4th of July Flooding Event

I had no idea that 4th of July would be so dreadful.

I was looking forward to rest, play around and just take it easy.

When I first saw videos about some kind of flooding in central Texas, it didn’t register.

It was not until the evening that the number of videos started to impinge on my consciousness. I had no idea that at 4:30 am Central that morning, people were losing their lives to the raging river water. Some were young girls, 7 or 8 years old, out on a camping trip.

Today is about a week later and the toll stands at 128 (according to Google) with about 170 still missing. Those missing could very well be dead.

What a dreadful 4th.

My first thought

When I finally took notice of the news, my first thought turned to the funding cuts in the FEMA, NWS and NOAA, which meant job cuts.

My first fleeting instinct was to think it was those DOGE cuts or maybe the government leadership that had made injudicious cuts.

But then, I thought no because I could envision other factors. I just didn’t have enough information to see what might have caused such poor outcome during the flood. More information was required before I could make an assessment.

Timeline of the event

While most of the left was eager to place the blame on the government for making cuts, which would mean the understaffing caused poor forecasts and warning. While some places throughout the US were said to be 20 to 40 percent understaffed, I don’t think the Texas offices were that poorly staffed.

It was said by meteorologists that the Texas NWS actually did a good job backfilling in the open positions and they did put out warnings about the flooding to come.

Here’s the timeline from one of the NewsNation YouTube videos and you can see that NWS actually put out a flood watch early Thursday.

Potential causes of disaster

If faulty NWS forecasting was not the answer, what could have contributed to the disaster? Well, I have some ideas.

• It could be that the phrasing of the alert did not convey the seriousness of the flooding until too late.
• This flooding took place during a holiday, so people were not paying attention to any phone alerts.
• In addition to the holiday, the flooding event took place early in the morning, starting from 1 am with the main event at 4:30 am. People were sleeping.
• There were quite a few out of towners so they may not have been attuned to the danger.

I later learned a couple of other possible reasons:

• The children at the campsites could not bring their phones.
• There were delays in getting out the code red message due to the instruction to get supervisor approval. The 4:30 am sheriff request to send out code red happened 6 hours later or around 10 am.
• I’m a little fuzzy but I heard that Kerr County did not accept funding from the Biden administration for infrastructure upgrades due to not wanting money from the government, especially that government.
• Or, another version: they accepted the money to prevent the money from going to blue states but did not spend the money on infrastructure improvements.
• The state denied the county’s request for funding for some kind of weather alert system.
• And the latest: head of DHS (Christy Noem) had instructed she was to approve all spending request greater than $100,000. Thus, the FEMA search and rescue personnel did not arrive until July 7th, way long after the main event.

And the crazier reasons put out by the far right:

• Courtesy of Charlie Kirk: DEI
• Cloud seeding

Other information from YT

This screenshot from YouTube depicts the news graphics on the issues with the alert system.

This next one shows flooding heights. Pretty scary. By the way, there was a video showing a cabin floating down the river, filled with camp counselors. Fortunately, they were rescued. But, there were a lot of RVs swept away, quite possibly with people.

The next image talks about the 1000 year event.

Yep, this was a 1000 year event.

Four one-in-1000 year events in one week!

Here’s a startling thumbnail that caught my attention.

I had no idea we had four major flooding events, all considered one-in-1000 years event. In one week.

Usually, it’s hard to attribute any single flooding event to climate change but I think 4 in one week would qualify as due to climate change.

So, the four places that suffered extreme weather events were: central Texas (Hill Country), central North Carolina, Ruidoso New Mexico, and Chicago.

I had been seeing New Mexico recently but not the other two.

Hurricane season hasn’t hit yet

The fact that FEMA was not available and the plan was to eviscerate FEMA in favor of relying on the states to provide aid is frightening. I’m not looking forward to seeing how this summer plays out.

There is so much disaster going on.