Aseries of flash floods in central Texas has left Americans in shock, with close to a hundred people dead and dozens still missing. Most horrifying is that a large number of those dead or missing are children or teens, many of whom were attending summer camps in the area.
The July 4 flooding, the deadliest in the US in 100 years, struck mainly in counties to the north of San Antonio and west of Austin, and most heavily in Kerr County, where affected summer camps were located. Almost all of the deaths reported were in that one county, and over ten campers and one counselor from one camp, Camp Mystic, were still missing when we went to press.
The area is a flood plain, in the Guadalupe River Basin, and has been the site of repeated deadly flash floods. But the storm that dumped an estimated 100 billion gallons in one day on Kerr County was unusual—a moisture-laden system that stalled over the area for hours.
While search-and-rescue teams continue to look for survivors and victims of the flood, and area residents try to make sense of the devastation to their lives, questions about official culpability have already been raised, including at the federal level.
One of the biggest questions about the flooding is whether an area prone to rapid flooding, where people had already died, should have had a better early warning system. The warning system that was in place when the floods hit was largely a word-of-mouth one, based on cell phones, with sites higher up the river expected to warn those farther down. But the flooding began in the middle of the night, and phone calls warning people to evacuate, as well as warnings from the National Weather Service about the intensifying flooding, likely went unheard in many cases.
The idea of a centralized early-warning system, with public sirens and water-detection systems, had been proposed by a former county commissioner, but it was never built, in part due to budgetary considerations. How much it would have helped in the face of a storm that dumped a day’s worth of rain in a few hours is unclear, but it likely would have saved at least some lives.
At the federal level, Democrats have suggested that cuts to the National Weather Service may have led to a lack of warning about the possibility of flooding. Texas officials blamed the NWS for a failure to accurately predict the storm, and media investigations found that key posts in the local Texas bureaus of the NWS were unfilled in the lead-up to the storm.
The Trump administration, in part through its DOGE agency, had offered early retirements to government workers, including meteorologists and hydrologists working for the NWS, and some of those positions were missing in the San Antonio field office as the storm bore down on unsuspecting campers. But the NWS has insisted that that was not an issue.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) demanded that the acting inspector general for the US Commerce Department investigate whether those job cuts led to deaths this past weekend.
Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said that there was definitely room for change: “Next time there is a flood, I hope we have in place processes to remove especially the most vulnerable from harm’s way. But that will be a process that will take careful examination of what happened.”
The mourning parents may have questions of their own.
To read more, subscribe to Ami
