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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am so tired of blaming Trump for everything, or blaming Biden, or whomever. Natural disasters happen, people die, it’s horrible and devastating but it’s not always someone’s fault. If that lake had a history of flooding, why was a children’s camp built right there beside it?[/quote]

Alternatively you could ask why that Texas town didn’t value flood monitoring enough to pay the $50k required to install a rudimentary system.  Instead they wanted to keep taxes low.    Smart science based policies save lives.  Regulations about flood areas save lives. Rural Texas voted against this and now there’s a lot of dead kids (and adults). [/quote]

Why I would never send my child to camp in rural Texas.  Yes disasters happen.   But this one was predictable had they had smarter local government officials.

https://www.tovima.com/wsj/officials-pushed-for-better-warning-system-for-years-before-deadly-floods/
Officials Pushed for Better Warning System for Years Before Deadly Floods

07.07.2025
17:00
The Wall Street Journal
By Scott Calvert, John West, Jim Carlton and Joe Barrett, The Wall Street Journal

A sheriff in 2016 recalled pulling ‘kids out of trees’ in summer camps as leaders repeatedly discussed installing a siren system, but didn’t do so
former sheriff pushed Kerr County commissioners nearly a decade ago to adopt a more robust flood-warning system, telling government officials how he “spent hours in those helicopters pulling kids out of trees here (in) our summer camps,” according to meeting records.

Then-Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer was a proponent of outdoor sirens, having responded as a deputy to the 1987 floods that killed 10 teenagers at a camp in nearby Kendall County. He made the comments in 2016, after deadly floods ravaged a different part of Texas the year before.

“We were trying to think of, what can we do to make sure that never happens here?” Hierholzer, who served as Kerr County sheriff from 2000 to 2020, recalled in an interview Sunday with The Wall Street Journal. “And that’s why we were looking at everything that we could come up with, whether it be sirens, whether it be any other systems that we could.”

That suggestion, from him and others, was never adopted.
[/quote]

Seems like red states have very short memories about preventable tragedies…[/quote]

Joe Biden was president for 4 years. He had FOUR years to fix the flooding problem in Texas. But he didn’t.

The blood of these children is on his hands. [/quote]

That's b******* he absolutely took action and had policies to address climate change.  Trump has trashed them all.[/quote]

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/

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Equilibrium & Sustainability
Deadly Texas floods leave officials pointing fingers after warnings missed
by Saul Elbein - 07/07/25 5:21 PM ET

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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.

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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.”

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“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.

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