Farming is a risky business. Always has been. A federal program to keep farmers in business during droughts seems like a good idea to me. Sadly, it’s also a target for fraud:“On a normal day, the promising storms produced snow or rain that would fall onto a system of official weather stations at airstrips or town halls, into heated “tipping buckets.” When the teeter-totter buckets filled with a thimbleful of water, the seesaw tilted, dropping one miniature metal bucket downward to close an electrical circuit. “One “tick” of the bucket, and a signal went out to National Weather Service sensors around the world that the parched High Plains had recorded one hundredth of an inch of welcome water. “What bewildered the trackers is that on many of these
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“On a normal day, the promising storms produced snow or rain that would fall onto a system of official weather stations at airstrips or town halls, into heated “tipping buckets.” When the teeter-totter buckets filled with a thimbleful of water, the seesaw tilted, dropping one miniature metal bucket downward to close an electrical circuit.
“One “tick” of the bucket, and a signal went out to National Weather Service sensors around the world that the parched High Plains had recorded one hundredth of an inch of welcome water.
“What bewildered the trackers is that on many of these stormy days, those buckets were not tipping. No tipping buckets pointed toward a severe spring drought. All cumulus, no accumulation.
“That same winter and spring, weather agency field technicians started phoning in a series of repairs to Colorado and Kansas rain gauges, also unlike anything their Pueblo bosses had ever seen.
“On New Year’s Day 2017, United States Geological Service crews charged with maintaining field weather stations made a routine check at Syracuse, Kansas, pop. 1,761, and found signaling wires from the rain gauge had been cut.
“In February, 15 miles to the west, in Coolidge, more wires were cut.
“In March, in La Junta, a National Weather Service employee found a gauge with a hole punched in the brass rain collector.
“Later in March, back in Syracuse, a funnel directing rainwater for measurement had been filled with silicone.
“The next day, in Springfield, the NWS rain gauge had been covered by a cake pan.
“Through April, from Elkhart, Kansas, to Ordway, Colorado, more than a dozen repair tickets appeared reporting silicone plugs, baking pans and metal plates acting as umbrellas obstructing precipitation readings. One gauge had all its bolts loosened so that the rain bucket would tip over without being recorded.
“When the Pueblo weather office finally got a phone call from crop insurance fraud investigators at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, local director Jennifer Stark felt her bewilderment give way to a gutted sense of betrayal.
“Local farmers, authorities came to believe, were systematically destroying vital weather data in order to falsely claim millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded crop insurance, for a drought they made up.”