I'm feeling slightly judgmental on the Texas flooding and I don't know if my judgment is merited

[conuly]

So, I read an article that said that the flooded cabins at the summer camp were low-lying, about 500 feet from the river. 500 feet is less than a tenth of a mile, so... one or two minutes walk.

And I read another that said that while the dramatic scale of this flooding was unprecedented, the fact that the river floods was very much not.

Am I right to think that at some point since the founding of the camp they ought to have moved the cabins back, put up a flood wall, or both? I live on a hill - if the water a few blocks down floods badly enough to affect us up here, that really will have been unpredictable! So I don't know about living quite that close to water at my front door. Maybe my intuition here is wrong and those precautions could not possibly have occurred to anybody?

Also, two links where you can donate.

Comments

[lilysea]

Apparently one of the factors that caused the deaths was that in 2016, the government opted to not spend money on flood warning sirens and other warning measures, because it preferred to spend the money on roads.

Also, the water at the campsite rose really really fast - 20 feet in 20 minutes.

[conuly]

Given how fast the floods rose, I'm actually not sure any warning system would've been enough to avoid calamity - but I still wonder if moving the cabins further back years ago was something they ought to have done.

[lilysea]

I just looked up Camp Mystic on wikipedia - I was curious if they were for-profit or not-for-profit, because flood walls aren't cheap -

and

"In 1932, the camp suffered a flash flood which washed away several cabins, but no fatalities were reported."

I wonder if the cabins that were washed away in 1932 were rebuilt on higher ground, or rebuilt on the same locations they were washed away from in 1932

[rebeccmeister]

Having lived in Texas, I don't think I could say for certain in this particular case, but in general, Texans have culturally accepted building in flood-prone areas where they really should not build.

This hit a lot of people really hard when Harvey landed in Houston. It's just going to keep happening, and it's tragic.

[conuly]

Well, maybe a big enough tragedy will prompt some sort of legislation banning people from putting residences and sleeping quarters so close to the water on unelevated land. It shouldn't have to take that, but.

[spiralsheep]

We had bans on building at ground level on flood plains over here. Developers built a whole estate of new-build housing on a notorious flood plain (overflow not dry river channel) with only garages at ground level. They got sold to people who couldn't afford better houses elsewhere. The new inhabitants almost all immediately build ground floor extensions.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[conuly]

Jesus.

[fox]

You would think. And yet, Sandy Hook changed nothing. Uvalde changed nothing. Parkland changed nothing.

[rebeccmeister]

It shouldn't, but history does suggest otherwise, sigh.

A couple years ago I listened to a This American Life episode about the climate change concept of managed retreats, but also how people utterly and absolutely refuse to do them. So that's why we'll have even more climate refugees, sigh.

[altamira16]

Clearly, you do not understand the bootstraps you must pull yourself up by because you do not have Texas galaxy brain politics.

There are a lot of good Texans. Unfortunately, they are not in charge of the government.

[adafrog]

There are a lot of good Texans. Unfortunately, they are not in charge of the government.
Word. (I also live in Texas, but in the Panhandle)

"government opted to not spend money"

[disgruntledgirl]

Correct!! (Texan here and heard this on the radio today)
In an August 2016 commissioners court meeting, then Commissioner Buster Baldwin voted against a $50,000 flood engineering study, saying, "I think this whole thing is a little extravagant for Kerr County and I see the word sirens and all that stuff in here."

Lt Gov Dan Patrick - who just spent all of the spring season trying to destroy 8,000 small businesses by banning CBD and THC from the state of Texas (a year after the populace voted to legalize it) threw down chaff and flare by saying "If the city can’t afford it, then the state will step up," - hoping to distract from the FACT that Bill HB 13 had passed the House vote with flying colors and was moved to the Senate for a vote but some reason it died in committee around .... April, when he was in a fervor over THC. The Senate never even looked or voted on it. Patrick neglected to bring attention to it.
HB13 was a bill to improve local disaster warning systems.

Re: "government opted to not spend money"

[conuly]

Well, fucking fuck, and fuck him too.

[jhetley]

My sense from even further away is that the camps should not have been built in a known flood channel.

[conuly]

Not the cabins, anyway. They could put recreation areas there, and put all the cabins uphill a bit.

[altamira16]

Because I am a nerd, I was trying to map the area in QGIS and learn about historic flooding in the region.

A lot of floods in that area happen this time of year or in the fall. There was a geologist who did a YouTube about it saying that with it being so hot, the ground was extremely dry. And the way the hills are leads to flooding, like they had in West Virginia and Kentucky. He showed the topography of the hill country involved.

So I was trying to map the Guadalupe River, and the various towns on it that have flooded. This page by the town of Seguin about the historical floods in the region was an interesting read.

There was a flood in Contour, TX (also on the Guadalupe River) in 1987 that killed like ten girls in a bus going to some Christian camp. Contour recently installed a warning system and had zero deaths.

With the cuts in the National Weather Service (NWS), it is not clear if the NWS called the local office of emergency management to let them know what was coming. Nim Kidd, the head of emergency management for Texas who was actually being considered to head FEMA by Trump at some point, said the NWS predictions were bad, but some other scientist was like "Hey, with climate change, the predictions are going to be bad."

And The Handbasket had an article about Kristi Noem screwing up FEMA response.

Multiple levels of Republican governing are failing, and everyone is patting every other person's back talking about what a great job everyone was doing.

Here is one of the updates where Greg Abbott and Kristi Noem are shamefully thanking Trump and each other for being awesome. Noem goes into complete disinformation meltdown at the end when journalists are asking her real questions. What if the DOGE cuts hadn't happened to the NWS? The most informative people on this are the judge who is the highest government official of Kerrville and Nim Kidd.

[conuly]

Multiple levels of Republican governing are failing, and everyone is patting every other person's back talking about what a great job everyone was doing.

They could at least have the common decency to throw each other under the collective bus.

[ionelv]

I have a different take on prevention: use the AMBER alert system and mandate that all weather related events are on by default. Here in Canada, all weather related alerts (and more common amber alerts) blare a horrible sound on my cellphone and it takes some doing to turn them off. I also read that some people in Kerr County did get cellphone weather alerts and promptly ignored them due to the “the boy who cried wolf” syndrome. Piggybacking on cellphone alerts should much much cheaper than any other proposed remedy IMO. Reducing the number of low-level weather alerts should also help with the ignore problem.

[the_siobhan]

I keep seeing articles that say we can't stop climate change, we can only prepare for it. OK... and? Where are the flood barriers and hurricane shelters being built then?

[nanslice]

This has been mishandled at every step and I find myself also feeling pretty judgemental about it as well. The loss of life is absolutely a tragedy. Every person in authority failed.

[magid]

Given the colossal f’up at all levels of authority, I admit, I’m far less likely to donate than if this were something that had never happened before.

Also, it’s the role of the state/government/country to help those in disaster areas. Yeah, the current administration doesn’t seem to think that’s one of the things they should do, and I really really really don’t feel called to try to fill that gap.

::channels my inner curmudgeon::

[adafrog]

I feel like an ass, but ITA with this. I hadn't even heard that it had happened before, but I was thinking about a similar situation where there were f-ups, and the info didn't get out. So many people died because the government couldn't be assed to have someone in the office overnight.

[elisi]

I came across this on Mastodon:

https://mas.to/@rikiwilchins.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy/114818623395168978

[conuly]

Then my intuition is right, and whatever responsible adults walked by those cabins and never said "This is really close to those waters, let's move them" has blood on their hands.

[ionelv]

I can do better with simple Google Maps: https://ionelv.dreamwidth.org/169437.html