From the Colorado Sun, September 8/24:
The sordid story of two ranchers who conspired to falsify drought numbers by tampering with rain gauges on the plains of Colorado and Kansas, resulting in millions in false insurance claims
Over the winter of 2016 into the spring of 2017, U.S. weather experts watching southeastern Colorado noticed something they’d never seen before.
Storm clouds would gather over the thirsty sagebrush ranges surrounding tiny Colorado and Kansas towns like Springfield and Coolidge.
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.
“It was shocking to me,” said Stark, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service Boulder office, who in 2016 oversaw the service’s Pueblo regional office for southern Colorado. “We take great pride in delivering objective, quality-controlled precipitation data to the public, to researchers, to climatologists. Personally, I just never thought that individuals would seek to damage that record, or the quality of that record. It’s kind of fundamental to the core of the National Weather Service that we deliver high quality data.”
Investigators found good cause to elevate the bureaucratic review into a high stakes criminal probe.
“There’s a program that the federal government has set up to benefit taxpayers. And when someone in the government got evidence that taxpayers were defrauding that program, it’s important for several reasons,” said assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Kirsch, in the Denver district office. “No. 1, it’s wrong. And in a just society, we want to hold people accountable when they break the rules. And we want people to see that there are consequences to breaking the rules.”
The Denver U.S. Attorney’s Office did not have a file drawer full of crop fraud cases to draw on. But when the Agriculture Department asked them to join the case, they dug in....
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