- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
By late afternoon on Monday the death toll from the flash floods that have wreaked devastation in Texas since Friday had exceeded 100 and is expected to rise further as more victims are found and more rain threatens to deluge the region.
You must log in or register to comment.
I know people want to pin this on trump, but I don’t see it. The nation system did what it usually does. Now maybe it should have done more. But that would be on not just trump, but the administrations that preceeded him too. Like why did so many people not get the alert? That isn’t a new problem, but one that isn’t getting solved.
The rest of the blame is local. Texas does run away from regulations. And clearly anyone housing children in a flood plain should have some regulations to keep those kids safe. Maybe they exist but weren’t enforced, I dunno.
No child deserved to die before they had a chance to decide thier own idealogy as an adult.
Cheering for the adults who died is no better than cheering a out ICE raids. Neither targeted “bad” people.
The US Department of Homeland Security responded to criticism of warning systems on Sunday on social media by saying mainstream media were “lying” and that the National Weather Service issued timely warnings.
Fuck Trump and everyone who still supports him.
Predicting “how much rain is going to fall out of a thunderstorm, that’s the hardest thing that a meteorologist can do,” Vagasky says. A number of unpredictable factors—including some element of chance—go into determining the amount of rainfall in a specific area, he says.
“The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event,” says Vagasky. “But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that.”
Flash floods in this part of Texas are nothing new. Eight inches of rainfall in the state “could be on a day that ends in Y,” says Matt Lanza, also a certified digital meteorologist based in Houston. It’s a challenge, he says, to balance forecasts that often show extreme amounts of rainfall with how to adequately prepare the public for these rare but serious storms.
“It’s so hard to warn on this—to get public officials who don’t know meteorology and aren’t looking at this every day to understand just how quickly this stuff can change,” Lanza says. “Really the biggest takeaway is that whenever there’s a risk for heavy rain in Texas, you have to be on guard.”
And meteorologists say that the NWS did send out adequate warnings as it got updated information. By Thursday afternoon, it had issued a flood watch for the area, and a flash flood warning was in effect by 1am Friday. The agency had issued a flash flood emergency alert by 4:30am.
The National Weather Service did stellar work with the tools that Trump’s DOGE cuts have left them with. The tragically inept emergency managers in Texas that think posts on Facebook and Twitter are good enough for emergency alerts should be strung up by their feet and at the next county fair and used for target practice with rotten fruit. As should every politician who voted against a siren type alert system when it came up for a vote last year.
God damn, why am I not surprised that Republicans voted down a grant for counties to upgrade/improve/develop disaster response infrastructure.
Yeah, I think they always expect to be out of office by the time the next big disaster hits. They’re coming faster and faster now, though. I don’t think that strategy will work anymore.
i will not hear about a 4am flood warning unless my phone went crazy. isn’t there a system in place to cause the phones to warm people about emergencies?
There is and the national weather service alerts that night for the area should have triggered such alerts twice, according to another article I read.
It was around midnight on Friday, July 4, when the first few thunderstorms began dumping heavy rainfall in central Texas. About an hour later, the first Flash Flood Warning was issued by the National Weather Service at around 1:14 a.m. This warning also included the “considerable” tag, which should have triggered wireless emergency alerts to go out to cell phones and NOAA Weather Radios.
Then at 3:35 a.m., the original warning was upgraded and included the verbiage, “Move to higher ground now. Act quickly to protect your life.” Less than 30 minutes later, the warning was upgraded again to a Flash Flood Emergency and would have triggered the wireless emergency alerts once again.
The problem seems to have been that the region where the floods were most dangerous has very spotty cell service. That combined with the fact that some people apparently turn their phones off at night prevented those alerts from reaching a lot of people. Also, the kids at Camp Mystic were not allowed to have phones with them during their stay.
Yes, but in Texas they only use it for dumb shit like waking up the entire state at 4am to warn them that a cop was shot the previous day in some podunk town 500 miles away.
https://www.404media.co/texas-blue-alert-emergency-notification/
“But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that.”
But it shouldn’t be hard to predict that this rain will all drain into rivers such as the one bordering on this camp even if it falls miles and miles away.
There is no way for meteorologists to know exactly where along a storm’s path that the rain will fall. That storm’s path as it moves from west to east could be hundreds of miles long and hundreds of miles wide to the north and south. That’s why your local forecast will say something like 50% chance of rain on Thursday. Meteorologists can estimate where the rain will most likely fall, but they cannot pinpoint exactly when or where it will fall.
The rain from a storm over a region 50 or 100 miles across can generally run off to a variety of different rivers. Sure, all those rivers are likely to find their way to the same waterways somewhere down stream, but it will take the water from different areas different amounts of time to get there depending on the geometry of the rivers. Just like when you drive from home to work, it’ll take you a different amount of time depending on which route you take, the runoff from a storm will take a different amount of time to reach a given point down stream. That means that the runoff from a large storm will not all generally reach the same down stream point at the same and those rivers will not be so likely to reach flood stage.
Yes, rain falling miles and miles away upstream will certainly make its way towards the camp. But if that rain falls miles and miles away downstream, then the flooding will be downriver from the camp. If the rain falls earlier than expected during the storm, then it will fall farther west and will runoff to the south of the camp as well. Same if the rain falls later and comes down to the east of the camp. But, again, meteorologists have no way to precisely predict either the path of a storm, nor where along that path that the precipitation will fall. They can give odds, but that’s it.
This case was a worst case scenario. A very large amount of rain fell in a very short amount of time along a relatively narrow path. That means a huge amount of water fell over a small area that all drained into a pair of rivers that both ran into the Guadeloupe river at the same point. This raised the river almost 10 meters in 45 minutes. Forecasters could not possibly have predicted that this weather system would dump all that water in such a short time over such a small area.
They did accurately predict that there would likely be flooding and they issued alerts for large areas where it was likely to occur. As the event proceeded and the odds narrowed, increasing the chances of flooding in particular areas they issues further alerts warning communities of the increasing danger in those areas. Sadly, there were no sirens or other mechanisms in place to make sure that the people living in those areas would get those alerts in the middle of the night.
If only there was some way to warn people of serious weather conditions. Maybe in 100 years the tech will exist to predict, notify, and evacuate people in a timely manner before the storms arrive.
They can still get every cell phone in the state to freak the fuck out at 4:50am because someone in the panhandle took a potshot at a cop.
There was a bill that the state voted down: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/06/texas-disaster-warning-emergency-communication-bill-kerrville-floods/
The 1-star state ya’ll
As a texan would say: it’s god’s will
And my own.
Yeah, where are all the preachers claiming that this is God’s punishment for Texas’ communal sins?
They’re busy blaming it on gays from California
Funny how God punishes little girls in Texas for the sins of gay people in California.
“gawd works in mysterious ways”
It’s a cold and heartless silver lining, but hey… fewer Texans.
Kindness and compassion towards life is how we heal the planet.
This does not mean we have to endlessly suffer their intolerance, or never punish the wicked and the greedy.
It means that when a tragedy befalls a problematic group of people, we empathize first and then after the immediate situation is adequately addressed, we demand accountability from everyone responsible.
Last I checked, the total number of dead and missing was 130. I hope the final number of deaths ends up being less than 130.
