Thoughts on the Politics of the Texas Floods
Both the policy issues but also the way it illustrates the politics of us versus them.
Without any doubt, the unfolding events in the Texas Hill Country (a place dear to my heart, I would note) are truly awful. As of my writing of this piece, the death toll stands at over 80, with at least 40 still missing.
All of this has happened in the context of ongoing concerns about the effects of climate change on extreme weather events and the DOGE cuts to the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the NWS (the National Weather Service), and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency). These facts alone make the discussion political, the same way that mass shootings are inherently political and partisan.
Ironically, or sadly presciently, the Texas Observer published the following opinion piece by Henry D. Jacoby* on July 3, the day before the disaster in the Hill Country: Trump’s DOGE Cuts Are a Texas-Sized Disaster.
Federal resources for managing climate-augmented weather disasters are being wiped out, and crucial information about future risks is being destroyed or degraded. Meanwhile, state leaders stand by while denying the seriousness of climate change as a driver of these events—and the threat this poses to the state economy.
It is not exactly breaking news that Texas is vulnerable to extreme weather, with recent hurricanes and wildfires fresh in mind, nor is the well-documented effect of a warming climate in magnifying severe weather. Just look to the growing count of billion-dollar natural disasters (severe storms, drought, flood, wildfires, severe cold). For example, from 2020 to 2024 Texas suffered 68 of these costly events, with Florida second at 34.
By upending the federal status quo around disaster relief, states like Texas could be left without a paddle. The largest federal program directed to the threat is Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster aid, followed by companion assistance for damaged homes from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and help for impacted businesses from the Small Business Administration. A breakout by state of aid from these federal agencies since 2017 shows that Texas and Florida, each receiving about $18 billion, account for almost a third of the 50-state total.
DOGE already cut roughly 20 percent of FEMA’s staff and moved to freeze its funds. And Donald Trump has repeatedly signaled his interest in shifting disaster relief responsibilities entirely to the states. On June 11, he made that threat more concrete by saying that his administration would start phasing out FEMA after this current hurricane season ends in November. “We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said. “A governor should be able to handle it, and frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor.”
I say all of this to make sure the context for this discussion is clear. Trump has a history of making disaster relief political, and he has definitely damaged the federal government’s capacity to predict and respond to natural disasters. As someone who lives close enough to the coast for tropical weather to be an issue (and really, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes), this is not comforting.
Having noted all of this, based on what I have read and seen to this point, it seems like we cannot blame the DOGE cuts on this specific outcome. It would appear that appropriate forecasts about flash flooding were made, but that the severity of the event was not predictable. I agree more or less with Scott Lemieux from LGM on this (here and here) insofar as it appears NWS did its job, and that communication may have been the real problem.
On the communication front, and speaking as someone who, again, lives in an area that gets constant severe thunderstorm, tornado, and flood watches and warnings (not to mention what feels like increased drama by TV weather folks over the last decade or so), it is far too easy to ignore these warnings, especially when it is 3 am and you are asleep.
This is not to get anyone off of hook who might deserve to be there, but these are factors that are worth remembering (or perhaps even just having a basic understanding of–these aren’t the kinds of things that, say, people in California** are used to dealing with). Further, the reasons things like this end up as disasters are that they are a surprise, if not unprecedented.
Still, there are very real and very important political issues here. Some are policy-specific, while others have broader implications.
First, policy.
Ultimately, I think Noah Belartsky at Public Notice has the basis outline of the situation correct.
Did Trump’s cuts cause excess deaths in Texas? It will probably be some time before we have a definitive answer to that question, if we ever do at all. We do know two things now, though.
First, Trump’s administration has worked to destroy the safety net, which makes all kinds of disasters — extreme weather, earthquakes, contagious disease, individual health events — much more likely to be much more deadly.
And, second, Trump has made these cuts in such a way that whenever there is a disaster, people are going to link the results to the policies of one Donald Trump.
In short, we really don’t know for sure how much the cuts matter (and we need to find out), and that Trump has made all of this a serious policy debate and political fair game.
Second, there’s Trump’s broader influence on our politics.
It seems worth noting, too, that when a major figure (and Trump qualifies) heavily practices the politics of us versus them, it infects the entire system, not just the administration and its followers. So, one of the responses we are seeing in this tragic event is a lot of people who oppose Trump leaping to wanting to use this event as a way to attack him. Further, it has led to some diminishment of sympathy for the victims because they are from (or, at least were in) a heavily Republican state, and some of them were at a Christian girls camp that, if I were to guess, was populated mainly by families who voted for Trump.
If they are victims of what they voted for, this can simply create more us/them divisions in our minds.
So, at a time when we should all be setting aside partisan thoughts, because they shouldn’t be relevant, we can’t help but see us and them.
Trump is not the originator of the partisan divide in the country. We could look back at political reactions to mass shootings, and some of this is present (to include very extreme examples like the way Alex Jones reacted to Sandy Hook). But he has deeply and constantly cultivated us versus them.
Note this example from last week.
This is not what a leader who cares about the country would say. It is not the right message.
Finding additional examples isn’t hard.
- Quid Pro Quo Federalism
- A Fascistic and Authoritarian Response
- In Front of Our Noses: Holiday “Greetings”
If a political leader and two-time president, whose rhetorical influence is now over a decade old, is constantly trying to divide us into us versus them, that has effects on both the Trumpist “us” and also on the anti-Trumpist “them.” He is pitting us against one another, and it is not just making the MAGA types more rabid; it is making all of us more angry and callous.***
I am not writing this to chastise people for seeing politics in the Texas floods, although I will caution about over-reading into these events and to also remind us all that getting too excited about finding FAFO moments can be viscerally satisying on one level, that perhaps a deep breath can be a good idea as well. This is a massive tragedy, regardless of how Texas voted, and we should remember that.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that, as per the above, the long-term effects of the cuts to NOAA and the NWS, as well as what may yet happen to FEMA, as foolish and wrong-headed. And I also think the events like the one in Texas will remind some people that, in fact, government can be a very good thing.
But, of course, as Berlatsky reminds us, there are some long-standing ideological issues on the table here.
It might seem obvious that a botched disaster would implicate Trump. And yet, for some 50 years, Republicans have been trying to convince people that government only harms and never helps.
Ronald Reagan famously sneered at federal disaster relief efforts, joking in 1986, “I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help,” even as his homophobic administration ignored the AIDS crisis. Trump has pushed a similar line, claiming he plans to phase out FEMA aid after 2025, leaving states to struggle and their people to die horribly in future disasters.
And yet, the very viciousness and arbitrariness of Trump’s cuts has helped the make the federal role in managing disasters more salient and more visible. Even before the final vote last Friday to pass Trump’s horrific reconciliation bill that slashes $1.1 trillion from Medicaid, a hospital in rural southwest Nebraska announced it was closing because of the funding precariousness caused by the bill.
So, yes, hold the Trump administration to task as it slashed needed programs without much thought to consequences, But still, also, deep breaths before reacting too emotionally that just deepens us versus them without actually making anything better. I hope that those who have a real public platform will be smart about pointing out the clear implications of the cuts that have taken place and why things like diverting huge sums of federal dollars to ICE and their camps is perhaps not making us safer while cutting things like NOAA, NWS, and FEMA will demonstrably make us less safe.
Remember that a lot of the source of our current willingness to reduce fellow Americans to belonging to either the us camp or the them camps is Donald Trump, and adjust your willingness to participate accordingly.
Please note that I am not suggesting that Trump voters don’t share in the general responsibility for his policy choices. I am just cautioning about the impulse to make immediate/emotional judgments through the us/them lens.
*He is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management, emeritus, in the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and founding co-director of the M.I.T. Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. So he knows of what he speaks.
**The running joke about the weather in LA Story was on point, especially given my experiences at the time I saw the film with both SoCal and Texas weather.
***Note: anyone who would like to contest that Trump is a major purveyor of “us v. them” politics is welcome to do so, if they can make a cogent argument and bring receipts. Whataboutism or claims that other politicians do it to are not welcome unless it is done in a way that attacks the actual thesis about Trump. Finding an example of a Democrat saying something partisan doesn’t fit.
I’ll even help. When HRC talked about a “basket of deplorables,” that was certainly divisive language. But 1) in context, the statement wasn’t wrong (see J6 as a manifestation that proves the point) and 2) it was not a blanket statement of hatred for the totality of the opposition. It was also not a central, ongoing theme of her politics. I am sure it insulted some people, and has been politically inadvisable, but it simply isn’t the same thing as a systematic and deeply thematic rhetorical and policy-oriented politics of us versus them as perpetrated by Trump. The volume, consistency, and nature are key to the analysis.
Other possible examples might include Obama’s “clinging to guns” bit and Romney’s 47% comment. All of these do put Americans into different categories, but they are qualitatively different from Trumpian rhetoric.
Being partisan and speaking in terms of different sides is one thing. Expressing ongoing hatred and contempt is another.
Note, too, that the issue is not what some rando on X, Blukesky, Facebook, or Instagram said. It’s about what the most powerful American says on a daily basis for a decade.
Texas in particular has always avoided spending on public safety. They avoid stuff like zoning rules so you can build homes right next to factories that have a high risk of blowing up, then they do. Or they build in flood plains, then they have a flood. They brag about lower taxes and lower cost of living but then they pay for it in other ways. So from my POV this precedes the extremes of us vs them that we have now. So while I think what happened was awful it was probably pretty predictable. The people in the area got cheaper homes and a cheaper camp in the short run but in the long run they paid a lot.
Steve
@steve: To be clear, I think all of that is fair game.
The us/them part is about the specific visceral responses some are having about the victims and responses to the victims.
Instead of FAFO responses, I would prefer a focus on the kinds of things you are highlighting.
I am also sincerely trying to point out how Trump has helped create an environment in which things that shouldn;t be immediately partisan have become such.
If only someone had seen this coming.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-national-weather-service-leaders-letter-noaa-cuts/
While I agree with SLT much of the time, not here.
Yes, forecasts were made. With several key offices in the local office vacant were the forecasts communicated?
This is the same as Covid. Did Trump’s incompetence kill the 40% extra that died?
Even worse than normalizing Trump is absolving him of clear responsibility.
Be better.
@steve:
I will push back a bit on this. Flash flooding was definitely predictable. I am not convinced as yet that this specific outcome was.
@Daryl: I agree that NOAA and NWS cuts will cost lives. I just need more evidence than has been provided in this case.
I mean, I did note the Jacoby piece at the top of the post.
Mexico has always had a corrupt government, with graft being a major issue that affects society and the economy.
Just the same, since the 1985 earthquakes that caused major damage and lots of deaths, successive government have implemented a seismic alert network, building codes, and have trained search and rescue teams as well.
The last government engaged in a lot of us vs them rhetoric, but this did not extend to how federal spending was allocated, nor how natural disasters were dealt with. There’s a difference between partisan politics and partisan governance.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m sorry. When tax cuts for billionaires are the most critical thing to you, above all else, you don’t earn the benefit of doubt. Which is what you’re granting them, in spades.
Perhaps a direct line cannot be drawn here. Given this administration we will never know the truth.
With their priorities MAGA has made it clear that they don’t care if people die. So if it’s this time or next time, meh.
@Daryl: I am not asking for benefit of the doubt. That’s not the point of the post at all.
But if we find ourselves willing to eschew facts and evidence and to simply let our disdain, even if justified, of the other side be the way we evaluate a givern situation then we are succumbing to simplistic us/them thinking which plays into Trumpian politics.
The fault lies with the state of Texas, just as it did when their grid melted down. They had knowledge of the risk, they knew how to minimize that risk, and they didn’t do it. And by denying the reality of climate change they made adaptation to same more difficult. They did however cut taxes.
But to be fair to governor Abbott, they’re very busy shitting on Mexicans and trans people. Priorities, you know.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I understand that it’s not the point of the post. The us/them lens seems to be focused in one direction more than the other but I can listen to that argument.
It does seem to me you’re granting the benefit of doubt.
Republicans have held every statewide office in Texas since 1994, and has held a trifecta of House, Senate, and gubernatorial leadership for more than two decades.
This is predominantly a Texas problem, exacerbated by the “build anywhere, regulations are bad and taxes are worse” mindset that pervades Republican politics. They KNEW this area was dangerous, and considered a warning system, but ultimately decided it was too expensive. (Gift link: Officials Feared Flood Risk to Youth Camps but Rejected Warning System).
That said, the cuts that have been made to NOAA and the NWS don’t help. They might not have been directly at fault here, but we’ll never know if a fully staffed office would have made a different call at some point that might have made a difference. Butterfly effect.
It’s a tragedy, but is it a massive tragedy?
Trump’s Big Beautiful Budget is going to kill more people. The unlawful DOGE pillaging of USAID has killed more people. Antivaxxers kill more people. The ICE attacks on immigrants and deporting them to hell holes (South Sudan, CECOT) is hurting more people — is a life in CECOT particularly worse than death?
I find it hard to care about these specific people, when we don’t care about so many others. Particularly when we (big collective we, all Americans, not the folks on OTB) could do something about all the others.
These dead campers are a rounding error in all the tragedies around us all the time. (If these were poor brown kids, would we be told to care by politicians and the media? I think we know the answer, and that might be a bigger tragedy)
And some people, some very myopic people, will focus on that rounding error to the exclusion of all others. And these people are wrong (except for those directly affected).
It’s like destroying SNAP benefits to eliminate the small amount of fraud, Or creating a massive police state to attack brown people because there’s a tiny number brown people hurt someone. Or attacking trans people as a group because of imagined harms.
Ok, there are a bunch of dead kids in a freak weather event. That’s not a tragedy, that’s life. If there are lessons to be learned and we don’t, that’s a tragedy.
@Gustopher:
Trump will be absolved.
As he was over Covid.
As he was over J6.
As he was for sexual assault.
As he is for Epstein.
Trump shall be absolved.
@Steven L. Taylor:
This. For as much as I want to be able to blame the DOGE cuts for this, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest this is a case of correlation versus causation. The AP’s coverage is the best reportage that I can find that isn’t firewalled:
At least for the moment, I’m seeing a lot of comments from experts–including from meteorologists who are anti-Trump DOGE cuts–that staffing doesn’t appear to have been a critical factor in getting warnings out in a timely fashion. Scientific American has a pretty fair write-up on this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/texas-flood-forecasts-were-accurate/
Without a doubt, a thorough and independent investigation is necessary. And that is something I am definitely skeptical will happen under this administration–especially due to the DOGE cuts around inspector generals.
One more thought on @what I wrote above–this is exactly the type of issue where there will most likely be no smoking gun one way or the other. That’s because of the complex ecosystem of actors related to this type of situation. Here’s a perfect example of why (from the Scientific American article linked above):
@Steven L. Taylor:
This is very true and seems the very opposite any absolution for Trump.
It’s dangerous, this extreme anti-government kink popularized by Reagan and pushed into hellish overdrive by rich, cancerous fraudsters like Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Rupert Murdoch, Trump et. al.
Climate change denial + dismantling government is a deadly combination. Red states like Texas do need to know that this anti-intellectual, government-hostile poison they’ve enabled is not just going to negatively affect California.
Is it us vs. them to express that? I don’t think the answer is really relevant.
What matters is that conservatives need to stop lying about climate science, stop blocking clean energy, stop reversing climate change mitigation efforts, stop cheering Musk’s reckless DOGE cuts and mass firings of critical personnel, and stop exploding deficits and undermining the general welfare with tax cuts for billionaires. This ideology is stupid, childish, and irresponsible.
Rigid ideological extremism leads to dumb behaviors like a) denying that climate change is behind increasingly intense and unpredictable extreme weather events and b) denying that a robust, taxpayer-funded public sector is essential to effectively address such problems.
Idiocracy has consequences. Californians living in fire zones, Texans living in flood zones, Floridians living in hurricane zones, and all the rest are going to pay a steadily increasing price until owning the libs and dunking on Dems becomes less important than improving American quality of life.
I agree with this, to an extent. It appears that the rainfall forecast a day or two ahead of time was as good as could be expected, that the flood watch was issued appropriately, and that the series of flash flood warnings in the early hours of July 4 were timely. And the regional NWS office was even staffed with extra people specifically to cover this anticipated rainfall/flooding. But I have doubts that the NWS effectively conveyed their data and modeling on the imminent severity of the flooding. For example, the warning issues at 2:03 am that included
certainly makes the point that some people in some places need to take immediate action. But it described the locations of expected flooding as the normal places that frequently flood. This was not a normal flood; it was an extraordinary rain event that required an extraordinary response. By the early morning hours, the NWS office would have had actual data on this flood-prone watershed–doppler radar rainfall estimates, rain gage readings, river gage height readings on the upstream river sections and tributaries. They should have seen a near-100-year flood about to unfold along portions of the river, and disseminated that hazard as it affects people located on the floodplain, such as the 75% of Camp Mystic and its buildings that are reportedly located on that floodplain.
Staffing losses tend to reduce the effectiveness of an organization, unless they are done as part of a planned efficiency or change project that maintains or improves outputs while streamlining or eliminating unneeded efforts. So I think it’s likely that the performance of the NWS was diminished in some ways, and that DOGE cutting without regard to consequences deserves a share of the blame.
Perhaps seeing tragic events such as this through a partisan lens is a bit of progress. I remember pretty clearly that some religious leaders, particularly those within certain Christian fundamentalist groups, interpreted Hurricane Sandy – with its damage falling mostly on NYC and the mid-Atlantic states – as God’s punishment for same-sex marriage and other “heathen behavior” in these blue states. Blaming Trump seems more reality based than blaming God.
@Matt Bernius:
I’ve been seeing the same thing, but also some comments from the same people that there may be communication issues. And I’ve gotten the feeling that the meteorologists are reluctant to say things that may be construed as criticism of other meteorologists.
The forecasts were good, the warnings were timely, but what did the NWS office do to communicate the unusual severity and scope of imminent flooding to authorities and those in the path of the floodwaters? I think we know by now that cell phone alerts are not enough. FFS, I got a Flash Flood Warning alert on my phone literally 40 minutes ago, and my plan is to do absolutely nothing.
@Gustopher:
THIS!! Exactly. The only thing I would add is to say that there’s no “if” about it. That’s the tragedy. 🙁
The narrative is very simple:
Trump cut NWS.People died.
Trump showed callous indifference towards people’s safety . People died.
Trump put an unqualified conspiracy theorist in charge of public health. People died.
When Trump is in charge, people die. People who should have lived died because of his actions, inactions, and incompetence, and he doesn’t care.
Whether this specific policy caused this specific disaster is not relevant. Trump is responsible for countless deaths through incompetence, ignorance, and cruel indifference to people’s lives, regardless of whether they are his supporters or opponents.
Trump is in charge, people die.
The weather service has nothing to do with it. The camp was built on a riverbed. Flash floods and extreme weather happening during the night are something you have to think about it if you have a sleepaway camp. That’s not something to pray to Jesus about. These kids’ deaths are the camp’s responsibility, and its idiot management should be haunted for the rest of their lives because of them.
Trump and MAGA live in a world were greed and self-interest are considered virtues. But to make them virtues, you have to make people dumb. Look at the right-wing narrative about the Palisades fires. Listening to conservatives, you would think that LA is a Chinatown-like city where that nice man Noah Cross is being conspired against by evil environmentalists and activist. It’s delusional, and that delusion about the way things work makes it impossible to deal with how things really work. It’s like being angry about the five trans athletes in America while not caring about the extent of expensive private sports leagues for kids.
Could this have been prevented by the camp? Absolutely. Are there ways for governments to regulate this nice old summer camp where everyone loves everybody but somehow continued onwards into the 21st century with bunks right on a river? Totally. I’m guessing that there’s going to be a good deal of information pointing to how negligent and full of shit everybody who stood to make money off this camp was. I’m also guessing that it’s going to be lost in a haze of faux Christian nonsense.
@DK:
Completely agree with this. The reality is that the vast majority of disasters were created through years of poor decision-making. NOLA’s post-Katrina flooding was a perfect example. That scenario had been considered possible for years, but no one wanted to make the necessary infrastructure updates.
BTW, this is the real issue with the DOGE cuts. They will undoubtedly cost lives (and can be convincingly argued to have already done so in terms of foreign aid). However, the real impact of them will be felt in the coming months and, more realistically, years.
@Gustopher:
This seems unnecessarily cold, and I am perplexed as to why it is necessary to downplay this event.
@Gustopher: “If there are lessons to be learned and we don’t, that’s a tragedy.”
I’ll add my agreement to @just nutha: Saw Ted Cruz at a press conference today. I generally find him to be disingenuous, at best, but I listened anyway. He spoke appropriately about the human tragedy of the flood, then about the scale and effort of the response by rescue crews. And then he spoke about rebuilding. My thought was, “What about the part where you say something about finding out why it happened and making sure it doesn’t happen again?!” He did not address that at all.
Then when a reporter asked a question about warning systems, Cruz said it’s predictable that you see some people engaging in partisan games.
@Daryl: I am not given them the benefit of the doubt, I am trying to base my opinion not on the narrative I would like to have (you know that it would fit my critiques of the Trump administration to be able to hang around DOGE’s neck, right?) but rather I am listening to a number of experts (we like experts, right?) who keep saying that there is no evidence that the forecast was damaged or impeded by the cuts.
What else would you have me do?
I agree. And I squarely blame Trump for it in the post. I am sincerely fearful of what happens if we all decide that us/them is normal politics. If we want Trumpism to win, that’s the route.
@Steven L. Taylor: The camp in particular was built in or next to a river bed with a history of flash floods. One could not predict when it would happen but a flash flood was predictable. Link goes to a description of another deadly flood in the area. Note that they took no safety precautions after that event. They just build in those areas because it’s cheaper, in the short run. (Note that they had 12 inches of rain in that event.)
https://nypost.com/2025/07/04/us-news/texas-christian-summer-camp-flooding-eerily-similar-to-1987-disaster-on-same-river/
Steve
@Modulo Myself: “The camp was built on a riverbed. Flash floods and extreme weather happening during the night are something you have to think about it if you have a sleepaway camp.”
Not to harp on this, but this camp would’ve (should’ve?) had an emergency action plan. And having buildings on the flood plain points to a clear need for an evacuation plan in the event of a flash flood warning. The little I know about what the camp owner/director did does not sound like following any plan, as he perished in his car along with five girls who he was trying to drive to safety… in his car.
@DK: BTW, I read that piece about the bill that failed in the Texas legislature. At first, I was ready to write it up as an example of failed governance. But reading the entire piece, to include some reasonable arguments against the specific bill, to include a very long time-frame and lack of clarity on an actual system (it sounded more like an expensive concept of a plan rather than an actual plan) I was less inclined to see it as a slam-dunk point of criticism.
Here’s the link. The 10-year timeframe and the vagueness of it are relevant.
@Eusebio: I have no need or interest to defend the camp, its location, or its disaster plans, or lack thereof. I did note in doing some research for the post that the camp has existed for almost 100 years (founded in 1928).
This just seems relevant in terms of evaluating the situation. It suggests, as a minimum, such flooding of this nature is likely rare.
Edit: by “such flooding” I mean this massive amount of water. I have little doubt that some amount of flooding is common.
@Steven L. Taylor: I just saw @steve‘s post, but note it is not the same camp.
BTW: for anyone who thinks I am being a squish, an apologist, or whatever one might think, please remember that I am also the guide that write The List, has been concerned about fascism and Trump since the first term, and recently defended the notion that Alligator Alcatraz could resasonbly be called a concentration camp.
So, to sum up.
1. I agree that NWS, NOAA, and FEMA cuts are going to cause people to die who otherwise would not have. I am just not convinced we have the evidence to do so here.
2. I am cautioning against allowing ourselves to fall into Trump’s us/them trap.
3. I am trying to listen to experts, instead of my own biases, when it comes to evaluating the blame issue.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m very sorry to tell you that that ship has likely already sailed.
There is an on-point piece from JV Last up at The Bulwark today. Last makes a strong, albeit defeatist/depressing, case that it has been historically nearly impossible for liberal regimes to undo the damage of illiberal regimes.
I don’t see how the US recovers from Trumpism without formal de-Trumpification and I don’t see how de-Trumpification will be possible without some epic societal level failure that forces the citizenry to confront where the country is now.
@Scott F.: Trust me, I am quite concerned that we have already hit a dire point in our history.
How much I think it is reversible varies, often moment by moment.
RE: Rebuilding–this is what is frustrating to me about a lot of the natural disasters we’ve seen as a nation. From wildfires to rebuilding in hurricane-prone areas, to this–all of it needs to either stop completely or be done much much much more intelligently.
This is the economic consequence of denying or downplaying climate change, and these areas are going to fast become completely uninsurable if we (collectively) keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas.
Thank you, Prof Taylor. Very much agree.
When we find ourselves trying to make a political case out of everything we must to step back and take a deep breath.
Forecasting is only one part. Alerts are another one. Communicating them effectively to the people who need to know them is the third, and the whole point of the exercise.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I hear you. To be clear, it pained me to click Post on my last comment. I was evidently at one of my lower moments.
But, I’ve reflected on the fact that I strongly believed that Trump’s botching of the COVID response was the kind of “epic societal level failure” necessary to repudiate his strong man approach to governance. And I also believed that the House’s J6 hearings were the sort of public tribunal that would bring about some de-Trumpification of the GOP. Well, Holy Moley, was I wrong about all that!
So, reversal is going to need a bigger societal failure than COVID and bigger Reconciliation Trials than the J6 Hearings. I am loathe to wish the former on my country and I don’t think my fellow citizens have the latter in them [in my higher moments, I would add “at least not yet” here.]
@Modulo Myself:
That doesn’t contribute to the overall positive experience of the campers in the long term, no. 🙁
ETA: “I’m also guessing that it’s going to be lost in a haze of faux Christian nonsense.” This, too, sad to say.
@Kathy: Agreed (as noted in the OP). But I don’t think that can be blamed on DOGE.
@Scott F.: To me it is worse than Trump’s failures. I fear that the kinds of democratic deficits in our system that I have written about for a long time now are what allowed Trump to emerge. He is not the core disease, but is a secondary infection.
@Matt Bernius:
Now, if people who vote for candidates like Trump gave a flying fuck about people in foreign countries, you’d be well on your way to creating different outcomes.
Provided that taxes wouldn’t go up.
@Eusebio:
FTFY.
@Steven L. Taylor:
WRT “Communicating them effectively to the people who need to know them,” I’m asserting that the NWS should’ve communicated the hazard more specifically and clearly to the public and officials. Had they done that, I don’t think the state and local officials would’ve blamed the NWS on Friday.
And I do think trump/doge cuts made NWS less effective in some respects.
@Eusebio:
What do you think that would mean? Do you think it means something outside the normal procedures?
And a curiosity question: do you live somewhere with routine severe weather and the commensurate reporting about it?
To me, this is a very similar situation to the LA fires earlier this year.
– In both cases, there were well-known risks with historic precedent. These weren’t – or should not have been – total surprises. It’s really just the scale of the disaster that wasn’t fully anticipated or planned for.
– Both had ample warning, and I think in both cases the NWS did what it was supposed to do.
– However, even with warning, mitigating a large-scale disaster in the time available was not possible in either case. Real mitigation is something that would need to happen far in advance of the warning, which is the difficult part.
– On that score, mitigating these events beforehand comes with difficult tradeoffs, both in terms of what’s politically possible, but also in terms of prioritization and resource allocation.
– There are always lessons learned. In any response to this kind of event (and similar kinds of events), there are always going to be mistakes identified, coulda-shoulda-woulda actions, and various policy, procedural, and resource changes to better respond in the future. This one is/will be no different. Just like I said after the LA fires (where I got a lot of pushback for making this same point), there will be lessons learned here and mistakes will be identified (and hopefully) corrected in time.
– Of course, the politics and especially partisans have pretty much reversed themselves from one situation to the other – the old and completely predictable partisan switcheroo. For political hobbyists observing from afar with no personal stake, being a team player is almost always the top priority.
Contrary to such partisans, my general view is that partisanship has very little to do with either this tragedy or the tragedy of the LA fires (or any number of other similar tragedies). These kinds of events are not confined to any ideology – we see them all over the world. The fundamental nature of humans and organizations composed of humans is to prioritize the short term and be lulled into a false sense of security, even for things that have happened before that we know are possible and likely in the future. We observe this phenomenon across various domains and at all levels, from the individual to national governments. The unfortunate reality is that we humans often have to learn lessons the hard way.
To illustrate, from my own experience, the LA fires served as a final wake-up call for me. Our house in Colorado is at the edge of a zone that’s at high risk for fire, near a major destructive fire that happened a decade ago. We did some fire mitigation efforts after moving here (the low-hanging fruit), but the bigger, more expensive, and more challenging things I’ve been putting off for years. Now, we are starting to do those things because the kind of fire in LA (or the 2021 Marshal Fire here in Colorado) could happen in my neighborhood. And it took me a while to take the risk more seriously than I did initially.
@Andy:
Agreed. And I agree, as you note, there has been some flipping of approaches based on political priors.
A lot of people are as confident about Kerr County now as others were about LA County. And about how obvious it should have been not to have done X, Y, or Z.
I hope I am being pretty consistent (not that you accussed me of otherwise), including the simple fact that while a lot of things like this are “obvious” in hindsight, that they are not obvious before they happened (see, here, for example).
One of the side stories developing is that another camp in the general area was monitoring the NWS warnings, and about 1:00 am decided to have 70 kids grab their gear and moved them to higher ground. Property damage but no people damage. The spokespeople seem to be quietly but repeatedly pointing out that they got no information from the state or county, only from the NWS.
From talking to a few people who manage camps up in fire country in my state, the annual turnover at such kid camps is high and there may be no locals on the staff. One of the things I’ll be watching for is about the staff at Mystic Camp. Were there people with local experience making the decision that “Yes, it’s 1:00 am. Yes, the eight-year-olds will be scared. But it’s time to exercise an abundance of caution and move them higher.”
@Andy: I do see that we did have some disagreement over the LA fires in terms of what “predictable” might have meant. In both LA and Texas, I guess my view is that these events were both conceivable, but the degree to which they were fully predictable in terms of high degrees of certainty and specificity is its own issue.
For example, that flash floods are predictable on the Guadalupe is true (and they were). That this exact event, as it unfolded, was less predictable in a specific sense is a different discussion.
@Michael Cain: I certainly think it possible that serious mistakes were made on the ground that day.
@Steven L. Taylor: One of the things in the aftermath of the LA fires is that in many/most of the affected neighborhoods, the houses that burned were built in the 1950s and 1960s. Where the old house had been scraped and a new house built to contemporary standards, the new houses didn’t burn even as their neighbors did. Remarkably simple decisions about roofing, siding, venting, and landscaping can make an enormous difference.
Texas seems to be particularly bad at anticipating disasters and requiring residents to take steps. Back in 2011 the Bastrop County fires burned 1,700 structures and did $350B in insured damage. Reports prior to the fires were that lots of home owners had dried pine needles piled six inches deep on parts of their roofs, or knee-high drifts of needles adjacent to the building. Maintaining a safe property in fire country is a lot of work. (Maintaining a safe property in flood country is easy: don’t build there.)
@Steven L. Taylor:
I should’ve been clear that I was expanding/commenting on the third point made by @Kathy:. Also, I think the original post is well fleshed out, and does offer a lot of angles to pursue–I didn’t even mention the SSA email, which demonstrated the politicization of that agency’s leadership, and appeared in inboxes a few hours after the Flood Watch was issued for Kerr and nearby counties.
As for the NWS communicating the hazard better/more specifically, from USA Today:
Okay, the first part of this message is attention getting, but the hazard wording is pathetically generic. The actual hazard in question went well beyond low water crossings, small creeks, and underpasses. The warning failed to say that flash flooding will be near record levels, that all areas within the floodplain must be evacuated, and to expect buildings and campgrounds to be rapidly inundated by floodwaters. This is a bread-and-butter function of the NWS–take rainfall data and upstream river gage data, plug it into the model for the watershed, and tell people the expected magnitude and timing of flooding downstream–and a well-rounded NWS office having people with experience in all the facets (I’m guessing forecasting, modeling, emergency management coordination, etc.) should’ve been more effective. I don’t think this is outside normal procedures. I think they largely met requirements by issuing timely watches and warnings, but failed to convey the severity of the impending flood and also failed to insure that emergency management officials were notified immediately, as evidence by the the numerous “we didn’t know”(s) by officials on Friday.
I’m not somewhere with unusually routine severe weather. Today it was thunderstorms training over an area a few miles away, resulting in a Flash Flood Warning, but just some light rain here.
@Steven L. Taylor:
IMO, these are both situations that we know are going to happen; the only question is when and how bad it will be. We know the indicators well enough to provide some warning ahead of time (and warning was given), but that amount of warning time is never enough to fully prepare.
The difficulty is that acting to mitigate and adequately prepare for these events has to be done well in advance of when they occur. That is, as I noted in the LA Fires thread, difficult on several levels.
How do weather alerts work? What can the local authorities do about them?
I’m completely unfamiliar with these. I know how the seismic alert works and what to do if it goes off*. We don’t get weather alerts, other than weather reports and maybe traffic reports. But then, Mexico City is not subject to disasters due to severe weather. We don’t have snow at all, nor hurricanes** or tornadoes. Rains can wreak havoc, but mostly material damage as opposed to dozens of people drowning (I think this is true of most cities).
While on vacation in Orlando in 2006, there were some tornado warnings on the morning news on TV. I’d no idea what to do in case of one. Did the hotel have a basement or other shelter? Did the Disney parks? No clue.
*In the early days of the seismic alert, the idea was to broadcast it on radio. This was far less than ideal. In addition, people had no idea what to do if they chanced to hear it. Therefore the installation of loudspeakers all over the city, and the annual earthquake drills.
** While we’re hundreds of kilometers from the coast, it’s possible for a hurricane to travel far inland. In 1988, hurricane Gilbert hit Monterrey, which is about as far inland as Mexico City. And the death toll was pretty bad.
@Steven L. Taylor:
And of course there’s people who, in both cases, said and are still saying Republican climate change denial is deadly — making it more difficult to mitigate these increasingly intensifying and increasingly strange extreme weather events. That hasn’t changed, whether it’s unprecedented January hurricane force blowtorch wind gusts in LA County, unprecedented summer flash flooding in Texas, or unprecedented hurricane flooding in North Carolina mountain terrain once thought flood proof at highland elevation.
I don’t see folks changing their views on that, now that Kern County is feeling the effects of inability to kick our fossil fuel addiction — thanks to rightwing nuttery and science denial.
Climate change doesn’t care about self-aggrandizing bothsidesism, nor does it discriminate between red, blue, and swing states. We all are going to suffer if we don’t act. So Republicans need to stop lying about climate science and join Democrats and the rest of the developed world in harm reduction efforts.
By contrast, the Big Ugly Bill’s gutting of clean energy and backsliding away from EV is exactly what we do not need rn.
@Michael Cain: Sure. But that has nothing to do with DOGE or us/them politics in the era of Trump.
@Eusebio: That warning comports with the kinds of warnings we get all the time, especially wrt tornadoes. I agree that the info is too generic to be as useful as I would like it to be. I would like to see better, but that doesn’t have anything to do with DOGE and this event.
Now, I will say that cuts to NWS and the like may preclude better alerts systems from being developed, and I will readily lay that at DOGE’s/Trump’s feet.
@DK:
No argument.
I certainly hope that is not how you see what I am saying.
@Andy:
Agreed. I suppose we differ, to a degree, as to, therefore, how much the word “predictable” is applicable (I think this was definitely the case in the LA fire case).
@Steven L. Taylor:
Of course not. I’m speak in general, not at you or anyone. Our horserace narratives about partisanship or nonpartisanship are not relevant right now, because the X factor in all of this climate change. No jurisdiction is going to be able outrun or out-prepare climate change, amid never-before-seen discrete events. California, Texas, wherever.
Meanwhile, one of the two dominant political parties in the world’s dominant superpower seems not just dedicated denying climate change, but to blocking and reversing efforts to mitigate it. While also crippling government, both in general and in its functions critical to address the climate crisis. This is harming California, Texas, Florida, North Carolina…the whole planet really.
At this point, it’s not enough to defeat Republicans at the ballot box. We need conservatives who know better act to actually step it up try to push their party away from this madness, for the good of the world. Whether this need gets met, I don’t know. Doesn’t look promising.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Here’s how I look at it in terms of analysis:
– First is the history – has this happened before, and how often, and under what conditions?
– Second is – are those conditions still applicable today? If the answer is yes, then I think one can reliably predict it will happen again. Scale and timing are the big unknowns.
In the case of LA, there have been at least 25 major fires in LA County since 1950. The wildfire conditions remain applicable today and are arguably worse due to increased urbanization and the effects of climate change.
It’s a similar story with flooding in the Guadalupe, although it occurs less frequently than fires in LA. But that’s still – at my rough count – six major floods since 1950. And the conditions are still there today, and are also affected by urbanization and climate change.
So I feel entirely comfortable in predicting, right now, that there will be additional destructive fires in LA and flooding on the Guadalupe in the future. If we had more rational politics, instead of the tribal politics that have seeped into everything, those politics would focus on future mitigation and response, and weigh all the various tradeoffs in developing and implementing changes. Alas, that is not the political world we live in.
@DK: Thanks for the clarification.
@Andy: Sure. It was generally predictable that there could be significant flash flooding on the Guadalupe River. And I agree there will be again.
But that does mean that the specifics of the July 4th flood was able to be predicted.
This is the distinction I am making (and was trying to make about the LA fires at the time).
@DK:
I think it’s not accurate to say these are never-before-seen discrete events. Quite the contrary, they have happened historically with some frequency, which is why we can predict they will happen again and why it’s appropriate to criticize a lack of preparation.
Although I don’t agree that we can’t outrun or out-prepare climate change, if you are correct, then we are fucked given the inevitability of future emissions increases that will happen regardless of what the US does.
I believe it’s been common practice for planners and designers to design for a “hundred year” storm, flood, what have you; which is to say they looked at records, identified the worst event in the last century, and designed to withstand it. Unfortunately, with climate change, the last hundred years is not a reliable guide. IIRC, the cities in ND on the Red River got serious about levies and pumping stations after their third hundred year flood in 20 years or so.
I read somewhere the subject camp is quite old. If flooding has never been a problem in the past at that camp, there’d be a tendency to assume it was safe. I have no idea what the flood history on the Guadalupe is, but people would tend to be guided by it, and they should not be.
@gVOR10:
Yes, if I was in a particularly pedantic mood, I’d say my use of the word ‘never’ is overheated. But the overall bird’s eye view point seems pretty accurate to me: climate change is worsening extreme weather events in intensity and frequency, and in ways that are unpredictable and often surprising — including to the scientists and meteorologists the public relies on to make decisions.
So if we don’t address climate change, we will continue to be caught flat-footed trying to catch up to intensifying, more frequent, more extreme, and more erratic disasters.
It could be that locals and officials everywhere — from LA County, CA to Kerr County, Texas to the NWS and NOAA to the Carolinas — are all just careless and negligent. This sounds too pat to me, like a know-it-all in hindsight.
It’s more likely future climate crisis outcomes actually are impossible to fully predict and prepare for before-the-fact.
‘Literally off the charts’: LA’s critically dry conditions stun scientists as fires rage (CalMatters)
LA’s wildfires sparked by rare collision of climate factors (Axios)
Why was the flooding in Asheville, North Carolina, so extreme? Meteorologists explain. (ABC News)
Texas flood forecasts were accurate. It wasn’t enough to save lives. (Politico)
If climate change is making extreme weather more intense — and it is — then it follows that efforts to mitigate climate change are the best way to mitigate these events. Because, no, we actually can’t always predict what this increasing intensity will look like in the future. It wasn’t inevitable that we had to do so little about pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere. Seems to me an ounce of prevention would be worth a pound of preparedness.
What good is to have a warning system if nobody can hear it? It is soon to know exactly where the blame is on something that’s so easily preventable but if the local reports are accurate that the NWS lost its community coordinator who would have made sure the alerts would have gone to the right people, well we can see where that’s a problem. In legal terms, one would need to assign blame on a sliding scale of contributory negligence and one’s opinion will inevitably be different from another but if I had to chose in order of descending responsibility I would go 1-camp managers, 2-local and state government officials, 3-NWS, 4-the parents. Yes, the parents bear some responsibility if the knew or should have known that their kids were camping in the middle of a flood plain in the middle of flood season.
@DK: I think you’re replying to @Andy:, not me.
The severity of the flood could not have been forecasted before the rain fell, but I continue to contend that the flash flood magnitude and timing could have been predicted in the hours before the river flooded catastrophically around Kerrville.
I also continue to believe that personnel cuts/doge reduced the effectiveness of the NWS office, and offer the following:
-State, county, and local emergency management officials, who should have been looped in to NWS predictions, claimed to have been unaware. At a news conference on Friday, Texas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, and Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice each blamed NWS forecasts without elaborating on whether they’d received updated flood predictions. Rice also went to the river between 3:30 and 4:00 am, and said there was very light rain and no signs of the river rising…at a time when NWS flood predictions should’ve told him that people need to immediately move off the floodplain because hell is about to break loose.
-We’ve yet to hear (I think) the severity of flooding predicted by the NWS in the early morning hours, which is something they should have been doing, and have not been told how the NWS communicated with emergency management officials. And recent staffing reductions are necessarily going to diminish the capability of the NWS office. Ex 1: KXAN reported in April, “Head of local weather warnings takes early retirement as NOAA cuts continue,” Ex 2: the NYT reported on Saturday, “The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said – the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
Final tidbit: Today Kerrville Manager Rice was asked if there was any discussion to evacuate or activate emergency plans. He didn’t answer that directly, but said they don’t want to cry wolf, and want to activate it at the right time. IOW, they never even considered getting people to evacuate.
Add.: If there were flood warning sirens, would they have even been activated before it was too late?
I am a guy who spent my life analyzing systems, diagnosing problems (we called them “bugs”), and figuring out how to make them perform better.
Clearly, better performance viz flood warnings is desirable. So I am interested in a detailed discussion of what went wrong.
However, that isn’t a political narrative. It isn’t something you campaign on. So we are seeing clashes here between political narratives and the interests of someone like me, and perhaps others.
I have no intention of stopping the political narrative in the mainstream. It would be nice to have a space somewhere on the internet though, where we could try and understand facts and systems and so on.
@Kathy: I agree. When I watched the HBO limited series, Chernobyl, one of the things that struck me was that as much as the Soviet government tried to publicly lie and evade responsibility for the disaster, behind the scenes, they were doing everything possible to mitigate it. It’s a big contrast between avoiding responsibility both in public and behind the scenes.