Are We Prepared for the Next Deadly Floods?

(Bloomberg Opinion) — It’s too soon to properly analyze or assign blame for the tragedy of the July 4 floods in Texas. It’s still unfolding, after all, with rescuers still searching for missing people. The internet has its theories, but it will be many days before we have a full picture of why so many needlessly lost their lives.

But it’s not too soon to consider whether we’re prepared for the next such unthinkable event. Because it could happen tomorrow. 

More than 100 people in several counties died in the floods that swept through the Texas Hill Country over the weekend, including dozens of children and counselors at an all-girls summer camp on the Guadalupe River. The proximate cause of the disaster was a brief but unbelievably intense deluge of the sort that has a one-in-1,000 chance of happening in a year. In some places, 20 inches of rain fell in a matter of hours, and the Guadalupe surged more than 20 feet. Beyond that, there were a few potential ultimate causes:(1)

Because warmer air holds more water, climate change makes such torrential downpours far more likely, in some places making formerly “1,000-year” rainfalls happen once every five years. It has also increased the chances of extreme weather intensifying quickly, overwhelming local authorities. But it’s too soon to say just how much more likely climate change made this particular tragedy. This part of Texas was flooding long before the climate began changing. It’s not called “Flash Flood Alley” for nothing.

Texas officials and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appeared to blame federal weather forecasters for failing to predict rainfall amounts and warn people of the danger. Noem said that the National Weather Service had an “ancient system” and that President Donald Trump is “currently upgrading the technology.” It’s true the NWS didn’t predict exactly how much rain would fall, and some locals claimed not to get flood warnings until it was too late. But others said they were alerted in plenty of time, and the NWS forecasts were plenty dire enough. I’m unaware of any existing technology that can accurately foresee 20 inches of rain falling overnight.

Far from upgrading the NWS, Trump has been gutting it, laying off hundreds of workers and reducing the volume of data the service can collect to hone its forecasts. Staff cuts at local NWS offices in Texas may have made it harder to coordinate with local officials, the New York Times reported. But those offices are also among some of the best-staffed in the country, Bloomberg News noted.

Even if we never completely sort this out, a couple of things were true before the Texas floods and are still true today: The climate is becoming increasingly dangerous, and we must prepare for every contingency. At the moment, at every level of government, we’re failing to meet that challenge.

For one relevant example, consider Kerr County, Texas, where the vast majority of this weekend’s flood deaths occurred. Despite long being one of the most flood-prone counties in the state, it lacks a modern flood warning system because “taxpayers won’t pay for it,” the county’s highest-ranking official told the Times. 

As another official put it during a 2016 hearing when discussing whether to upgrade what he called Kerr County’s “pretty antiquated” system:

We’ve had a lot of damage, we’ve had deaths associated with [flooding]. We also have more summer camps than anybody else along the Guadalupe River. So we got a potential there. We’ve got, you know, we can probably cost-benefit analysis [whether a new system] would save a few lives [and] is probably worth the money.” [Emphasis added.]

Whether a cost-benefit analysis was ever performed, the county never got its new warning system. What would the results of such an analysis be after this weekend’s tragedy at Camp Mystic?

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has put life- and property-saving tools further out of reach by killing the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program. FEMA has taken back $880 million in funds that might have helped Kerr County and others prepare for future disasters. Trump and Noem have declared their intention to end FEMA altogether and leave states with the responsibility for both disaster prep and cleanup when the number and destructiveness of disasters are rising.

That probably means individuals will often be left to their own devices. Most of us will need a better understanding of just how vulnerable we are to floods, wildfires and other hazards. We can’t rely on government officials to give us adequate warning of the dangers and an action plan when those dangers arrive. We’ll need to do our own weather monitoring and have tested plans to escape with our loved ones to safer ground.

Most of all, we can’t become numb to this and succumb to “warning fatigue,” a real threat as the pace of disasters increases. That risk will rise if our weather forecasts lose accuracy under Trump’s assault on weather and climate science. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law even as Texas was flooded, calls for closing the weather and climate research labs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including the National Severe Storms Lab, which studies flash flooding. 

So our future could be one of both false alarms and epic disasters that seemingly come from nowhere. But this shouldn’t be reason for despair. We still have the power to shape our own futures and save our own lives, while also demanding that those with even more power actually start using it for good.

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(1) I won’t dignify with a rebuttal the right-wing conspiracy theory that somebody is controlling the weather to make these tragedies more likely. I’ll let Ted Cruz do that.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

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