Wife’s tip leads to timely warning

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Thursday, Aug. 21, 2003 | 9:40 a.m.

Behind every great man, there's a great woman, they say.

Joseph Nemeth Jr. got the flash flood warning out to the Las Vegas Valley from the National Weather Service's computerized office Tuesday at 3:49 p.m., helping kick into gear the search and rescue crews that wound up saving dozens of lives during the flood.

But it was a phone call from his wife, Paula, four minutes earlier that led him to the decision. She said she was seeing big hailstones and heavy winds -- signs of a storm that can lead to floods.

The call, he said, helped verify what their technological tools had been telling them for several hours.

"This proved what we were already suspecting ... and that allowed us to get the warning out that much sooner," he said Wednesday.

Getting out the warning sooner got crews on the street and in the air sooner.

"This gives you a clear picture -- minutes save lives," the veteran meteorologist said.

Nemeth and his colleagues had been watching the radar all afternoon. "We were getting ready to issue a warning ... We're mandated by Congress to help save lives and property ... and we don't want to cry wolf, either," he said.

His wife gave him what he called "ground truth," as she offered two key descriptions of the sort that only someone out in the weather -- and not in an office -- can give.

Paula Nemeth is a dog groomer in a pet salon near Cheyenne Avenue and Decatur Boulevard. But as soon as she gets home, she takes her job seriously as the eyes and ears for her husband.

She said she comes from a family of "weather nuts" -- "my brother and father used to stay up to watch storms."

So shortly after she married Joseph in Pennsylvania 23 years ago, she took a course that taught her how to measure rain, wind, hailstones, snow and other signs of weather

That course helped her more than once over the years, as she would call in blizzards to her husband before they were verified by him in his weather service office back East.

And it helped her Tuesday afternoon, as she was lying down to take a nap after work and starting hearing hailstones pelting her windows. She got up, measured them, estimated the wind speed and set out a rain gauge as soon as the hail let up enough. She made the first of four calls to her husband, telling him 3/4-inch hailstones were falling and winds were whipping outside at about 60 miles an hour.

"This showed us ... that the storm had reached dangerous levels," her husband said. Within four minutes, his office issued the flood warning via television, radio and e-mail.