Karen Gleason
Del Rio meteorologist Dan Schreiber urged city council members on Thursday to take weather into account in planning for future emergencies.
Schreiber is a former Air Force meteorologist and a certified consulting meteorologist who lives in Del Rio and owns and operates STWX Strategic, a meteorology consulting firm specializing in forensic meteorology services for the legal and insurance industries.
Schreiber made his comments during the citizen comments portion of Thursday’s city council meeting.
Schreiber began his comments by thanking the mayor and council for their work and praising his fellow Del Rioans for the way they handled the recent cold weather emergency.
“What a community we live in, just a coming together of folks, complete strangers, to help each other in need. It was just awesome, and I’m proud to be from Del Rio,” Schreiber told the council.
Schreiber said weather disasters are becoming more prevalent and warned Del Rio is about to enter its annual storm cycle.
“We’ve had three weather disasters here in the past year in Del Rio, and then we also had a record-breaking hurricane season, which fortunately missed Del Rio, but not a lot of other places, so we’re running out of weather emergencies to have before we head for the (annual) cycle so, I think it’s something where we really need to take action extremely quickly, proactive action, extremely quickly, before we’re caught with our pants down again,” Schreiber said.
He said he was happy the council was discussing the purchase of generators for its critical infrastructure and agreed they are needed.
“One of the key things that I want to bring up is that this (cold) weather was forecasted. We don’t always get that so much with tornadoes, which could be hit and miss, or with hailstorms, which can be hit and miss. This winter weather was forecasted very well in advance. I think that’s something that needs to be taken into account and inserted into our hazard mitigation plan for future weather emergencies,” Schreiber said.
Schreiber volunteered his services to the city free of charge to assist in future weather emergency planning.
For more information about Schreiber, visit his web site at stwxstrategic.com.
