emily Gracie
For those who don't know what WEA.
- [18:03]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Is, wireless emergency alerts. It also is something where there have been some noted challenges because all kinds of alerts go out through that. Amber alerts, tornado warnings, flood warnings. Years ago, the weather service, they were receiving a lot of feedback that people were getting too many flood warnings. So they introduced tiers of warnings so that only the highest end tiers are what are going out to phones. But for all the reasons I noted earlier, it's not getting us the whole last mile. I think it's helpful overall, I really do. And I think our efforts to try to hone it in to the most significant cases make the noise as, you know, low as we can, but we need to couple that with more things. We need to couple that with. Or if you're in a river, you Know, Riverine area. And you're putting a lot of people in camps having in place notification systems, having, you know, management processes. People who are watching for this specifically and are managing those groups of people and guiding the decisions that they're making. It's not with wea. I think we live in a world where we believe just getting individuals a warning is enough. As long as we can just influence the individual, they can all just go make good choices. But we function as collectives and we need to lean on that a little bit more than we have, I think.
- [19:31]
Podcast Host/Producer
Very good point. Do you think NOAA weather radios are gonna have a comeback?
- [19:35]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Oh boy. I think that Texas is about to see a lot of weather radio sales after the governor, he really had a come to Jesus moment with people asking, do you have this? It is a struggle to hear from local officials who claim to not have received warnings. That is, that is sadly revealing in not really great ways. And whether radio could have solved, could have solved some of that at least getting them woken up to start a process of looking, looking at things and seeing if there's something they should be doing.
- [20:10]
Podcast Host/Producer
Something that I've seen come out of this, and I mean we're kind of even doing it now is like a lot of finger pointing. And I noticed that kind of coming out of every disaster, right? Like what went wrong? Who's to blame? Is that a natural human instinct to.
- [20:26]
Emily Gracie
Do that, to find something to blame.
- [20:27]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
In a tragedy like this from a 30,000 foot level? I think it's something that has helped humanity to survive. I mean, we always are looking out for each other and seeing, okay, what did someone try over there? Did they eat that plant and die? Did they? You know, like we, we develop these causal chains in our minds and that's how evolutionarily we've been able to survive on this very volatile planet. So I don't fault people for that instinct. I think it's a very common instinct. I think where I come in on disasters like this is that there are so many complex factors that often come into play that the real story isn't so simple as here's a scapegoat, here's just a simple switch to flip and everything will be made better. This is one of the reasons why I think we need to have something like an NTSB for disasters. We need to have something that looks across these multiple levels of. There's local decision making that is so important to this process. There's a saying in my science, all disasters are local. So that means all the decisions made about land use, all the decisions made about, you know, dissemination infrastructure, about evacuation notices, about everything that happens after we push a button and issue a warning. What society does, that's all local decision making and all local vulnerability and exposure. We have to understand those layers. We can't just look at the warning and say, well, you know, do we need to change the words? Do we need to, you know, like, do we give people enough lead time? Like, is just more time always better that looks at things in such an isolated box. The context of the situations people are in are just as important, and we don't control most of those factors in the weather world. If we want to improve, we can't just be meteorologists over here, you know, wringing our hands, saying, oh, but if we just had the perfect warning, you would do the right thing. We've got to couple it with, hey, maybe there need to be some adjustments in how, how our, our, our communities, especially campgrounds, maybe in this case think about, systematically think about flooding. That that is something that an integrated NTSB like assessment would be so great at doing, that we as individuals just aren't well situated to, to do that level of analysis on our own.
- [22:53]
Podcast Host/Producer
You mentioned that you were on a Hurricane Harvey task force is.
- [22:56]
Emily Gracie
So what. What kind of system do we have.
- [22:58]
Podcast Host/Producer
In place now to look at natural disasters?
- [23:00]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
That's a great question for, For a number of years, the National Weather Service has run what it calls service assessments. So that's one layer of things that go on. It's an internal assessment of, okay, a disaster happened and it meets one of at least four different criteria. It's something that causes a lot of public outcry or attention, high fatalities, something notably was wrong, you know, in the meteorological infrastructure, like something was broken that we think really needs to be fixed, you know, those kinds of things. And we don't do service assessments, though, for every single storm that might meet those criteria. Part of this is budget, not necessarily a lot of funding allocated to these things. One of the real challenges with service assessment is just because a disaster has happened, that doesn't mean we did anything wrong, and it doesn't mean there's something obvious out there for us to fix. It also doesn't have teeth in the sense of there's no regulations. If there's findings in these reports that someone has to go and implement those findings. Recommendations. A lot of these things sit on a shelf. There have been recommendations made to do stuff, you know, for years that just keep getting repeated and nothing ever changes. So there's that's one layer of what does happen and one of the known disadvantages of the way that it's done. Another places where they have jurisdictional authority, they do reviews. So nist, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, they have a set of legal capabilities to issue like requests for information and subpoena authority where there's building issues because there's different regulations around building practices and building codes. So there's at least some legal basis there to say we're going to go in and evaluate. Did you guys build something to code? Because we, you know, there was a disaster. We think it's related to, you know, a structural problem and we can go in and evaluate that. So there's a little piece that NIST owns over there and you see this all over the place. Like NIST owns the buildings piece, we own the forecast piece. Local jurisdictions. After Harvey, there were county reports, the Army Corps of Engineers did a report because they're the ones who manage the waterways, right? They're the ones who manage the dams. And we're making, you know, things like assessments of releases of water and everything else that ultimately affected inundation and populations in harm's way. And nothing was ever integrated across like these findings. These little individual reports just go to the ether and there's no cross learning. This is why we need to evolve this system. It's frustrating. As someone who works in disaster sciences, there's just no way to get the political momentum that's needed to change the way things are. When we're fritting away all of our resources individually, we'll be more powerful together.
- [26:13]
Podcast Host/Producer
One of those perhaps wasted resources is people addressing cloud seeding. Can you explain cloud seeding, how it's used and how it's not used?
- [26:27]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
This is one of those times where people like to play the blame game and stuff. I don't fault people for googling and seeing, oh, cloud seeding. You guys are able to manipulate the environment some way and then they don't know what to do with that. So I think it's really important for us to put out messaging that's digestible about, all right, what really is that and what is it good for? But what are its limits? And how can we understand a disaster like this? Could, could humans have been behind it or not? But the idea is you already have like a cloud ongoing or you have an environment that could support clouds, but maybe you don't have enough cloud condensation nuclei. Like it's much easier for water to form droplets around little dust particles that it just Spontaneously in nothingness say, I'm going, there's a lot of humidity here, so I'm just going to voom, make a droplet. It's much, much easier for the atmosphere to rain out the water that it has in it if you have little seeds, essentially little seeds planted. So you can think at the simplest level of cloud seeding is just that we're planting little seeds so that water droplets can form. What we are able to do out of that is either take something that's already a tiny cloud and just try to give it some oomph enough to make it rain. And when I say tiny cloud, I'm talking about the scale of rain that we might be able to get out of. It is like a couple farm fields. This is typically used in agriculture to try to help, you know, like we have extended drought in Texas. There was a cloud seeding mission a couple days before this event because they were an extended drought and they were doing these cloud seeding efforts to try to get a little bit of rain just to feed, you know, crops. But even that, it's, it's, it's, it's something that's sort of a, almost an act of desperation. And it's not something where you're getting big scale rain. You're getting, you're getting just bare minimum, we're trying to save, save something rain that's like an easy bake oven. I think a lot of us tried to cook stuff in easy bake ovens growing up, especially us millennials and Gen X millennial crossover generation. And we all know that, yeah, you could maybe make something did take some time. It was very small, very humble. It was not going to get you like a wedding cake. It was going to get you a little bitty tiny cake. And after a very painful, long process, that is what cloud seeding is like. And so the power of the systems that came in just naturally, the power of all the remnant moisture coming up, the moisture plume and all the forcing from the remnant tropical system that came up, I compared it to the energy versus a 60 watt light bulb. Like that is the energy of multiple nuclear bombs being released. Lots and lots of nuclear bombs worth of energy. There's just the scale of the force of the atmosphere. It's beyond most people's comprehending. I don't think we really appreciate just how big it is. And that is very fundamentally different from what we're able to manipulate or control.
- [29:33]
Podcast Host/Producer
But I understand the need to blame this on something. I mean, even if that's ridiculous, there's this, like, lack of control in a world that we seemingly control so much of right now. And, you know, you're a mother, I'm a mother, and I think this one hit particularly hard. And I'm wondering if you have any insight into why we're feeling this disaster perhaps more than others, or maybe it is some other thing. Maybe it is because so many children were involved.
- [30:04]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
No, I. I think the. When children are involved, it just always, always hurts so much more. There's something that, you know, each disaster can have a different profile of the kind of attention that it raises. And some of the features of disasters that make people really uncomfortable are things that seem uncontrollable, you know, beyond the state of the science, or when they affect something that is very close to our hearts. And that. That is certainly the case with the children. That's just we. We all. You know, it's a. So many of us have been to camp and know what it's like to be there, know the wonderment and joy and the innocence of children who are there. And it's very hard. It's been very hard for me, personally and professionally as a mother of children who are that age. You know, I look at that and I think, what could I do so that my own children would survive this? Would my children have survived this? Would I have even known? Would I, you know, could I have been just like those parents? And it's that sense of social nearness that, you know, that identifiability that makes this hard for everyone. And there's an extra layer, I think, for those of us in this field, because we feel like we should be able to change this. Like, it's on our shoulders to change it. And so we get. We spin in circles, you know, even more than other people. Everyone, I think, is trying to figure out how to. How do we make this better? We all want to have that sense of controllability, and we feel the burden of, oh, it is. It's our responsibility. I think that this one is going to have huge, lasting impacts. You mentioned Neil Jacobs and his confirmation hearing that happened yesterday. I listened to it. And Ted Cruz, he's. He just happens to be the chair of the committee that was running that. That hearing and his opening statements. I almost cried, and I think everyone almost did. And I've never seen a confirmation hearing that had that tenor before that. It was just sadness, but also mutual respect. And we're gonna do something to get through this together. And I think a consequence of all the public attention is going to Be. It's been a hard, hard year for the weather enterprise. It's been a hard, hard year for the weather service in particular. I think we're about to see it get put back together because these disasters are nonpartisan. They happen to everyone, and they happened to children at a camp in Texas. And we all feel it, and we all recognize it's our responsibility to do everything we can to empower anyone who's able to make a difference to do so. Yeah.
- [32:56]
Podcast Host/Producer
You know, I interviewed Neil last summer when we were kind of Talking about Project 2025, what's to come for NOAA and the National Weather Service. And one thing he mentioned over and over again was that he thought the general public really didn't understand the nonpartisan support. Support for weather and for ocean and for climate. And, you know, there's so much noise. Right. Going on all the time that I didn't really believe it either until yesterday. And I was watching the hearing, and you're absolutely right. Like, it was the first time in.
- [33:30]
Emily Gracie
A week that I felt a little hopeful.
- [33:32]
Podcast Host/Producer
I was like, there is bipartisan support for all of these things because the.
- [33:36]
Emily Gracie
Goal is to save lives.
- [33:38]
Podcast Host/Producer
Right? Like, that's the ultimate goal. So who wouldn't want that?
- [33:41]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Right? And it's one of those things that, like, government can. Politicians love this kind of thing. They can come in and be heroes. And, you know, there's a. It's a rare opportunity when everyone can come in and say, oh, there's a straightforward thing we can agree on that we can all help with and work together on. And sometimes it takes. It's very, very awful. But if disasters are going to happen, at least we can learn from it. Like, honor the people who died by making things better next time. That's how our whole field has evolved. It's after a whole series of disasters that every major renaissance of our field, every major technological development and investment, every major institution that's ever been built, they've all been built on the back of some kind of disaster. The National Weather center where I work, the funding for that came after the 9-3-99 tornadoes here in Oklahoma. That there was a process that kicked off to get the special appropriation to build that building. We can trace just about every single thing back to a disaster that has made our science better and has enabled us to do more for our communities. So I hope that happens again. And it really does look like you said, it looks like it's going to happen again.
- [34:53]
Podcast Host/Producer
Wow. That's very hopeful. Personally, you study decision making. Does this Ever affect your personal life? Are you better at making decisions than the rest of us because of this?
- [35:07]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
I like to think I'm, I'm really, I'm really, really empathetic. And so I, I empathize with people who make bad decisions. That's I, I, you know, I'm like, you know, let's just be really real about people because I would be real about myself. I don't see any use in us being, you know, having rosy glasses about how people make decisions. That's not going to reach anybody where they are. If anything, I almost feel like I'm a great person to work on this because of all of my enormous flaws and failures and my imperfections. And if the system can work for me, then it has a chance to work for you.
- [35:44]
Podcast Host/Producer
Oh man, I love that you're like a therapist.
- [35:48]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
No, we designed to the lowest common denominator.
- [35:53]
Podcast Host/Producer
It's like the equivalent of a hairstylist with bad hair.
- [35:58]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
When you, I mean you have little kids too. When you have. I have a 2, 4 and 6 year old and my brain is like only half there most of the time. And it's a great place for me to come from to have humility about what is real and practical. Walking through the decision making process. There are a lot of, you know, tornado risk events where I will be watching storms coming. I'll know that they're possible but man, I'm not going to be waking my, I got, it took me hours to get my kids into bed. I'm not going to be waking them up unless I absolutely have to, you know, so I know these things are decisions people have to make about what is, what is your risk tolerance and what, what works for you and your family. And that's going to, that's going to differ between people. We have to respect that. People are all coming into these situations too with their own set of, you know, other things they're thinking about other priorities. Not everybody's just a weather geek. Like lives are very rich and full and complicated and the more that we can work with that instead of against it, the better off we're going to be.
- [37:04]
Podcast Host/Producer
So maybe for people who feel kind of hopeless right now, the thing that they can do is educate their children. Do you have any advice on that? Like what, what does your education of your children look like when it comes to weather awareness?
- [37:16]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Oh my goodness, a couple things.
- [37:19]
Podcast Host/Producer
They wear helmets in the storm shelter like mine do.
- [37:22]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Oh, they know they our storm shelter. My husband is like this miracle worker. He's made our storm Shelter into this place. A space like an actual, like a fun space.
- [37:32]
Podcast Host/Producer
Yeah.
- [37:33]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
There's lighting and there's fans and there's food and there's toys. And he's taken like a huge piece of like the sheet paper and put it along one wall so the kids can go down there and make like a mural while we're, you know, watching tv and we explain to them what's going on and we expl to them, here's the map, here's where we are. It's a great opportunity to learn and teach them some spatial skills, but teach them radar interpretation, teach them all of that. And then we can hear the stuff outside and you know, say, oh well, that's the, the storm is reaching us. Here's what that looks like on this radar and here's what you're hearing. And so I just teach my children by going through it and pointing out the connections between these things as we go. But I try to provide them a, you know, safe environment that's not super emotional to do it so that they can learn and not just be scared. If you're scared, you're not going to process things the same way. So it's really important for us as parents, as with anything, I think we train ourselves to just have some chill. They fall off of a, off of a ledge. Don't react like, see if they're okay. Like, don't. If you start, if you freak out, they're going to cry like you. You know that we've practiced this. Do that in weather too. Don't like, just don't overreact. Be calm, be deliberative. You'll make better decisions when you're like that too, in that mode and just, they'll queue off of you. The way that you respond teaches them just as much as the radar does. They're learning from you how to be a person who's adapted to this environment. So try to, try to keep some chill. I will say a lot of parents right now are probably getting questions from their children about the flooding. I'm not going to claim to have perfect answers, but I'm getting those. My kids are starting to hear the news. See, you know, prayer things go up for victims, whatever. They've started to understand that children are involved. That could very easily be hard for them to take. I had my 4 year old s, she came home from school and said, oh, there was a water park and a lot of people died. And she, she asked me, you know, do we, do we get, do we get floods? And I calmly Walked through. Well, that was a unique kind of place where they get really, really bad ones because they're in mountains. But we do get floods here. And here's times where I've experienced them. Here's things that I did, you know, I walk through that to give them the. They can happen, but we can do something. And I don't know that there's a perfect here how to be, but it could be a really useful teachable moment since it's in everybody's minds. I think the more that you give them tools where they feel like it's something they can do something about it, the better off they'll be psychologically.
- [40:26]
Podcast Host/Producer
Yeah. And I, you know, everyone spends a lot of time worrying about their kids and this is going to sound very selfish, but like my kids always seem fine. They seem kind of undeterred by things and really resilient and don't like they're selfish enough that they don't really take it in. So, you know, I think it's important.
- [40:43]
Emily Gracie
For people to take care of themselves too.
- [40:45]
Podcast Host/Producer
We worry so much. What are we going to say to our kids but like what are we saying to ourselves too, to kind of comfort ourselves, Right?
- [40:50]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Yeah. Oh my gosh, that's so true. I've, I've actually felt the same about my kids. Like you see, pointed that out, a lot of people died and then the next breath they're like, so am I going to get a donut? And you're like, right. Oh my gosh. Okay. So I was taking this as a big talk moment and you're just like, whatever, mom. Okay.
- [41:06]
Podcast Host/Producer
They'll bring it up at a really random time. You know, they, they introduce the dark stuff in random moments.
- [41:13]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Right. It's back on. Just. Yeah, but yeah, you can't have that calm and chill unless you have done the work yourself to be calm and to find your chill. And so prioritize yourself, prioritize your mental well being. Right now I'm not again, not necessarily great at this all the time because we're in the disaster field. So I'm constantly mining for the reports of what did happen to people, what we know, help them make decisions or what decisions were they unable to make? What information do they not have? I kind of put myself right into the middle of that disaster zone constantly as a part of my, you know, evolving like professional thoughts on and input into the situation. We've got to stand back, you know, you've got to make space for yourself. So I'll do that for a while and then I'll tell you, I've been going to thrift stores hardcore the past couple days. I've just, I walk out of the house. I've got to go someplace where it's like I'm just totally something else. Just go, go. This is the modern hunting and gathering is thrift stores. Do something else and give yourself some space so that it's not constant.
- [42:23]
Podcast Host/Producer
Find your own mindfulness. I like it.
- [42:25]
Emily Gracie
Kim, is there anything else you'd like.
- [42:26]
Podcast Host/Producer
To share about this topic?
- [42:28]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
These were just horrible events. I really hate this one. I really hate this one. I think it's going to be really painful to go through, but we have to walk through the really painful things to make sure that we learn and that it doesn't happen again. And I'm grateful that I get to be a part of holding everybody's hands as we walk through it. My, my final thoughts to people are it's okay to fish around and try to reason through it and see what you know, see what sense you can make of it. That's just human in the face of any trauma. We've got to to do that. But also, don't forget to take deep breaths. And I too am doing this. We don't know everything. A lot has yet to be learned. Try to hold some space in your heart and grace for the people who are affected and that should also give you patience for yourself. We don't know what to do yet to make this better. Give them grace. Give yourself grace.
- [43:30]
Podcast Host/Producer
Kim, you're an inspiration. Thank you so much.
- [43:33]
Dr. Kim Kloko McLean
Thank you so much for having me.
- [43:38]
Emily Gracie
Off the Radar is a production of the National Weather Desk. Make sure you're following the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes publish every Tuesday. Once again, if you'd like to help the victims of the Texas flooding disaster, you can go to sinclaircares.com to donate a huge thank you to Dr. Kim Kloko McLean for bringing her insightful and empathetic voice to this episode. Thanks thanks to the National Weather Desk and Sinclair Broadcast Group for their ongoing support of the podcast, as well as my associate producer Brian Petras for his help with today's episode. I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie. Make it a great day.