Central Texas floods. Still from video posted to X.

“Ignorance might be bliss for the ignorant, but for the rest of us it’s a right fucking pain in the arse.”

– Ricky Gervais

While offering his “thoughts and prayers” for the families of those drowned in the Texas floods, JD Vance referred to the killer torrents that swept away more than 100 people, including dozens of children, as “an incomprehensible tragedy.”

“Incomprehensible?”

Only if you ignore the fact that the Girls Camp was allowed to be built and continue operating in one of the most flood-prone valleys in the US, that the climate crisis is making these floods much more frequent and then in order to give more tax breaks to billionaires you gutted the staff of the National Weather Service that could have given these vulnerable children warning of the imminent danger that would claim their lives …If you don’t ignore these facts, this tragedy was both entirely predictable and avoidable.

Trump put his own self-exculpating spin on the floods, saying they were impossible to foresee: “Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it.” In fact, almost anyone who knew the slightest thing about the area known as “Flood Alley” saw it coming. Because it had already come, more than once. Previous recent floods had killed 10 people in 1987, 31 people in 1998 and 26 people in 2015.

The hill country of central Texas contains some of the most flood-prone valleys in the United States. The Guadeloupe River was so flood-prone that the Kerr County sheriff had recommended installing a flash flood warning system back in 2016. And the Obama administration agreed to the request, only to have the Texas Division of Environmental Management.

Climate change has made the extreme rainfall episodes that have plagued this region of Texas for decades even more frequent and more lethal. In central Texas, the intensity of extreme rainfall events has increased by 19% since 1985.

On July 3, remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which had whacked the gulf coast of Mexico earlier in the week, settled over central Texas, eventually dumping four months of rainfall on the Texas Hill Country (about 1.8 trillion gallon) in the next three days. That afternoon, the depleted ranks of the National Weather Service issued its first alert, warning of flash floods in the Guadalupe River valley, predicting rainfall totals of more than 6 inches in 12 hours. The predictions were made by a seriously understaffed NWS office in San Antonio, which lacked both a chief meteorologist and a warning coordination meteorologist.

It’s not just the NWS that finds itself overworked and understaff as the warming climate unleashes stronger and stronger storms. The slashes to NOAA’s budget and staffing are going to dangerously degrade accurate and timely predictions of the threats posed by tropical storms, cyclones and hurricanes. According to Dr. Frank Marks, a 45-year hurricane veteran, the staff needed to fly NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft is down by 50% this year.

This initial forecast proved to be a fatal underestimation and the emergency alert, urging residents to evacuate to higher ground (though how high that ground was and whether it was high enough remains unclear) didn’t come out until 4:30 in the morning. By 6:AM, it was too late, the river was already flowing at record flood levels. More than 20 inches of rain would fall on the Guadalupe Valley watershed in the next three days, causing the river to surge from 3.5 feet to 34.29 feet in less than an hour and a half, sweeping away houses, bridges, barns, roads, farm animals and at least 120 people (173 remain missing), including as many as 27 young girls and counselors at Camp Mystic, the summer camp for evangelical girls. Most of the cabins at the camp, run for years by Conservative Christians, were located in flood zones, some in areas label “extreme risk.”

In 2019, the owners of the camp completed a multi-million dollar renovation. But instead of moving the most vulnerable cabins out of the flood zone, it built more cabins inside it. Anna Serra-Lobet, a flood risk researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told the New York Times that allowing these cabins to be built in extreme risk “floodways” was “like pitching a tent in a highway. It’s going to happen, sooner or later. A car is going to come or a flood is going to come.”Anna Serra-Lobet, a flood risk researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told the New York Times that allowing these cabins to be built in extreme risk “floodways” was “like pitching a tent in a highway. It’s going to happen, sooner or later. A car is going to come or a flood is going to come.”

Texas Governor Gregg Abbott didn’t waste much time in urging a socialist response to the disaster, as he begged Trump for immediate help. The emergency aid wasn’t quick in coming, however. Indeed, FEMA’s response to the Texas floods was crippled by cost controls imposed on the agency by DHS head Kristi Noem, who didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began. Still Abbott rejected calls for an investigation into the lack of warnings and the bungled rescue operations, calling it “words of losers.” He presumably wasn’t talking about those who “lost” their lives and loved ones, though who knows given the hair-chested rhetoric he customarily deploys.

Days went by, as the death toll continued to mount, without a single word from Trump and Noem’s pick to head FEMA, David Richardson, prompting a FEMA staffer to denounce Richardson for showing “a lack of regard in disaster response, and a lack of care for communities that suffer through these disasters.”

Heckuva job, Puppy Slayer!

Five years from now, we’ll long for the cool June of 2025…

Rep. Tim Burchett: “God put coal in the ground, let’s use it… There’s a reason as Trump told me........

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