By Abrahm Lustgarten
On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.
Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?
Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people’s everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable.
Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods.
We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can’t hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck.
The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.
There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week’s extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological condition.”
That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000.
The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It’s one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense.
What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.
Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation’s seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has — as of last week — signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the country’s industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is “in alignment with evolving priorities” of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating.
Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. But the country faces a larger and more daunting challenge, because this disaster — like the firestorms in Los Angeles and the hurricanes repeatedly pummeling Florida and the southeast — once again raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. It might be that in an era of what researchers are calling “mega rain” events, a flood plain should now be off-limits.
Abrahm Lustgarten reports on climate change and how people, companies and governments are adapting to it.
Keep Flagler Beautiful says
This is an accurate and certainly timely article. Hand in hand with climate change there is the extremely important factor of woods being leveled to build massive new housing developments. Some Palm Coast, Flagler and Bunnell officials are not paying attention. Areas in Florida that didn’t used to flood but where there is now heavy flooding unequivocally attribute the problem to decimation of trees with deep roots, which absorb water. It’s going to happen here unless zoning boards and certain commissioners learn to say NO to developers. We will pay forever for the terrible decisions made by the Joe Mullins-led Flagler County Commission. Thankfully, there are much better commissioners on that board, now. They seem to care about the irreversible damage caused by mega-developments, and for that we are grateful.
Shark says
When you have a president who thinks a magnet loses it’s magnetism underwater and 20 unqualified fox entertainment (former employees} running our country – what more can you expect !!!!
JimboXYZ says
The fraud of this article is that solar & EV don’t create bigger environmental problems than a purely a fossil fuel burning global population creates. It’s 8 billion plus & growing for consumption & choices that ultimately come back to burning fossil fuel to make those choices available. And the cost of the alternatives is a bait & switch shell energy Ponzi Scheme. Cloud seeding played a role in the Texas floods, yet the experts refuse to acknowledge their hand in that ? As usual & just like decades of studies for smoking and anything else unhealthy they created false narratives & fraudulent reports to justify industries that create jobs. Somehow, cloud seeding is perceived as a good & improvement because mankind did it ? How can mankind ever improve a system that works before the existence of mankind’ during mankind & will work long after mankind. How delusional & narcissistic is that ? Yes, the world revolves around people, because we are people. We even justify local growth at the expense of wild life. May not like what I comment, but this is the last 4 years of Palm Coast/Flagler County/State of FL. And the video is a Texas example, same game, different place with different names & faces. It’s been going on for as long as mankind has existed. These experts for the article aren’t experts, they’re just a bunch of people getting paid well to spin their nonsense. The video is a truer, naked exposure of who is amongst us. It’s not a flattering look for the human race and they are right in one regard, it will only get worse as the liars & frauds continue to do what they do for greed & profits that the video exposes those involved in that example. Makes me wanna vomit when I read about the developers converging on City Hall to oppose a moratorium and the lengths they go to threaten lawsuits to protect their perceived right to a profit, that became nothing more than veiled greed.
Kim says
Idiocracy.
Bo Peep says
[Disallowed. Please comply with our comment policy. Thank you.–FL]
ric Santo says
By the time the orange turd and his cronies do anything about this problem, many people in this country (and many other countries) will suffer and die as a result of climate change. Seems to me as the tiny brained turd thinks that if he just denies that the problem exists, it will magically go away. Reminds me of the pandemic and he kept saying “it will be gone by….”. Then magically, we had a million Americans dead. Too bad there isn’t a vaccine to fix morons.
Truth be told says
Hahah remember when republicans in Kerr county Texas gathered and refused to accept Biden administration build back better money to improve alert system!! So they saved some money! Yeah people die but that’s a sacrifice murikkka is willing to make to enrich the billionaires further! Every kid starved saves Elon 5 dollars!! The gop terror organization has many more plans to increase pain sufferering and cruelty! Stay tuned !!
Deport republicons says
Many have already died and many more will die due to the orange terror and his terrorist policies! What a sick and embarrassing nation! I hope this nazi shithole crumbles so we can try to build something better than a giant genocide machine that spreads terror throughout the world! Must end the gop terror organization first and they are worse people and better funded than any gang anywhere! Good luck in the fight against Nazis 2.0! pedos still covering up his epstien files! If you want to Vote for a pedophile vote republican! I think we have over 30,000 lies this year alone from the Orange terror! So it’s literally just diarrhea out of his orange mouth all day everyday, like there may be as much truth in a stain speech as there is chicken in a mcnugget if there’s any at all it’s microscopic!
TR says
I believe it’s now called the Gulf of America. Even maps are displayed with the new name.
Google Maps relabeled the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America, and Apple is doing the same. Apple Maps, Bing Maps and Google Maps have all changed their Maps software and apps to now display Gulf of America.
FlaglerLive says
Yes, at Buc-ee’s, too. This isn’t Buc-ee’s. Our readers don’t stop at the water’s edge of the Gulf of Mexico.
Ray W, says
This past Friday, a Latin Times reporter wrote a story of Kerr County Texas officials beginning in 2016 a series of discussions about the need for installing warning sirens and the installing of a water depth gauge warning system throughout the county.
The outcome?
“… [D]espite multiple meetings and FEMA grant applications, funding efforts repeatedly stalled, first due to missing mitigation plans, then due to shifting priorities after Hurricane Harvey.”
In 2021, the Biden administration “awarded” to Kerr County American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds in an amount of more than $10 million.
According to the reporter, that money could have been used for “flood prevention infrastructure”, such as warning sirens.
During public comment on whether the county should accept the money, one attendee opposed accepting any of the money, describing it as coming from a “criminal treasonous communist government.”
Others offered opinions indicating that commission attendees did not want help from the federal government.
One said: “We don’t want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much.” The commenter added, “We’d like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
What did the Kerr County commission do?
According to the reporter, it accepted $8 million of the ARPA money, but used most of the money to upgrade the sheriff’s department and to give stipends to public employees. $600,000 was used for community amenities and staffing. None was used for flood prevention.
In a related story, Newsweek reports that in 2011, the Christian girl’s camp that flooded last week as the wall of water moved down the Guadalupe River was originally included in a FEMA “Special Flood Hazard Area” 100-year flood map, meaning that there was a 1% chance of flooding at the site each year. Inclusion of the camp onto the map came with requirements that the camp operator have flood insurance and that it adhere to “stricter construction regulations” for any future building plans.
Appeals followed. In 2013, FEMA agreed to remove 15 of the camp buildings from the map’s hazard zone. Fifteen more structures were removed from the hazard zone in 2019. Another fifteen were removed in 2020.
Expert sources told the Associated Press that Camp Mystic’s appeals could have been filed in order to avoid the requirement for paying for flood insurance, to obtain lower insurance premiums, and to allow new buildings or structures to be built under “less costly regulations.”
Because the amount of rain and the height of the flood waters, Chris Steubing, executive director of the Texas Floodplain Management Association, told a reporter that it would be difficult to call the flood plain management plan a “failure”, as “Mother Nature set a new standard.”
FEMA released a statement that flood maps “[a]re not predictions of where it will flood, and they don’t show where it has flooded before.”
Associate Professor Sarah Pralle, Syracuse University, told the AP:
“It’s a mystery to me why they weren’t taking proactive steps to move structures away from the risk.”
A third article, this one from The Guardian, addressed the effort earlier this year by the Texas legislature to pass a bill (HB 13) setting up a state-wide emergency siren flood warning system. The House bill died in the Senate over a debate on cost.
A Texas A&M atmospheric sciences professor described the thinking as follows:
“Texas will spend a lot of money recovering from disasters, but they’ll spend very little trying to avoid the next disaster.
As proof for this form of reasoning, the reporter referenced the 2021 hard freeze that cut off electricity for millions of Texans, killing some 200 in the process. Texas political leaders promised reforms and Texas’ governor soon announced that the problem had been fixed, yet Ercot, the state’s electrical regulatory commission, still warns that a repeat storm will carry an 80% likelihood of rolling blackouts.
The reporter chalks this up to an “absence of forethought” that would be “less serious were it not for Texas being, literally and metaphorically, in the eye of the storm. The state’s long Gulf coastline renders it vulnerable to hurricanes and sea level rise, its southern location makes it hot and growing hotter, the west of the state is in the desert southwest region which is liable to droughts, and the Hill Country, as has been seen with such heart-rending results, is home to “flash flood alley”, one of the most dangerous flood-prone areas of the U.S.”
Between 1980 and 2024, 190 “extreme weather events”, such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, or fires, each causing at least a billion dollars in damages, have hit the state, more of such events than have hit any other state.
Even with this history, the official state Republican Party platform proposes to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, to reclassify carbon dioxide as a ‘non-pollutant’, and to oppose what it calls “environmentalism, or ‘climate change’ initiatives that obstruct legitimate business interests and private property use.”
An SMU political scientist opined to the reporter that if Texas Republicans can persuade themselves that climate change is not man-made, then it becomes easier for them to proclaim that nothing can be done to fix it. If nothing can be done to fix it, then it follows that Texas Republicans won’t have to deal with it.
The Texas House Republican who represents Kerr County is on record as having voted against passage of the 2025 state bill that would have set in process the installation of a state-wide siren flood alarm system.
He told a Texas Tribune reporter after the flood:
“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now.”
As an aside and pertaining only to the 2021 hard freeze mentioned above, my older daughter’s husband is an electrical engineer who has long worked in the electricity generation field.
Both he and my daughter told me years ago that the freeze issue is not that hard to fix, though the fix takes money.
Electricity generating plants in Wisconsin are covered over with an insulating shell during initial construction. The shell (enclosing walls and a roof) is designed to protect the plants from the effects of extreme cold. In cases of extreme cold, Wisconsin power plants continue to operate as designed.
Electricity generating plants in the south are often constructed without the exterior shell. In cases of extreme cold, they stop working as designed. Some 200 or so Texans are dead because state regulators did not require powerplant owners to build their powerplants in a manner designed to protect them from extreme cold. Regulators in northern states require this to be done.
I understand that FP&L, after the Texas blackout, commissioned a study to determine which, if any, of its powerplants need to be enclosed. I don’t know whether the study was abandoned or, if completed, what was the outcome of the study.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
There are many forms of deceptive reasoning.
The most obvious form of deceptive reasoning, and perhaps the most common, goes as follows:
If I like something, it is right. If I don’t like something, it is wrong.
Many an argument raised by various FlaglerLive commenters fails because of this type of reasoning process. After all, truth does not depend on what we like.
A particularly virulent form of circular reasoning goes as follows:
Good people don’t make mistakes. All prosecutors are good people. I am a prosecutor. Therefore, I don’t make mistakes.
A third form of deceptive reasoning goes as follows:
Something bad happened on my watch. I bear some responsibility under the law for the outcome of the happening because I possess a measure of political power relevant to the happening. What can I imagine or conjure that would explain, if the explanation were to be accepted by the many gullibly stupid among us, that someone else is responsible for my shortcomings?
There are many more forms of deceptive reasoning.
I suggest that each FlaglerLive reader look to the excuses raised by the various people cited in the three articles I drew from for this comment, excuses in many of the cases that were imagined or conjured in order to set forth, or perhaps to direct, blame elsewhere.
Start with the inferences that can be drawn from the fact that FEMA, knowing in 2011 that the camp at issue was in a floodplain, included the camp on a flood map. Everyone in authority in that county knew from that moment that the lives of campers were at risk every single day.
As it turned out, two columns of air heavily laden with moisture combined to dump tons of water beyond imagining onto a small, hilly, rocky area nearly bare of soil, an area long known for flash flooding. Some 120 people are dead and another 150 or so are still missing. It has happened before. 190 times in 44 years have billion dollar or more storms or fires or other natural disasters hit the state. It will happen again. Yet, a bill funding the creation of a statewide siren or flood gauge warning system cannot seem to find its way out of the state’s legislature.
Skibum says
The very disturbing findings that Ray W. outlined above are very illuminating regarding how local and state government elected officials in Texas have a “go it alone philosophy”, until their mistakes and mismanagement inevitably result in disaster, calamity and loss of life, then the state begs for outside help and assistance recovering from their own horrible decisions that have has disastrous outcomes for residents in the Lone Star state time and time again.
If you look at the map, or an overhead view of the Guadalupe River where it naturally bends right where the girl’s camp was built in that flood prone area adjacent to the river, anyone with half a brain could see that any flooding over the banks of that river would potentially inundate at least some of the camp area where those children’s cabins were placed. Although nobody could have predicted the intensity of the flash flooding that occurred on July 4, this was not the first time that flooding from that river caused damage or deaths. One would think that the previous incident where people were killed from the river overflowing it’s banks due to flash flooding would have been a wake-up call for some early warning system to be funded and put in place to protect the many homes and the summer camps located along the river in Kerr County, but no, they did nothing to prevent the latest disaster.
There are other examples of Texas not wanting to be pro-active to prevent that which could have been prevented from harming that state’s residents. Take Texas’ stance on electric energy for example. That state’s electric grid is not connected to the country’s nationwide power grid, and their grid is known to be in poor shape, with outage after outage in cold winters when demand is high. It was not long ago that the state’s entire power grid was nearly knocked out during an extreme winter, and an investigation afterward found that the state’s power grid had been neglected for years, many people wondering why Texas still refuses to connect to the nationwide power grid as a backup in case they have another outage that puts lives in danger.
Texas should change their state’s motto from the “Lone Star” state to the Lone State, since they somehow think they know better and can do everything alone without outside help… and then each and every time a disaster strikes that could have been prevented had they made better decisions, then they start begging for outside help when lives have already been lost due to state and local incompetence. No, Texas is definitely NOT the example of good governance, despite what some people happen to believe.