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Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
The Deadly Floods Revealed Texans' Heroism—and Their Failed Politics
Texas novelist Billy Lee Brammer once described the rivers and creeks of the Hill Country around Austin as 'running deep like old wounds, boiling round the fractures.' This past weekend, those wounds opened. As of this writing, the catastrophic floods have claimed 95 lives, including 27 from an all-girls Christian summer camp. Climatologists peg the start of Central Texas's years-long drought to the La Niña event of 2021; over the past four years, we've had a 'rain deficit' of 36 inches. On July 4, parts of the Hill Country—that distinct, creek-carved, cedar-green and chalk-bright thumbprint in the heart of my state—received almost half of that in one day. Kerr County got 12 inches in just a few hours. With the death toll rising and more still missing, this is now set to be the deadliest flooding event in modern Texas history, surpassing even Hurricane Harvey. As I write this on Monday morning, a flood watch is still in effect in Travis County, where I live. The dangers near me are mostly in the streets that dip into formerly dry creek beds, but even I can see that the ground is too wet to absorb anything more. The water seems to push up out of the dirt rather than sink into it. The land here has always been prone to flooding; its thin soils and steep slopes funnel water into rivers with brutal speed. When I heard about the children lost at Camp Mystic, I thought about the Hill Country girls' camp I went to as a kid, also set along a river. The riverbed was nearly all limestone—bright, slick, shallow, quick and easy to underestimate. It made for fun canoe runs but there was nothing to hold onto if the water came fast. When it rained, the counselors would put a chain up blocking the trail down to its banks. Geologists have called the region 'Flash Flood Alley,' or sometimes, 'the Flash Flood Capital of North America.' Over the last thirty years the pace of destruction and the lives lost have only increased. The 31 people who died in 1998's Central Texas floods were followed four years later by floods which that claimed fewer lives (12 casualties), but crushed the built environment: 48,000 homes lost to the waters, and nearly $1 billion in total damage. Just weeks ago, news organizations published solemn remembrances of the 2015 Memorial Day floods in nearby Wimberly that killed 13 people; at the time, The Texas Observer's Forrest Wilder described the floods as 'like nothing you've ever seen.' Previously unthinkable disasters have followed hard on that flood's heels. Since 2013, this area has experienced two '500-year storms' and one '300-year storm,' to borrow the terminology that civil engineers still use to describe events that were once thought to be rare. Given all of this history, officials who say that they couldn't have seen this past weekend's floods coming are simply lying. At a more macro level, the failure to act on climate change is the most sweeping systemic failure—one that amplifies every other mistake. Zoom in and the temptation to assign blame gets murkier, even as it gets harder to resist. Warnings from the National Weather Service went out as quickly as they could, starting on July 3. The nut of the horror seems to be older and more intractable than the Trump administration and DOGE cuts: Local officials lacked the infrastructure — literally, no local alert system in Kerrville—to warn residents effectively. As Rob Kelly, Kerr County's top elected official, told The New York Times, 'We've looked into it before … The public reeled at the cost.' Asked on July 5 if he thought that the weekend's events might change the calculus, he replied, 'I don't know.' (By this time, 15 children had already been reported dead.) You're horrified, I'm horrified. Still, what looks like political callousness needs to be balanced against the heroism and generosity displayed over the past few days. Here in the Lone Star State, there is a contradiction I've puzzled over for most of my life: Texans have made a whole brand of independence, proud of our 'come and take it' toughness. But they are as eager to come to one another's aid as any human on earth; I happen to think they might be above average in that regard. I signed up to help with sorting donations and shifting displaced pets in foster homes only to find out thousands of people had signed up before me. On Sunday, the city of Kerrville asked people to stop coming to the area; so many had already shown up with flatbeds, boats, chainsaws—anything that could carry help in or haul wreckage out they didn't need any more non-professional volunteers. Instead, they are directing folks to drop-offs and fundraising. There is such a powerful instinct to help, to give, to protect—an urge to collective action that is instantaneous when the threat has come and gone. Yet that same generosity does not translate into broad support for the kind of public infrastructure that can prevent or mitigate disaster. I have seen people stand on a roadside and cheer an H-E-B truck rolling through floodwaters; meanwhile, the local siren system goes unfunded. People will risk their lives to pull a child out of a tree but refuse to invest in what might have kept both the child and themselves safe in the first place. This reflexive aversion to taxes and the social safety net didn't come out of nowhere. Conservative politicians in Texas in particular have spent decades weaponizing the impulse to aid each other on the ground, lauding it as superior to help 'from the government.' They frame government as a thief rather than a partner and separate 'community' from the structures meant to uphold it. And when the government does falter, as all complex systems sometimes do, those failures become proof of its supposed uselessness. In their project, government failures are a design feature, not a bug: starve public systems of resources until they cannot deliver, then hold up their collapse as proof that nothing public can be trusted. But what is H-E-B's emergency relief, really, if not a massive public works project that also sells groceries? The problem isn't massive institutions; maybe it's that Texans have been trained to love the wrong ones. Trump's administration has pushed that spiral of dysfunction and distrust into something so tight and steep it might as well be just an arrow pointing down: slashing FEMA, cutting the National Science Foundation, dismantling public health protections, abandoning the disabled and the poor. That leaves communities even more dependent on last-minute neighborly heroics and more suspicious of the idea that a government could ever act with the same urgency. What mutual aid groups and even H-E-B show us, whether they mean to or not, is that mutual aid and volunteering are not the opposite of government; they are what government ought to be. Taxes are just a sandbag brigade stretched across thousands of miles. It's tempting to blame those who resist building that line—to scoff at anti-tax voters or wish their cynicism washed away. But blame is paralyzing. Responsibility, even when it hurts, is a blueprint to action. And responsibility belongs to all of us. I have strong opinions about what the taxpayers of Kerr County should do differently—and about that decades-long GOP project to undermine faith in government—but as images of the mud-torn Hill Country dominate my phone, I'm drawn to thinking about the middle-term, and how I can influence the people closest to me. Not today or tomorrow but in six months or a year. Maybe the challenge is for those of us who already believe in public systems—who already vote and believe in how taxes work — to go smaller, too. To show up at the food pantry, or at a lifeguarding shift at the YMCA, lending a hand at a church fundraiser, or spending time at a Big Brothers Big Sisters orientation. We need to do more than protest or write letters and start building trust through repetition, routine, and being reliably present in the places where politics don't lead. The more granular and further away from explicit political undertones our actions, the more room there is to connect across the divides that show up at the ballot box. In the mutual aid networks I've been involved with, the political bent is usually progressive to anarchist but they are totally agnostic as to who benefits. In a flood, those groups work right next to evangelical Christian volunteers and alongside people who might call themselves libertarian, hauling supplies in a steroidal pickup. That collective, neighborly instinct is the closest we get to what the government should feel like: not a foreign power, but people helping people, at scale. Billy Lee Brammer saw rivers as old wounds, boiling around the fractures. The Hill Country has always offered up those scars. But Brammer's The Gay Place is a lightly fictionalized account of his time as a speechwriter for Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan willing to believe in a government big enough to heal historic trauma. Texans sent him to Washington to build the Great Society, even as they mistrusted Washington itself. That spirit feels far away right now. But maybe it isn't gone. Maybe it's just waiting for us to notice each other after the waters recede.
Miami Herald
07-07-2025
- Climate
- Miami Herald
In Texas, Florida and across the globe, warmer climate makes flooding ‘more unprecedented'
As the Texas flooding death toll reached 95 on Monday — at least 27 of them children — and Tropical Storm Chantal prompted dozens of water rescues in North Carolina, some Floridians were reminded of the disastrous 'rain bomb' in 2023 that hit faster and harder than any hurricane in living memory. Though no one died from the 2 feet of rain that deluged Fort Lauderdale in a single day in April two years ago, the relentless rain forced hundreds to flee to Red Cross shelters, covered airport runways, filled the tunnel that runs under the New River and turned downtown streets into raging rivers. And, despite the sheer speed with which these floods took people by surprise, they have another thing in common: Climate change made them even more catastrophic. While the tropical system stuck over Texas' Hill Country — also known as 'Flash Flood Alley' — was expected to cause flooding, 'we also know that climate change is adding just a little bit of extra rain,' Shel Winkley, who worked as a broadcast meteorologist for a CBS-affiliate in Texas, told the Miami Herald. Overall, the climate is now 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than before humans started burning fossil fuels, which releases greenhouse gases that trap heat within the atmosphere. The warmer the atmosphere, the more moisture it can hold, and, consequently, release. Heavier rainfalls likely made the Texas flooding 'even more unprecedented,' said Winkley, who taught at Texas A&M University. 'The question is, would it have come down as fast, and would the river have risen as quickly as it did, without that climate change influence?' Using a rapid analysis to show how the floods are linked to climate change, scientists in Europe determined that warmer weather fueled the Texas disaster as overall weather conditions in that specific region had gotten wetter compared to the past. The severity of the event, they said, can't be explained by naturally occurring changes to the climate and weather. Research by Climate Central, a nonprofit science and communications group, also found that, over the past 50 years, rainfall has become heavier in cities like San Antonio, some 60 miles south of the worst flooding, with rainfalls now increased by 6 percent. In Miami, Climate Central's analysis, which is based on NOAA data, found that the hourly rainfall intensity increased by 12 percent. Both Florida and Texas are adversely affected because they lie on the Gulf of Mexico, which is currently between 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average for the beginning of July, conditions that are 10 to 30 times more likely because of climate change. This extra heat has given more water molecules the energy they need to 'escape' from the surface and evaporate into the atmosphere, where they're supplying additional moisture, which makes rainfall more intense. 'Climate change loads the dice toward more frequent and more intense floods,' Davide Farranda, an expert on extreme weather events at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said in a statement, adding that the Texas flood 'shows the deadly cost of underestimating this shift.' 'We need to rethink early warning systems, land-use planning, and emergency preparedness. And above all, we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit future risks,' he said. While cutting greenhouse gas emissions is the only proven solution that can stop things from getting even worse, our atmosphere and oceans react slowly to the CO2 we're emitting. The impact of the fossil fuels burnt today will be felt in decades to come. That makes adaptation a necessity, especially in places like South Florida, where a lot of infrastructure dates back to the 1950s. 'These extreme events are likely to become more frequent,' said Ben Kirtman, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami, referring to the 2023 rain bomb, which overwhelmed Fort Lauderdale with such a sudden deluge that schools had to shut down for two days. A 1-in-500-year flood, he said, referring to a flood that, statistically speaking, is so devastating it occurs once every 500 years, 'that will maybe be a 1-in-a-100-year flood, or a 1-in-20-year flood,' Kirtman said. Cities, he said, need to know what to plan for, so infrastructure can be hardened, and at least some catastrophes can be avoided. Figuring out not just how much rainfall we can expect, but also the frequency and duration of rainfall is exactly what Kirtman and colleagues from across Florida, including the US Geological Service, are trying to figure out. Six inches of rainfall might not be a lot for a city like Miami, but it wouldn't be able to handle six inches of rain over three, four or five days. Within a year, he and his colleagues hope to have some preliminary data. Even with that data, keeping people and properties safe from ever heavier flooding can simply prove too costly. Miami, for example, would have had to pay $5.1 billion to upgrade its infrastructure for a 1-in-10-year storm, an extra $1.3 billion compared to adapting for a 1-in-5-year storm. The city tried to find a middle ground, upgrading some projects to higher and others to lower levels. Though Floridians are used to storms, heavy rain and flooding, being surrounded by a warmer Gulf on all sides and the fact that hurricanes have already become more intense doesn't bode well, Winkley said. And while Florida was less susceptible to river flooding due to its lack of hills, the Texas flood, he said, was 'a warning for everybody.' This climate report is funded by Florida International University, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the David and Christina Martin Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald retains editorial control of all content.
Time of India
07-07-2025
- Climate
- Time of India
Big revelation in Texas tragedy: Was ‘flash flood' warning system scrapped before 27 died at Camp Mystic?
Live Events Texas officials scrapped 'Flash Flood Alley' NWS defends flood warnings amid cuts (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel A July Fourth weekend deluge in Texas caused catastrophic flash flooding that has killed more than 80 people. Camp Mystic in Kerr County says Monday morning that it is 'grieving the loss' of 27 campers. The risk of life-threatening flooding was still high in central Texas with more rain on the in Kerr County, Texas had discussed installing a flood warning system along the banks of the Guadalupe River, known as 'Flash Flood Alley". But the idea was rejected as it was too expensive, reports The New York floods, which occur when the ground is unable to absorb torrential rainfall, are not unusual in this region of south and central Texas, known colloquially as " Flash Flood Alley ." Human-driven climate change has made extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and heat waves more frequent and more intense in recent years.A flood warning system was first suggested in 2015 in the wake of deadly floods in Wimberley, Texas, some 75 miles east of Kerrville, the Kerr County to the outlet, Kerr County had looked into installing sirens, river gauges and other modern communication tools along the waterway in 2017. But it never happened. 'We can do all the water-level monitoring we want, but if we don't get that information to the public in a timely way, then this whole thing is not worth it,' Kerr County Commissioner Tom Moser said at the the county, which has an annual budget of around $67 million, lost out on a bid to secure a $1 million grant to fund the project in 2017, county commission meeting minutes show. It is unclear how much installing a flood warning system would have cost report says Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official in a recent interview, said residents were hesitant about the high cost of a warning system. 'Taxpayers won't pay for it,' he said, according to the the devastating floods, Wimberley upgraded to a more advanced monitoring system, installing cell towers to send emergency alerts directly to local by Wimberley's improvements, former commissioner Moser visited the town to study the new flood warning setup and returned to Kerr County advocating for a similar approach. His plan included enhanced water detection technology and improved public alert mechanisms, but it ultimately stalled due to budget constraints.'It sort of evaporated. It just didn't happen,' he told the admitted that he 'didn't know' if people might reconsider their position in light of the recent admitted it isn't certain that a flood warning system like the one he proposed a decade ago would have prevented the recent tragedy in the county, which has seen at least 80 killed, including some 28 children — but he does believe it would have made a difference.'I think it could have helped a lot of people,' he fatal and deadly floods in Texas have also sparked a fresh round of scrutiny of Trump administration cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS). Some Texas officials were critical of the NWS, saying forecasts underestimated the Donald Trump rejected the idea of investigating whether NWS cuts had left key vacancies, and the White House said claims that NWS cuts had anything to do with the tragedy were 'disgusting", reports NBC News.'The forecasting was good. The warnings were good. It's always about getting people to receive the message,' said Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist based in Wisconsin. 'It appears that is one of the biggest contributors — that last mile.'(With inputs from agencies)
