When a blue state falls to natural disaster based on its failure to prepare for contingencies, spending its cash on goodies for special interests instead, it tends to blame the federal government.  Think Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina.  Think of the failed supply stocks or hospital contingencies for COVID.  They always blame the feds, particularly if the president is a Republican.

Well, San Francisco's ultra-blue mayor, London Breed, decided to try the same thing on the National Weather Service, blaming the federal agency for not warning her that a huge "atmospheric river" or "Pineapple express" of storms was headed her city's way and she'd better prepare.

It didn't work out the way she thought it would.

According to an exclusive from the San Francisco Standard:

One day after Mayor London Breed accused the National Weather Service (NWS) of misleading city officials into a false sense of security ahead of a New Year's Eve storm, the agency has shot back, claiming it gave San Francisco considerable warning — well over a week in advance, in fact.

"We were under the impression [by the National Weather Service] that we could anticipate not even an inch of rain [that weekend]," Breed said at an emergency press conference Tuesday afternoon. "The information we had was not sufficient in helping us prepare in the capacity we needed to respond to this issue."

But according to communications shared with The Standard, the NWS had alerted local officials and broadcast media as far back as Dec. 21 of "a significant rain event that would bring high impacts and hazardous conditions." 

Susan Buchanan, a spokesperson for the National Weather Service, said that forecasters even emailed daily briefings to the Mayor's Office and attended the virtual citywide planning meeting for New Year's Eve on Dec. 28. 

By Dec. 29, NWS raised the threat level for heavy rain on New Year's Eve in San Francisco to high — forecasting for 2 to 3 inches of rain, with the potential for up to 6 inches in surrounding areas. 

Then, a day before the massive storm arrived, it warned: "This will be a dynamic and potent system ... Expect rain rates to intensify, with periods of heavy rain to develop overnight tonight and through midday on New Year's Eve."

So she lied about her own failure to do anything about the storm, despite repeated warnings that it was going to be huge, and then tried to pin the blame on the largely apolitical federal agency as a convenient punching bag.

Well, well, well.  Seems one-party blue cities don't quite have the same privileges as solid blue states in blaming Republicans at the federal level.  This federal agency is probably as Democrat as the rest of them, and so it wasn't going to take this lying down, particularly when it did its job correctly.

The blame-the-Republican privilege is not there.  It's roughly parallel with the screaming we hear from blue sanctuary cities upset about migrants being transported to their environs on a voluntary basis by red border-state governors, making them suddenly concerned about the costs.  Rather than blame the feds for the bad policy, or themselves for their sanctuary city laws, they blame the governors for transporting the incoming migrants to them, which makes them look like clowns.  Often, they call on the federal government to give them money for the migrants, but they never admit that their own bad policies on sanctuary fueled the problem, meshing exactly with the federal policies.  They just don't want to pay or change policies, so they blame Republicans instead.

In any case, Breed's bid to lay blame for the storm's bad outcome, which has led to flooding, blocked highways, power outages, and massive disruption in her already unlive-able city, on the feds for not warning her, didn't work for her.  The largely apolitical agency, which did its job, bit back, much to her surprise.

Now she has been exposed as an idiot, a placeholder mayor, a dunce who doesn't do her job.  Had she not attempted to shift the blame, she might have gotten away with escaping blame by the scope of the storm.  As it stands, it's pretty obvious she's a mayor who got warning that there were problems ahead, could have done something, and didn't.

Breed is a former cultural NGO official, which is fine and dandy for culture and the politics of symbolism, perhaps, but obviously, when it comes to life-and-death matters, when actual leadership is required, she has no idea how to do her job.  That in turn explains a lot about why there are so many disasters in that city. 

Now that that's out of the way, maybe the voters in that benighted city beset by natural disasters will get a clue.

Image: Pax Ahimsa Gethen via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.