There will be more floods like Texas. We can't afford to stand on the sidelines.

USA Today

13 hours ago

Flash floods and other extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes and tsunamis are nature's way of doing business. But the disasters they trigger are based on our choices.
Normally, July Fourth is a day to celebrate life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This year, a foot of rainfall over central Texas and the resulting Guadalupe River flash flood overwhelmed any such joy with heartbreak – grief over the loss of life, especially the deaths of so many young children. After the mourning will come reflection: are such tragedies inevitable? Or can we change things? Moving forward, can we do more to protect ourselves and our kids? And if so, how?
The good news? We can do better – much better. Our vulnerability to such hazards is largely the result of our past decisions and actions. What we've done, we can undo. The bad news? To reduce future risk will take decades. It will also require profound change (not a change in values, but changes in culture and behavior):
We must start with learning from experience instead of repeating mistakes. Worldwide and here in the United States, natural hazards inflict loss of life and economic destruction that varies year-to-year but on average has increased by a factor of three over 35 years.
Many see this as an unavoidable consequence of population growth and economic development. But the trend results most fundamentally from our deep attachment to place (not only to the banks of the Guadalupe but also the slopes of Lahaina, the neighborhood of Altadena, the town of Asheville and the city of New Orleans).
We all have a love of 'home' that fosters policies favoring 'rebuild as before.' In this act we condemn those who follow to a never-ending cycle of repetitive loss.
What airlines and commercial aviation can teach us
Contrast this with the past half-century in commercial aviation. Aviation fatalities peaked in 1972 at over 2,300. At that time there were only some 4.7 million commercial flights a year. In 2023 there were fewer than one hundred fatalities in the face of 37 million commercial flights.
Commercial aviation has become roughly twice as safe each decade over the last 50 years. The decline is widely attributed to the establishment of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in 1967. The world of aviation sees each catastrophe as a lesson and to be taken to heart. Instead of continue-as-before, the culture vows (in less colorful language) that 'this must never happen again.'
Note that the task is more doable with air travel, sentiment and attachment play little role. But still, America could learn a crucial lesson from aviation, establishing a Natural Disaster Reduction Board (NDRB) that would use similar strategies to tackle natural hazards.
We need to forestall such emergencies at the get-go. Natural disasters don't simply begin suddenly, hours or minutes before a storm develops. They arise gradually from vulnerabilities we create and accumulate for years or decades, when we choose to locate our homes and businesses on floodplains and other dangerous sites, when we settle for less-than-rigorous building codes, when we implement and then rely on fragile infrastructure (such as roads, electrical power, and communications that may appear robust in fair weather but that fail us precisely when they're most needed).
That's why the Association of State Floodplain Managers advocates for 'No Adverse Impact.' They want to moderate practices such as levee-building that reduces the hazard at one location while increasing the hazard downstream. The association also wants to limit new settlement on floodplains behind such levees.
The Guadalupe River was hit this time around, but each day, hundreds of similar vulnerabilities lining some 2,000 watersheds across the United States are one day closer to their own catastrophic failure. These disasters are close-to-hardwired into our future. If we can't easily unwind such past decisions, at a minimum we should avoid sowing the seeds of new ones.
Extreme weather is natural. Humans create disasters they trigger.
We need to embrace change. Flash floods and other extreme events such as hurricanes, tornados, severe winter storms, earthquakes and tsunamis are nature's way of doing business. However, the disasters they trigger are a human construct – and are reshaped and continually evolving in response to the decisions we make and actions we take that determine where and how we live and work.
Take forest fires for example. In the early 1900s, federal policies were enacted to suppress all fires. But by the second half of the century, forest managers realized the practice was increasing the risk of larger fires and endangering national parks and forest ecosystems, so prescribed burns were reinstituted. But if the challenge of providing resilience for a continually reinvented society seems daunting, it is in part because we are attempting to solve tomorrow's problems using only yesterday's tools.
We need to harness new meteorology, new social science on risk communication and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics for every aspect of emergency management.
We must maintain focus on people and relationships. On a dangerous planet, emergency management demands a professional workforce and close collaboration across that workforce – spanning first responders, emergency managers, weather forecasters, hospitals and more. The essential innovation will draw from scientists and engineers of every discipline. The coordination must extend across all levels of government, federal, state and local. It must span both the public and private sectors.
But every bit of this coordination depends utterly on a rich, vibrant web of personal relationships. What's more, the larger public is no mere bystander. Each of us bears personal responsibility for our safety and for that of our families.
Our children will be the ones to prevent future disasters
Finally, we must equip our kids. This for two reasons: first, if it's going to take decades to implement changes needed in our culture and ways of doing business, then most of that workforce will be today's school children (extending even to the as-yet unborn). Accordingly, K-12 public education should place greater emphasis on the causes and working of natural hazards and on concepts of emergency management.
This may seem a minor detail in the scheme of what today's kids have to learn on their road to adulthood. But the benefits transcend public safety. Hazards grab kids' attention and serve as a portal through which they can develop a broader interest in science and engineering. They help acquaint young people with the connections linking natural science – food, water and energy resources – and civics.
Second, our kids may face circumstances where they find themselves on their own. We must empower them. News accounts credit youth camp counselors along the Guadalupe River with moving kids to safety without benefit of adult instruction.
The Declaration of Independence closes in this vein: 'And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.'
Let's live this out. Let's get real about what it takes to maintain life, to live free, and to pursue happiness on a generous but sometimes dangerous planet.
William Hooke is a former executive direction of the American Meteorological Society and also served as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deputy chief scientist and senior scientist to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. He chaired the White House interagency Subcommittee for Natural Disaster Reduction and was a member of the United Nations International Council for Science planning group on natural and human-induced environmental hazards and disasters. He authored "Living on the Real World: How thinking and acting like meteorologists will help save the planet," and has blogged since 2010 at Living on the Real World.