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

[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.