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?

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Comments

[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.