Latest news with #Central Texas
CBS News
2 days ago
- Climate
- CBS News
Sen. Maria Cantwell urges Trump to invest in modernized weather forecast system: "The money will save you money"
Sen. Maria Cantwell is urging President Trump to prioritize modernizing the nation's weather forecasting system, saying the investment will save lives as well as money down the road. She released a letter to the president Monday, following through on her pledge to provide guidance that the administration can use to upgrade weather forecasting infrastructure. "The money will save you money, for sure," Cantwell said in an interview on CBS News Monday. "The kind of investments you could make here are about taking a $20 billion [disaster] event and saying, if we would have done these things in advance, it wouldn't have cost us that much money. If storms are costing us this much, we have to come up with better solutions." The Democratic congresswoman, a prominent voice in environmental policy on Capitol Hill and ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which oversees weather and disasters. Cantwell penned the letter in the wake of disastrous flooding that killed at least 135 people in Central Texas. The July 4 flash flood prompted a massive search and recovery operations and raised questions about whether forecasts and warnings could have been more effective ahead of time. Cantwell's letter outlined five bipartisan recommendations to improve U.S. forecasting. It comes as the Trump administration continues to make cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency focused on weather and climate, and the National Weather Service, its subagency in charge of daily forecasts. NOAA is slated to see a 27% reduction in its budget at the start of the 2026 fiscal year, which could impact weather forecasting in a number of ways, including terminating research programs aimed at helping predict future precipitation rates and improve flash flood warning systems. The committee recently held a confirmation hearing for Dr. Neil Jacobs to become NOAA's new leader. "Communities across the United States are experiencing more frequent, intense, and costly flash floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, atmospheric rivers, landslides, heatwaves, and wildfires," Cantwell's letter said. She cited deadly — and costly — natural disasters that have ravaged communities around the United States in the last two years alone, including the Texas floods as well as last year's flooding from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the devastating fires in Los Angeles and the Hawaiian island of Maui. Examples like these suggest "that providing Americans with more timely and accurate weather information can avoid billions in property losses and save lives," she wrote. CBS News has reached out to the White House for the administration's response. Cantwell's recommendations emphasize improvements in how weather data is collected and analyzed, as well as systems for notifying communities of severe weather. They include:Tracy J. Wholf contributed to this report.
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
US neo-fascist group claims it is part of Texas floods relief efforts
A US racist and neo-fascist hate group that has become a public fixture in recent years has descended on central Texas in a stunt it claims is part of the 'disaster relief' efforts under way after the devastating flash floods hit the region last week. Patriot Front, founded following the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, after which its leader, Thomas Rousseau, a Texan, was later charged for his participation, has claimed on its Telegram app channel that it has shown up in the areas near Camp Mystic, where 27 young campers lost their lives. 'Patriot Front is here in central Texas,' Rousseau declares in a video statement, amid the backdrop of what sounds like buzzing chainsaws in the flood-ravaged community, 'responding to the flooding, which has destroyed communities and taken the lives of scores of Americans.' Rousseau goes on to claim that his so-called 'activists' are distributing supplies to survivors, but clarifies that his group is prioritizing their 'people' and 'European peoples' in those operations. The far-right compulsion to disguise racist actions under the terms of humanitarianism has its roots in Adolf Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf, in which he prescribes to his readers to take pride in keeping their collective communities strong as a not-so-hidden metaphor for cleansing it of what is deemed other, undesirable peoples. Similarly, American hate groups, second amendment-oriented militias and neo-Nazi street gangs have long shown up as community relief cadres across the US, in a sort of ploy to whitewash their images as dangerous forces in the country. After hurricanes struck the Carolinas and Florida in fall 2024, Patriot Front also exploited the moment during a particularly polarizing presidential campaign season, showing up to clear debris in badly hit communities. 'It's not surprising to see Patriot Front inserting itself into disaster relief in Texas,' said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, who has researched rightwing extremism in the US for decades. 'The group was founded there, and like other extremist groups, they want to take advantage of relief efforts to mainstream their ideas, present themselves as non-threatening and helping the community, and ultimately use what they hope will be positive PR to recruit and grow,' Beirich noted that everyone from Klansmen to armed militias have seen value in public appearances providing disaster aid. Sign up to Headlines US Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion 'We've seen David Duke do this in the past, and more recently Veterans on Patrol inserted themselves into the relief efforts in Asheville after last year's hurricane,' she said. 'The concern is that it works – and Patriot Front's white supremacist agenda gets laundered as positive, and that helps them spread hate and recruit.' Last week, Patriot Front caused a stir in Louisville, Kentucky, over the holiday weekend when its masked members marched to the beat of drums in downtown streets while holding a Confederate banner – which has become a commonplace demonstration for the group, having previously appeared in Boston around the Fourth of July weekend in 2022. Patriot Front's Rousseau has sometimes tried to soften his image in public statements, referring to himself and his crew merely as political 'activists'. But recent Guardian reporting shows the group has increasingly allied itself with the neo-Nazi Active Club movement and the white supremacist leader Robert Rundo.
Washington Post
10-07-2025
- Science
- Washington Post
The best flood warning systems? Here's what works to save lives.
The flash floods that killed at least 117 people in Central Texas over July Fourth weekend have amplified concerns that many communities — especially in rural areas — don't have good warning systems to keep people out of harm's way when sudden storms send walls of water down once-docile creeks and streams. It's extremely difficult to anticipate exactly where a flood will strike, experts say. Weather models have been steadily improving over time, but if rain shifts a few miles in any direction — especially in hilly areas with many different streams, creeks and valleys — it can completely change which waterways will flood. 'Right now it is impossible to make site-specific flash flood warnings,' said Witold Krajewski, an environmental engineer at the University of Iowa. 'People say, 'How come we didn't predict this bridge would be compromised?' Well, I'm sorry, we just can't. It's just impossible right now.' But with better river monitoring and more ways to get the word out, emergency managers can at least give people more time to react when flash floods strike. Most small rivers and streams are blind spots for flood forecasters. In Tennessee, for example, two-thirds of river basins have no gauges to measure how high the water is, according to Alfred Kalyanapu, an environmental engineering professor at Tennessee Tech University. 'One hundred eighty-two basins in Tennessee don't have any eyes on the ground,' he said. That's because river gauges can be expensive. Top-of-the-line versions from the U.S. Geological Survey — which gather reams of useful data on water flow — can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Most are concentrated on big rivers near big cities, which helps protect urbanites but leaves rural residents on their own. So, Kalyanapu developed his own DIY river gauges that cost about $500 a pop. The simple systems can be installed on bridges. They estimate water levels by bouncing soundwaves off the water surface every 15 minutes and measuring how long it takes for the echo to come back. The data is much rougher than the USGS sensors, which directly measure much more information about water speed and volume — but it's good enough to keep an eye on flooding, Kalyanapu said. He and his students have built about 15 sensors for rural Tennessee rivers, including half a dozen for Humphries County after a flash flood killed 20 residents in 2021. Other rural areas could follow suit, he said. If states fully commit to the idea, they could build a flood warning system like the Iowa Flood Information System, which is considered one of the best in the country. After a record-breaking 2008 flood, the state legislature set aside about $1.2 million a year for the University of Iowa to develop a statewide flood monitoring system. University scientists deployed nearly 300 low-cost stream and river gauges on unwatched waterways. They combined those observations with USGS river gauges, radar data on rainfall and local hydrologic models that predict how water will move through Iowa's soil, streams and cement. Eventually, they created an online map that gives visitors a real-time look at water levels in rivers across the state and forecasts for future flooding that update every few minutes. 'Is this a foolproof system? No, of course not. We had people die in Iowa in flash floods. But nothing like Texas,' Krajewski said. Experts say the Texas floods are also a reminder of the importance of investing in meteorologists at the National Weather Service, emergency managers at FEMA and scientists across federal agencies and universities who sharpen the weather models that forecast rain and floods. Funding for all this work has been cut or frozen since President Donald Trump took office — but without it, flood forecasts and disaster response could suffer. 'People really need the support,' said Brooke Fisher Liu, a University of Maryland professor who studies crisis communications. 'You can't just have people prepare on their own. It's not realistic in all situations.' Once local emergency managers know a crisis may be coming, they need several ways to get the word out: cellphone alerts, sirens, weather radios, cop cars playing warnings over loudspeakers, neighbors knocking on doors and so on. 'You can't just have one alert or warning channel. When you only have one, things fail and communities suffer,' Liu said. Sirens have gotten lots of attention after the Texas floods, because local officials in Kerr County had decided they were too expensive to install. Sirens can be a useful piece of a warning system, some experts say. 'Sirens tell people, 'Hey, something is seriously wrong and you need to see what's happening,'' said Cruz Newberry, owner of Table Rock Alerting Systems. His company installed sirens in the unincorporated community of Comfort, Texas, which is just downriver from Kerr County — and which in 1987 lost 10 teenage campers in flash floods. During last week's flooding, Comfort's sirens sounded as intended, as captured in a Facebook video posted by the Boerne Star, a local news outlet. But experts say sirens aren't much help on their own, because they don't give any information about the threat. 'Let's say you're a traveler visiting an area on vacation and a siren goes off,' said Harry Evans, a senior research fellow in the Center for Research on Water Resources at the University of Texas in Austin. 'What is it telling you? What is your recommended action?' That's why it's important to combine sirens with well-crafted alerts, according to Jeannette Sutton, an associate professor researching risk communication at the State University of New York at Albany. People should be able to understand from every emergency message who sent it, what the hazard is, where it's happening, when the danger is coming and how they should protect themselves. 'Otherwise, they're going to spend time searching the internet trying to figure out, 'What the hell are you talking about?'' Sutton said. 'If they need to act immediately … that's really dangerous.' When cellphone companies first implemented the wireless emergency alerts that allow authorities to set off disaster alarms on phones in a certain areas, they limited messages to 90 characters — too short to be useful, Sutton said. They've since expanded the limit to 360 characters to give more space for detailed instructions, but Sutton said many local emergency managers still stick to the old 90 character limit because they lack training. Sutton designed a free tool to help emergency managers quickly write good cellphone alerts for 48 kinds of hazards by plugging information into preset forms. 'It's just like Madlibs,' she said. She has trained 500 people on the tool, but she's still trying to get the word out to more emergency managers.
