TX flood and climate change
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Anonymous
This is how I see it too. They were pushing their luck and it finally ran out. |
Anonymous
Their luck ran out decades ago. They had an incident with campers just 8 years ago. They were just too cheap to fix it (they=camp owners, local government officials and state government officials.) |
Anonymous
That's b******* he absolutely took action and had policies to address climate change. Trump has trashed them all. |
Anonymous
Why do flood always wash away innocent children when they could take out the likes of you. |
Anonymous
Republican Congress members voted against flood warning systems under Biden, including the one representing the Texas flood zone Stupid is as stupid does. https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/5388538-texas-floods-flash-flooding-camp-mystic-dhs-nws-warnings/ News Policy Business Health Opinion Events Jobs Join/Log In Video Newsletters Search trending: Trump megabill Texas floods MAGA Epstein Trump Musk sponsored: Content from Raft Content from Davita Just In Trump confirms he will travel to Texas on Friday after fatal flooding News | 11 minutes ago Trump directs Treasury to limit wind and solar tax credits Energy & Environment | 25 minutes ago Trump ‘all for’ Iran peace talks, but ‘ready, willing and able’ to strike again International | 39 minutes ago VA reverses on major workforce cuts Defense | 48 minutes ago Trump says Aug. 1 tariff deadline 'not 100 percent firm' International | 1 hour ago Trump: ‘We have to’ send Ukraine more weapons Administration | 1 hour ago Paris closes Seine to swimmers 1 day after ending ban News | 1 hour ago Netanyahu presents Trump with letter nominating him for Nobel Peace Prize News | 1 hour ago View all Equilibrium & Sustainability Deadly Texas floods leave officials pointing fingers after warnings missed by Saul Elbein - 07/07/25 5:21 PM ET Unmute Current Time 0:01 / Duration 2:52 Captions Fullscreen Share Play AUSTIN, Texas — Local, state and federal officials are all pointing fingers in the wake of the deadly Texas flooding, but one thing is certain: The warnings weren’t heard by the people who needed them. After the catastrophic Independence Day floods that killed at least 90 across central Texas, state and county officials told reporters that the storm had come without warning. But a wide array of meteorologists — and the Trump administration itself — has argued that those officials, as well as local residents, received a long train of advisories that a dangerous flood was gathering. The timeline of the floods on Friday, experts say, revealed a deadly gap in the “last mile” system that turns those forecasts into life-saving action. That issue is particularly pronounced in central Texas, where cellphones go off with National Weather Service (NWS) flash flood advisories practically every time there is a thunderstorm — and where limestone canyons split by countless creeks and punctuated by riverside campgrounds and vacation homes are particularly vulnerable to sudden floods. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) timeline released over the weekend showed a drumbeat of steadily increasing warnings — something that is characteristic of flash floods, said John Sokich, former legislative director of the NWS staffers union. WH on Harvard civil rights anti-semitism violations Whether a specific neighborhood or camp floods can come down to “which creek basin the rainfall is going to fall, and 3 miles makes a complete difference,” Sokich said. So NWS forecasters, he said, put out regionwide warnings of potential flash floods, which they tighten as the danger develops. “And then when it gets really bad, they put out the ‘catastrophic flood levels,’ messages, which is what they did for the situation in Texas.” Sign up for the Morning Report The latest in politics and policy. Direct to your inbox. Email address By signing up, I agree to the Terms of Use, have reviewed the Privacy Policy, and to receive personalized offers and communications via email, on-site notifications, and targeted advertising using my email address from The Hill, Nexstar Media Inc., and its affiliates “The challenge there,” he added, “was people receiving the information.” Meteorologists’ warnings of potential flooding, which drew on NWS forecasts, began as early as Wednesday, when CBS Austin meteorologist Avery Tomasco warned that the dregs of Tropical Storm Barry had parked “all this tropical fuel” over central Texas. “I hesitate to show you this because it’s so outlandish,” Tomasco said, but the storm could produce “5 to 15 inches of rain somewhere in central Texas. Again, I think that’s pretty far-fetched, but you can’t rule out something crazy happening when you have this kind of tropical air in place.” By sunset the night before the floods, federal forecasters were warning that rainfall would “quickly overwhelm” the baked-dry soil. By 1:14 a.m. local time, the NWS released the first direct flash flood warnings for Kerr County, which officials told The Texas Tribune should have triggered direct warnings to those in harm’s way. Instead, beginning on the day of the flood, state and local officials insisted they had no idea the flood was coming. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said leaders “had no reason to believe this was going to be anything like what has happened here, none whatsoever.” They were echoed the following day by Nim Kidd, the state’s top emergency management official, who told reporters that forecasts “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.” That quote “baffled” meteorologist Ryan Maue, who in a post on social platform X blamed Kidd for setting off “a furious news cycle in which the National Weather Service was blamed for the tragic events because a forecast 2 days prior wasn’t as extreme.” On Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that “something went wrong” when Camp Mystic and other sleepaway camps alongside the region’s rivers didn’t receive warnings of the oncoming waters. “Next time there’s a flood,” Cruz said during a Kerr County press conference Monday, “I hope we have in place processes to remove the most vulnerable from harm’s way. But that’s going to be process that will take careful examination of what happened.” Some — like Sokich — argued that one possibility is that after rounds of staff reductions, NWS offices that may have had enough staff to issue accurate predictions didn’t have the personnel for potentially life-saving outreach. “If you don’t have the full staff, then you can’t do that,” he said. “People are just focusing on issuing the watches and warnings.” University of California, Los Angeles meteorologist Daniel Swain wrote on X that such outreach is “one of the first things to go away when offices are critically understaffed.” On Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) told reporters that he would urge state lawmakers to focus on a better system of state warnings in the upcoming July special legislative session. One such system exists in other flood-prone basins, where gauges in a cresting river automatically send alerts to a network of river sirens, which sound alarms across the area. That’s technology that Kerrville officials say they have needed for years. But locals “reeled at the cost” of a county program, Kelly told PBS’s “Frontline,” and attempts to pay for it with state or federal funds failed. In 2018, during the first Trump administration, Kerr County and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority applied to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for about $1 million to build a flood warning system — and were denied, KXAN reported. This year, a bill that would have spent $500 million on a modern system of disaster warnings across the state passed the House but died in the Senate. One House member who voted against it, first-term state Rep. Wes Virdell (R), represents Kerr County. “I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” Virdell told The Texas Tribune on Sunday, adding that he had objected to the measure’s price tag. |
Anonymous
This +100. |
Anonymous
DP. Totally a rando. And frankly I am a lot more concerned about the callous craven disregard of Republicans that brought us to this tragic and senseless and preventable loss of life than I am about this rando’s comment. |
Anonymous
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It’s a pretty wealthy state with plenty of resources, so maybe they need to bring in DOGE to help them find some money in the funding that can be spent on mitigating for floods. Rather than let go of NOAA scientists, DOGE can be put to work in Texas helping them find money and reallocate resources. Let’s face it, these floods aren’t stopping in our lifetime.
At least get the area closed to camping until engineers can determine what kind of work needs to be done. Where does all their money go that they couldn’t find a few million to handle this properly? |
Anonymous
Texas plans to cut property taxes by $51 billion in the next two years. But they couldn't find the $1million for a flood safety system in the county labeled the "flood zone." That's where their priorities are... |
Anonymous
So the people of central Texas have spoken, and we across the US should respect their decision, I guess. |
Anonymous
And considering the amount of money the families of these campers had, they could’ve pooled money and covered the cost for the sake of their kids. |
Anonymous
Federal govt mostly NWS 1 Coast Guards team dispatched Failure after failure after failure by this admin |
Anonymous
No, we will just point out that they care more about money than they do about that even their own children. Their own children’s blood is on their hand. I mean, I’d respect it if their decisions just killed their own children instead of countless children across the United States. |
Anonymous
| Counties will rightly bear the brunt of the blame here. It's their job to install monitoring systems and warning protocols. Blaming the NWS is BS. |
Anonymous
| Texas has a culture of ignoring safety concerns and being incredibly cheap with anything they do build so they can grift as much money from the government as possible. No surprise local officials failed their community. |