As the death toll hit 70 Sunday morning from the Guadalupe River flooding, several questions abound. And have grown since it crossed 100.
The biggest was about warnings. Even with local and state officials offering caveats about lack of prediction in location, nonetheless, with the initial warning of 7 inches in the area already early afternoon on July 3, followed by the first flash flood warning early July 4, I think, per the Trib:
“The heartbreaking catastrophe that occurred in Central Texas is a tragedy of the worst sort because it appears evacuations and other proactive measures could have been undertaken to reduce the risk of fatalities had the organizers of impacted camps and local officials heeded the warnings of the government and private weather sources, including AccuWeather,” AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter wrote in a statement Saturday morning.
That Kerrville and Kerr County officials are full of shit.
Second question, not even being addressed yet by Tex-ass Rethuglican Congresscritters who voted for Trump's bigly ugly bill? How much will it reduce the accuracy, and cut the amount of advance notice, that the NWS was able to offer in this case, even though it went largely unheeded?
Here's the same second link on that, at least at the professionals' level:
The flooding came amid concerns about staffing levels at the NWS, after the Trump administration fired hundreds of meteorologists this year as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts. The NWS Austin/San Antonio office’s warning coordination meteorologist announced in April that he was retiring early due to the funding cuts, leading to speculation that vacancies could have impacted forecasters’ response.
As I've half-jokingly said elsewhere, the "Gulf of America" will get renamed back to "Gulf of Mexico" the first major hurricane that spawns in it hits the Texas or Louisiana coast.
Per later comment in the story, they're adequately staffed NOW. Six months from now? A year?
Zeynep Tufekci talks more about that official, Paul Yura, in a column asking other questions, like — why haven't more camps moved their camping areas just, even a few feet higher and a few yards further away from the course of the river?
[A]t Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors were washed away, the kids whose cabins were on just slightly higher ground all survived. Only those in the lower cabins were lost. Those lower cabins were less than a quarter of a mile away from the higher cabins. Every moment would have counted.
There you are.
On Yura, it's not just about total staffing; it's about loss of experience. But, per places like LinkedIn, you'll see capitalist America, like the Elmo Musk behind DOGE, can't and/or won't put a dollar value on that. (Neither will neoliberal Democrats except when it's worth political haymaking.)
Update: It does appear that NWS cuts grounded several warning balloons.
The first piece has bullshit from dog-shooting Homeland Security head Kristi Noem trying to hand-wave away these concerns.
The third question? How much do Democrats really want to politicize this, since Dear Leader's administration is partially to blame, at least career staffers in it? How much do you want to politicize it, per two paragraphs above, because Dear Leader was one of two people to make sure the "vaunted" Paris climate accords are voluntary unenforceable Jell-O? How much do they want to support putting Tweety Eastland, the surviving Mystic spouse, on the legal hook publicly?
How much of this is the fault of the youth camps' staff? After all, both the 1 am and 4 am July Fourth alerts were available by cellphone alerts. Mystic's co-owner Dick Eastland is among the dead, so he can't be asked, but other owners of other camps, and managers of them, certainly can be. Or, per The Barbed Wire's piece that references self-backpatting of state and federal officials, will this get swept under the rug?
And, to go there? These are Christian girls camps, even if not affiliated with a particular church? How many girls are told that climate change is a myth? What about camp owners and staffers?
Refudiating the likes of Chip Roy in that Barbed Wire piece? This was not a once in a century flood. The Monthly, like others, references the 1987 flood in Comfort.
So does the first Trib piece, at top link, which has a good "wrap-up" on some of these issues:
Billy Lawrence, a 73-year-old San Angelo man, has dealt with this type of tragedy before. During flooding in the summer of 1987, he spent more than 30 days looking for bodies. The first one he found was of a child in a tree, 20 feet up.
But he said this flood is twice as bad as it was in 1987. On Saturday, he was back patrolling the river for bodies. A former volunteer with the Red Cross, he said he's gotten used to the morbid practice.
“I’m used to death. I’ve been around it a lot," Lawrence said.
He noted there are about 20 camps along the river in this area and said the camp counselors should receive training to check the weather every night.
"I'm not blaming them. They just have to do that,” he said.
Refudiating Danny Goeb, the jefe during this with Strangeabbott out of the Pointy Abandoned Object State? His Tex-ass Senate, and Rethuglicans in the House, killed HB 13, a bill that would have updated state warning systems.
Tots and pears are no substitute for training and the acceptance of modern realities.
And, even if campers can't have cell phones on, per this Texas Monthly story, at least at that particular camp, camp counselors, managers and owners sure as hell can. Or you can have a weather-band radio that gets the same type of emergency alerts.
As for the climate change issue? You don't have to go back to that 1987 flood, per the top link:
The region has experienced catastrophic flooding before, including the 2015 Wimberley flood that left 13 people dead, as well as major floods in 2007 and 2002.
Notice how close together these things are now getting?
Last week, moved from the Texas Progressives Roundup, we had Evil MoPac grappling with the Hill Country flooding tragedy. I moved it here because after it going all nice and polite on getting to the bottom of things, this:
There will be a thorough accounting of what infrastructure issues and human errors may have been present and, hopefully, there will be common sense policy changes to try to reduce the terrible human and propery tolls of Texas floods in the future.
And this:
But we also need to grapple with the fact that this tragedy and the incredible rainfall amounts that caused it were not totally unprecedented and the impacted area has long been at risk for this type of event, even if rare. It’s that feeling of helplessness that will be one of the hardest things to process going forward: we can make improvements (including to local warning systems) and increase spending to try and solve the flooding problem, but it might never be enough.
Are both untrue.
The former is untrue per what I said about climate change and Tex-ass Rethuglican leadership, if nothing else. Any "changes" will be a right-wing corporate socialism bailout of capitalism.
The latter will be untrue starting with climate change, which the "we" wingnuts running Tex-ass won't grapple with. It's also untrue in that, from all I read, ownership and management of the various camps easily could have done a better job with the resources they had — ie, smartphone warnings — as could have local governments.
That's as Inside Climate Change notes this is more and more NOT a one-off — as the death toll crosses 100 July 8.
And, per my update about the killed HB 13? Stop cutting these people slack, you fucktard.
I suspect lawsuits are coming — and they need to come.
(I mean, good old BlueAnon Neil Aquino gets it right on this being a political issue, but gets it wrong of course on not looking at how it's various forms of business as usual for both duopoly parties.)
And, Blue Anons, do you REALLY want to politicize the FEMA angle of removing parts of Camp Mystic from the 100-year floodplain? Per the AP, via the Trib, that would be the OBAMA-era FEMA.
In response to an appeal, FEMA in 2013 amended the county's flood map to remove 15 of the camp's buildings from the hazard area. Records show that those buildings were part of the 99-year-old Camp Mystic Guadalupe, which was devastated by last week's flood. After further appeals, FEMA removed 15 more Camp Mystic structures in 2019 and 2020 from the designation. Those buildings were located on nearby Camp Mystic Cypress Lake, a sister site that opened to campers in 2020 as part of a major expansion and suffered less damage in the flood. ..
[Syracuse University associate professor Sarah] Pralle said the appeals were not surprising because communities and property owners have used them successfully to shield specific properties from regulation.
Ooopppssss ....
But wait, there's more!
Pralle, who reviewed the amendments for AP, noted that some of the exempted properties were within 2 feet of FEMA's flood plain by the camp's revised calculations, which she said left almost no margin for error. She said her research shows that FEMA approves about 90% of map amendment requests, and the process may favor the wealthy and well-connected.
And, with that, we have the answer that, in the past at least, the Eastlands were partially responsible for the current deaths. And, we have material evidence of negligence, even willful negligence, when somebody drops this nice polite ownership bullshit and sues.
Will Texas Monthly mention that? Mimi Swartz's hagiography of the Eastlands and Forest Wilder's laundry list of what went wrong both failed to.
Abrahm Lustgarten, who has a great book on climate change, now weighs in at Pro Publica.
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