The Texas Disaster Freezing Sacrifices At The Alter Of Wind And Solar Power by JEWELSTAITEFAN

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

The Texas Disaster Freezing Sacrifices At The Alter Of Wind And Solar Power

POSTED BY: JEWELSTAITEFAN
UPDATED: Thursday, July 17, 2025 09:23
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Tuesday, July 8, 2025 8:29 AM

Texas flooding rescue effort takes grimmest turn yet as death toll soars past 100
https://x.com/Daily_MailUS/status/1942475584220618982

Ted Cruz: "To the best of my knowledge, there is zero evidence of anything related to anything like weather modification. Look, the internet can be a strange place. People can come up with all sorts of crazy theories."
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1942245577447616620

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Tuesday, July 8, 2025 5:21 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Kerr County asked Texas to help pay for a flood warning system for 8 years. Can it happen now?

By Neena Satija, Keri Blakinger | July 8, 2025 4:09 p.m.

https://tinyurl.com/mpw8x579 (Houston Chronicle URL)

Nearly a decade before catastrophic flash flooding killed at least 94 people in Kerr County, including 30 children, several local officials were hard at work convincing their peers to buy into a new early flood warning system.

The once “state of the art” program installed along the Guadalupe River back in the 1980s was in desperate need of an upgrade, they argued. It wasn’t good enough for Kerr County, which sits at the heart of “flash flood alley,” a portion of the Texas Hill Country whose climate and terrain make it uniquely susceptible to sudden and catastrophic floods.

“I’m not trying to put a dollar on a life or a flood, but the fact of the matter [is] floods do happen, and we need to be prepared for them,” then-Kerr County Commissioner Bob Reeves noted during a series of public meetings that began in 2016. And, his former colleague Tom Moser pointed out, “We also have more summer camps than anybody else along the Guadalupe River.”

The wide-ranging discussions back then — captured in transcripts archived online — proved to be a chilling precursor to the disaster that unfolded early on July 4. That’s when a slow-moving, massive rainstorm caused the Guadalupe River to rise by 22 feet in just three hours, catching those living and camping on its banks off-guard in the middle of the night.

But the new warning system never became reality. Though local officials agreed to spend $50,000 on an engineering study, which made specific recommendations for such a project in 2016, they never secured the $1 million they estimated would be needed to implement it – despite asking for help from state officials at least three separate times.

“We never were successful in getting that funding, or putting the matching funding with it to do anything,” said Moser, who retired in 2021, in a phone interview. He said he hopes the county can “go back to the drawing board on this, and hopefully it’ll be a model that could be used all over the United States.”

In 2017, Kerr County and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority asked the state to give them federal disaster relief dollars, but their application was denied. They tried a second time after Hurricane Harvey, when more federal funds became available and Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged local entities to submit applications. They were rejected again.

Both applications would have been handled by the Texas Department of Emergency Management, whose spokesman, Wes Rapaport, said the agency could not immediately respond to specific questions because “we are in the middle of ongoing response operations.”

The governor’s office did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Abbott said in a news conference that flood response will be handled during the state’s upcoming legislative session, which starts on Monday, July 21.

The river authority, UGRA, also applied for state funding through the Texas Water Development Board. But the agency only agreed to chip in 5% of the estimated $1 million cost, according to documents from the river authority and the water board. The remaining price tag was too steep for Kerr County, whose annual budget in 2016 was about $30 million. UGRA has far fewer resources; last fall, the authority approved spending about $2.3 million.

“At that point we sort of dropped it,” said William Rector, president of the board of UGRA, which has supported the effort for years and paid for a portion of the 2016 study. Abbott appointed Rector to the board in 2016 and named him president two years ago.

In response to questions about why the river authority didn’t get more money to fund the project, the Texas Water Development Board said it was looking into the matter and would respond “as soon as possible.”

In an interview with Fox News on Monday afternoon, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the county should have had siren warning systems along the river and that “the state needs to step up and pay.” He added that “we need to have these in place by the next summer,” though local officials had ultimately decided against adding sirens to their proposed flood warning system.

"The governor and I talked this morning at length about it, and he said, 'we're just gonna do it'," said Patrick.

In recent days, other local officials have bristled at the suggestion that a warning system could have made a difference, pointing out that even national weather forecasters underestimated how much rain could fall in such a short period of time. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s highest-ranking elected official, told reporters over the weekend that “nobody saw this coming.”

Phil Bedient, who has spent decades designing flood protection and prediction systems as director of Rice University’s SSPEED Center, disagreed.

“We have radar, and we have cell phones, and we have sirens, and those three things together can be used to create a pretty good system,” he said. “It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, but what’s that versus 80 or 100 people dying in a flash flood?”

Rector said UGRA is continuing to move forward with a flood warning system plan. Documents show the river authority agreed to pay an environmental firm about $73,000 to once again assess what new infrastructure Kerr County might need to implement an early flood warning system – though that’s likely a tiny fraction of the total cost of putting one in place.

“This storm has told us we just can’t wait anymore,” he said.

Lots more at https://tinyurl.com/mpw8x579

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, July 8, 2025 5:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Could have paid for it. Too busy giving that money to Democrat illegal invaders though.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, July 8, 2025 9:03 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Could have paid for it. Too busy giving that money to Democrat illegal invaders though.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Kerr County is run by Trumptards. Texas Trumptards are the stingiest and most selfish semi-humans in America. If each Trumptard had donated $10 for the flood warning system, those hundred people won't had died, but $10 is a million times more valuable to a Trumptard than saving a hundred from death.

Candidate
Donald Trump (R) 21,594 76.8%
Kamala Harris (D) 6,299 22.4%
Chase Oliver (LB) 161 0.6%
Jill Stein (GR) 65 0.2%

https://www.statesman.com/elections/results/2024-11-05/race/0/texas#ke
rr-county

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 6:56 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely (because Trumptards’ stinginess and stupidity killed those kids)

When it comes to disasters, accountability delayed is accountability denied

By Paul Krugman | Jul 10, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/should-we-politicize-the-texas-floo
d

Whenever natural disaster — like the flash flood that just killed large numbers of people, many of them children, in Texas — strikes, we can count on a quick response from officials, both federal and state, who arguably could or should have done something to avert or minimize the disaster. Namely, there will be self-righteous denunciations of anyone trying to assign responsibility: “Now is not the time to politicize this tragedy.”

In fact, now is exactly the time to put officials on the spot and ask how much responsibility they bear for the horror. Because the reality of America today is that if we don’t make an issue of how this happened within the next few days, nothing will be learned and nothing will change.

OK, you could make a case for putting off hard questions if you believed two things. First, you would have to believe that the relevant officials are well-intentioned and open-minded, that they will make a good faith effort to learn from the disaster. Second, you would have to believe that the news media will stay on the story, as opposed to quickly dropping it in favor of more pressing topics like Zohran Mandami’s college application.

And you might believe these two things if you’ve spent the past 40 years in suspended animation.

The reality is that the people now on the spot are right-wing hard-liners, who are the opposite of open-minded. Their mindset was perfectly captured by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who denounced efforts to politicize the disaster, then suggested that the problem may be that we have too many federal bureaucrats.

It also more or less goes without saying that there’s massive hypocrisy involved. Trump officials are reacting with rage to any suggestion that their policies may have contributed to the Texas disaster, but Trump was quick to make completely false attacks on the Biden administration’s responses to natural disasters on its watch.

So let me offer some suggestions about the lesson we should be learning from the Texas tragedy.

The specifics are still coming into focus. We know that thanks to payroll cuts, the National Weather Service was short-staffed. Its forecasting was fine, but the official in charge of “warning coordination” — basically, getting the message from the forecasts to the relevant local officials — had taken the DOGE buyout and hadn’t been replaced.

We also know that local officials had been told repeatedly over the years that the affected area needed a better warning system, including sirens, but refused to raise taxes to pay for it and were denied a grant from the state.

We’ll probably learn more about failures to prepare for floods in a river plain that was known to present major risks, and perhaps about the failures in officials’ real-time response. We may never know how many lives might have been saved if Elon Musk hadn’t taken his chainsaw to the National Weather Service or if local officials had been more responsible. But we don’t need specific numbers to understand that this kind of tragedy is only to be expected after politicians have spent decades denigrating government and degrading its effectiveness.

There was a crucial turning point in both attitudes toward government and the resources devoted to public goods — basically, goods we can’t expect the private sector to provide, like, say, weather prediction and flood protection — in 1980. That was when Ronald Reagan, who insisted that government is always the problem, never the solution, took office, and this attitude has been pervasive in U.S. politics ever since.

Overall government spending continued to rise despite political hostility, because federal civilian spending is dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the combination of an aging population with rising health care costs made these programs ever more expensive. But other forms of government spending were cut back sharply under Reagan, and much of our government was understaffed and underfunded, in effect held together with paper clips and rubber bands, even before Elon Musk came along with his chainsaw.

Anyone who has worked in American government or has friends there knows how much of a shoestring operation it has become. Here’s one measure, nondefense discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP, which bumped up briefly after the 2008 financial crisis and Covid, but has remained low and gradually declining otherwise:

Source: Congressional Budget Office

In a way, Musk’s disastrous attempt to eliminate government waste proved that the government is in fact underfunded. He assumed that the budget was full of fat that could be cut away without doing any harm but immediately found himself cutting deep into muscle. As the Washington Post reported,

Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.

So what is a thinly stretched government, asked to do too much with too little, going to do? It’s going to make more mistakes than it would if it had adequate resources. Mistakes will always happen, of course, and it may be impossible to prove that any given mistake was the result of reduced spending and staffing. But there will be more and bigger mistakes than would have happened if anti-government ideology hadn’t taken its toll.

Actually, the relationship between under-resourced government and natural disasters is a lot like the relationship between climate change and such disasters. You can’t prove that climate change “caused” any particular disaster — extreme weather and hundred-year floods have always happened. At most you can say that a warming planet made that disaster more likely. But climate change is raising the risks of disaster — a fact acknowledged by the insurance industry, whatever politicians may say.

Which brings us back to why we absolutely should politicize the tragedy in Texas. It illustrates the kind of disaster that will happen with increasing frequency if we keep depriving government of the resources and respect it needs to do its job.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 2:24 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Democrats Should Say Who’s Really to Blame for the Flooding in Texas

Republican lawmakers have Texan children’s blood on their hands. Democrats shouldn’t let anyone forget it.

In just 45 minutes, early Friday morning, intense rain caused sections of the Guadalupe River in Central Texas to rise by nearly 26 feet. Four months’ worth of rain dropped within hours. By late Monday afternoon, more than 100 people had been confirmed dead, including more than two dozen campers and counselors at a riverside Christian summer camp. As the search for victims and survivors continues, more heavy rain is expected this week.

When a tragedy of such proportions occurs, the temptation to point fingers is strong. Some Republican officials in Texas have found their scapegoat in the National Weather Service, which they’ve accused of failing to predict the storm’s full intensity. They’ve got the wrong guys; despite grappling with deep cuts imposed by the Trump administration, the NWS put out early and increasingly urgent warnings about the coming deluge. There’s plenty of blame to go around, though. Democrats, accordingly, should do a lot more than merely call for investigations into how White House attacks on the NWS might have hampered preparedness efforts. They should connect the dots, again and again, between Republican policy and its lethal consequences. Democrats should hammer Republicans not just for undermining Texas’s and America’s disaster preparedness and response infrastructure but for having spent decades blocking efforts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. GOP lawmakers have Texan children’s blood on their hands. The more say that the Republican Party has over governing a climate-changed world, the more people will die.

More at https://newrepublic.com/article/197662/democrats-should-say-who-really
-blame-flooding-texas

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 9:32 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely (because Trumptards’ stinginess and stupidity killed those kids)

And nobody is listening to any of you.

Awwwwwww...

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, July 11, 2025 2:57 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

102 people died in the Lahaina Hawaii fire. The governor is a Democrat, both Senators are Democrats and the mayor was a Democrat.

The Camp Fire in California burned more than 150,000 acres and killed 85 people. The governor was Democrat and Butte County leans Democrat.

Not to mention the recent and very expensive LA fire: Democrat "woke" mayor, Democrat governor (county supervisors are nonpartisan but LA voters are overwhelmingly Democrat).

The point is, lack of foresight is a non-partisan issue.

If the flood disaster are "Trumptard's" fault, the fires and deaths are "libtard's" fault.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, July 11, 2025 2:17 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
102 people died in the Lahaina Hawaii fire. The governor is a Democrat, both Senators are Democrats and the mayor was a Democrat.

The Camp Fire in California burned more than 150,000 acres and killed 85 people. The governor was Democrat and Butte County leans Democrat.

Not to mention the recent and very expensive LA fire: Democrat "woke" mayor, Democrat governor (county supervisors are nonpartisan but LA voters are overwhelmingly Democrat).

The point is, lack of foresight is a non-partisan issue.

If the flood disaster are "Trumptard's" fault, the fires and deaths are "libtard's" fault.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely (because Trumptards’ stinginess and stupidity killed those kids)

And nobody is listening to any of you.

Awwwwwww...

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix and Signym, you two have no idea that both of you are absolutely evil. And you will never understand why being evil is why your lives are full of well deserved drama, hardship and suffering. In glaring contrast, this is how good people react:

Sirens alone won’t save us from floods. Texas needs a culture shift. | Editorial

By The Editorial Board, Opinions from the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board | July 11, 2025

https://tinyurl.com/mpcsmpza (Shortened URL from Houston Chronicle)

Is Texas cursed? Are we being punished?

Our state is so beset by drought, flood, fire, disease and violence, we can’t help but ask: Why us?

The stories coming from the Texas Hill Country after the July 4 floods shake us to our core.

Sisters who died with their hands locked together. A wife who perished trying to drive to safety but who made sure her husband escaped. Parents found dead, their two young sons missing. When last seen, the father was clinging to the boys as the Guadalupe River surged through the RV park where they were vacationing. Only their young daughter was found safe.

Rescue efforts are now focused on recovering bodies entangled in miles of downed trees and metal debris. The death toll has surpassed that of Hurricane Harvey. And still, it keeps rising.

What’s most difficult to process is that these deaths were largely preventable. If Texas is cursed, it is because over generations our leaders have not just abandoned us to tempests, but have enabled man-made catastrophes.

Biblical weather events are out of our control, but repeated and catastrophic loss of life is of our own making. We choose where to build. Whether to install warning systems. And how we respond to urgent alerts. Our politicians choose to ignore the same calls to action after each unprecedented flood, each devastating hurricane.

Yes, it’s true that other factors contributed to the lethality of the July 4 floods. It was a holiday weekend. The rains came in the middle of night. The rocky and steep hills unleashed a fast-moving wall of water.

And yet, no one had to die. Not children at camps. Not families in a RV. Not the couple attending their law school reunion. If these people had realized the floodwaters were coming, they’d have been somewhere else, somewhere safe.

This week editorial board writers asked what can be done to prevent the next tragedy like this one. A range of experts — forecasters, engineering professors, industry consultants — gave us the same message again and again: Technology alone will not save us. Texas needs a culture shift.

Local officials in the hardest hit areas, including Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, have said that no one predicted the speed and force of the floods. It is true that forecasters often cannot pinpoint where the heaviest rains will hit, but in this case, there was advanced warning.

At 1:18 p.m. Thursday, the National Weather Service announced a flood watch. That should have been a high-alert signal to county officials, RV park owners and summer camp operators — anyone with responsibility for residents and visitors in flood-prone areas.

Then, at 1:14 a.m. on Friday, the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning. That should have triggered emergency protocols: Texts and alerts telling people to seek higher ground. Mobilization of first responders. Evacuation plans put in action.

Flooding began at Camp Mystic between 2 and 3 a.m. It wasn’t until about 4 a.m. that the deadly wall of water crashed down the Guadalupe River.

So what happened during the hours between the warning and the flood? Families of the victims and the people of Texas deserve a thorough investigation. Why weren’t more people warned? Why did officials, residents and visitors not heed the alerts they did receive? What evacuation plans were in place, and why weren’t they followed?

We should also learn from those who were prepared and acted with life-saving urgency.

At Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly, a 500-acre Christian camp and retreat center on the North Fork of the Guadalupe River, facilities manager Aroldo Barrera noticed the water rising at 1 a.m. Friday. According to reporting by the Associated Press, he alerted his boss, who was monitoring the weather. Even without having received warnings from local officials, Mo-Ranch relocated roughly 70 children and adults from a building near the river. Most of the camp’s facilities were already on higher ground. By 7 a.m., staff was notifying parents that their children were safe.

What stands out about Mo-Ranch is not only the quick thinking that night but the advance planning. The culture of preparedness. The long-term investment in infrastructure, people and procedures that kept their guests safe.

In contrast, when Camp Mystic carried out a $5 million dollar expansion in 2019, it did not move historic cabins out of the floodway — the highest-risk area closest to the river — and Kerr County did not require the camp to do so. By all accounts, the co-owner and director of Camp Mystic, Richard “Dick” Eastland, was extraordinarily dedicated to his campers. He had long ago advocated for better alert systems and died attempting to save campers.

What accounts for the difference between those two camps? And even if Camp Mystic didn’t initiate an evacuation on its own, should authorities have done more to protect the campers?

By asking those questions, we don’t aim to cast doubt on the core values or motivations of Eastland or anyone else. We hope to prevent future tragedies.

Gov. Greg Abbott has taken the first step by adding flood recovery and preparedness to the Legislature’s special session agenda. We urge lawmakers to treat those items as their top priority. For Texas’ sake, it’s crucial not to let them get lost in partisan battles over issues such as redistricting.

Here’s what we’re watching.

1. Install modern emergency sirens: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has called on the state to “step up” and pay for emergency sirens. “Had we had sirens along this area,” he said, “that would have saved some of these lives.” Patrick should follow through, and not just for the Guadalupe River. Warning systems aren’t cheap. Reporting by Houston Chronicle reporters Neena Satija and Keri Blakinger found that Kerr County asked the state for 8 years without success to fund a new warning system. Texas should expand grants to deploy them in all highly vulnerable areas that are densely populated — including parts of Houston. As Bob McLaughlin at Acoustic Technologies explained to us, the latest outdoor alert systems use speakers that can blast short instructions that name the emergency: Seek higher ground in case of a flood. Shelter in a safe spot for a tornado. Why install World War II-era sirens in 2025? The last thing Texans need are more incomprehensible alerts.

2. Improve phone alerts: Texas needs a tailored and user-friendly approach to mobile phone alerts. If everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. Alice Claiborne told us that she and her family went back to sleep after receiving a 1:13 a.m. flood warning on July 4 while in Kerr County because they thought it was an Amber Alert. In Harris County, you can sign up for flood alerts based on nearby flood gauges. That’s great for those who are plugged in and super knowledgeable, but everyday Texans need a user experience that’s dead simple to understand. In the direst kinds of emergencies, the language should be idiot-proof and location-specific: You’re in extreme danger. You need to act NOW. Here’s what to do.

3. Bolster flood data collection: Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, is on the right track when it comes to improving the quality of the data used to decide when to send alerts. He tweeted Tuesday, “The Texas House will work with leading experts like @RiceUniversity’s SSPEED Center” and linked to an op-ed that Phil Bedient published in the Houston Chronicle. That piece calls for more river gauges, updated flood mapping and better radar systems like those successfully used along Brays Bayou to protect the Texas Medical Center. Another expert, Mark Rose, a former general manager of the Lower Colorado River Authority, urges an integrated approach that includes gauges to measure rising water levels in the whole water shed, so that real-time alerts would arrive before the river is dangerously high. Let’s listen to these smart people. Let’s fix the problem.

4. Strengthen land use rules: If counties do not have the capacity or political will to prevent developers from building in flood zones, the state should empower regional or statewide entities. Flood waters don’t respect county lines.

5. Provide emergency training: If local emergency managers can’t adequately respond to disasters, the state should step in to issue training, resources and accountability.

6. Educate the people: Finally, the public needs to have a better understanding about the dangers we face. We should respect flood warnings the way we do fire alarms. Even if buildings don’t burn down when most fire alarms go off, we still heed them. It should be muscle memory. The blunt “Turn Around, Don’t Drown” campaign is a good model. James Doss-Gollin, a Rice engineering professor, explained, “Warnings work really well if people know what to do, where to evacuate to, and know where there's high ground.”

Everyone should be sick of Texans dying. Fearful that we have come to accept life as disposable. Heartbroken that mass casualties are now routine.

Texans must respect our own lives enough to demand more from our elected officials — and of ourselves.

July 11, 2025

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, July 11, 2025 3:57 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
102 people died in the Lahaina Hawaii fire. The governor is a Democrat, both Senators are Democrats and the mayor was a Democrat.

The Camp Fire in California burned more than 150,000 acres and killed 85 people. The governor was Democrat and Butte County leans Democrat.

Not to mention the recent and very expensive LA fire: Democrat "woke" mayor, Democrat governor (county supervisors are nonpartisan but LA voters are overwhelmingly Democrat).
The point is, lack of foresight is a non-partisan issue.
If the flood disaster are "Trumptard's" fault, the fires and deaths are "libtard's" fault.

SECOND: 6ix and Signym, you two have no idea that both of you are absolutely evil. And you will never understand why being evil is why your lives are full of well deserved drama, hardship and suffering. In glaring contrast, this is how good people react:

Sirens alone won’t save us from ~~floods.~~fire. ~~Texas~~ California needs a culture shift. | Editorial

By The Editorial Board, Opinions from the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board | July 11, 2025

https://tinyurl.com/mpcsmpza (Shortened URL from Houston Chronicle)

Is ~~Texas~~ California cursed? Are we being punished?

Our state is so beset by drought, flood, fire, disease and violence, DRUG ADDICTION AND HOMELESSNESS we can’t help but ask: Why us?

Just substitute California (or Hawaii) and fire and it's the same story.
Or New Orleans and floods.

Why build there?
Why only one evacuation route?
Why was door to door notification required? (Or in Hawaii's case, why no notification at all.)
Why was infrastructure not built to mitigate risk?

Every time a preventable disaster happens, there's A LOT of justified blame to go around. Many pointed questions to ask, and changes that SHOULD be made.
BUT THIS HAPPENS EVERYWHERE.

Blaming "Trumptards" doesn't really get to the heart of repeating disasters, and therefore doesn't point to a solution. It only shows that you have TDS.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Saturday, July 12, 2025 7:52 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Blaming "Trumptards" doesn't really get to the heart of repeating disasters, and therefore doesn't point to a solution. It only shows that you have TDS.

I blame people who are utterly evil for their evil deeds. But every evil person has a justification for being evil, twisting the situation into something about their personal freedom or their bank account or their stupidity such as "I don't want to pay" or "You cannot make me stop doing what I want to do," or "It is none of your business what I do," or "Climate change is a Chinese Hoax," or "I will not accept blame for what I did because that is the way by twisted psychology works."

Signym, you can read Why Trump blames decisions on others – a psychologist explains

By Geoff Beattie, Professor of Psychology, Edge Hill University | July 11, 2025 7:23am EDT

https://theconversation.com/why-trump-blames-decisions-on-others-a-psy
chologist-explains-260877

Trump is only one out of many tens of millions of Americans who blame their decisions on others.

The Risk Was Obvious

July 12, 2025

The Federal Emergency Management Agency included the prestigious girls’ summer camp in a “Special Flood Hazard Area” in its National Flood Insurance map for Kerr County in 2011, which means it was required to have flood insurance and faced tighter regulation on any future construction projects.

But then Federal regulators repeatedly granted appeals to remove Camp Mystic’s buildings from their 100-year flood map, loosening oversight as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain in the years before rushing waters swept away children and counselors, a review by The Associated Press found.

Experts say Camp Mystic’s requests to amend the FEMA map could have been an attempt to avoid the requirement to carry flood insurance, to lower the camp’s insurance premiums or to pave the way for renovating or adding new structures under less costly regulations.

Syracuse University associate professor Sarah Pralle, who has extensively studied FEMA’s flood map determinations, said it was “particularly disturbing” that a camp in charge of the safety of so many young people would receive exemptions from basic flood regulation.

“It’s a mystery to me why they weren’t taking proactive steps to move structures away from the risk, let alone challenging what seems like a very reasonable map that shows these structures were in the 100-year flood zone,” she said.

Pralle said the appeals were not surprising because communities and property owners have used them successfully to shield specific properties from regulation.

Regardless of FEMA’s determinations, the risk was obvious.

More at https://apnews.com/article/texas-flood-camp-mystic-map-records-investi
gation-e12bee8d5f88301363861ca12c19b929

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, July 12, 2025 8:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

You are evil. We've already established this and there is plenty of recorded post history from you showing as much.

Nobody takes anything you have to say seriously, especially not your hilarious judgements of your superiors.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, July 12, 2025 11:55 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND,

"Evil is as evil does."

"By their deeds you shall know them".

"Do evil, be evil."

There's no such thing as doing evil in the name of good.

If you do evil, you're evil, no matter how much you fancy yourself at the right hand of God.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 9:33 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND,

"Evil is as evil does."

"By their deeds you shall know them".

"Do evil, be evil."

There's no such thing as doing evil in the name of good.

If you do evil, you're evil, no matter how much you fancy yourself at the right hand of God.

Signym and 6ix, please know what you are writing about for once in your ignorant lives: It's like you are totally unaware of how the USA won WWII. It was not by sending in ambassadors and philosophers to gently and graciously persuade the Japanese, Nazis, and Italian Fascists to stop their mass murdering in neighboring countries. Instead, the USA killed millions and millions of Japanese, German, and Italian civilians, besides millions of their soldiers. That is how evil is fought with greater evil.

The Trump Administration Is Violating the First Rule of Disasters

Good disaster management is premised on preparation.

By Zoë Schlanger | July 15, 2025, 7:24 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/07/texas-flood-respon
se-preparation/683528/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-trump-administration-is-violatin
g-the-first-rule-of-disasters/ar-AA1IDFg3

In the days since the Texas flash-flood disaster, the Department of Homeland Security has had a stock response to questions about delays in the federal government’s response, or about a recent rule requiring DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to personally approve FEMA expenditures over $100,000, including rescue teams. The response goes, over and over, like this: “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens … The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

The Trump administration has been using this line for more than a month now, in response to criticism of its plans to remake, or perhaps disband, FEMA. And many people who study emergency response agree that, to some degree, the agency needs reform. Yet now the administration’s press to quickly strip down the agency is being tested against a devastating disaster for the first time. And it is violating a basic precept of emergency management: Be prepared.

In any disaster, responding quickly can help save people and salve the harm. Protocols should be well known and well practiced before an event. An active disaster that killed more than 130 people, with more than 160 still missing, is not the occasion to switch up the norms. “This is exactly what many of us are concerned about,” Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Urban Institute, told me. However much FEMA might benefit from change, remaking it in an ad hoc fashion will just result in more devastation, he said: “In the context of a really complicated emergency where lots of people’s lives are at stake—that’s just not where you want to see experimentation happening.”

And FEMA’s response to the Texas flash-flood disaster has not been business as usual. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of urban-search-and-rescue teams—deployed in the past within hours during similar events—until more than 72 hours after the flooding had begun, per CNN reporting. The agency failed to answer thousands of calls from flood survivors after allowing contracts for call-center workers to lapse one day after the disaster, according to The New York Times. FEMA had fewer than 100 people on the ground in Texas within four days of the disaster, and 311 by day five; within a week of Hurricane Helene, during what Donald Trump deemed a failed response to the flooding, FEMA deployed 1,500.

The situation on the ground in these immediate post-event moments can create a fog-of-war atmosphere, and no complete assessment of the federal government’s reaction will be possible until later. “Like with any really catastrophic event, it’s hard to understand what’s happening at a micro level,” Rumbach said. Several non-FEMA rescue teams from other states and Mexico traveled to Texas to help, supplementing Texas’s own robust emergency-response apparatus. But each of the other state teams waited on FEMA to call them up, as is protocol; FEMA didn’t begin to activate any of them until last Monday, according to CNN. No missing person has been found alive since last Friday. “It’s clear that the initial response was much smaller and more measured than you would expect from FEMA,” Rumbach said. “It’s different from what you would expect a year ago, in terms of the number of personnel and the speed of response.” And FEMA is simply operating with fewer resources: About a quarter of the agency’s staff has left since Trump took office in January, according to the Times. Due to vacancies, there is currently no FEMA regional administrator in any state along the Gulf Coast, just deputies.

Right now, rather than “lean” and “deployable,” it might be more appropriate to describe FEMA as “starved and hobbled.” But ostensibly, a FEMA-review council assembled by the Trump administration is meant to offer a plan to overhaul the agency. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who praised the Trump administration’s response to the flooding as “swift and very robust,” sits on that council. At a gathering of the council on the Wednesday after the floods (at which Abbott was absent), Noem reiterated her desire to see FEMA “eliminated as it existed” and “remade.” The council’s recommendations are due in November.

The administration does seem to understand that its plans to rapidly remake FEMA have real drawbacks. Noem has retained FEMA employees who looked like they’d be let go; Trump said last month that he intends to phase out FEMA only after this hurricane season. But reporting in recent days suggests that the administration is softening its tone on FEMA even further, at least for the moment. The Washington Post reports that the promised dissolution may in fact look more like a “rebranding.” Reality sets in fast in a disaster.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, July 16, 2025 6:52 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Camp Mystic did not evacuate kids immediately when warned of 'life threatening' flood

The National Weather Service issued an urgent flood warning at 1:14 a.m. on July 4th. Camp personnel did not start moving girls to safety until at least 46 minutes later.

By Peggy O’Hare, Staff writer | July 15, 2025 12:47 p.m.

https://tinyurl.com/yedrp2nz Shortened link to the Houston Chronicle

The owner of Camp Mystic received a National Weather Service alert on his phone warning of imminent “life threatening flash flooding," but camp personnel did not begin evacuating children until at least 46 minutes later, the family that runs the camp said through a spokesman.

Twenty-five campers and two counselors died early on the morning of July 4th when floodwaters barreled through the Christian girls' camp, a beloved, 99-year-old retreat in Kerr County. The camp's owner and executive director, Dick Eastland, 70, died trying to rescue campers.

The weather service sent the flash flood warning at 1:14 a.m. that morning as torrential rains pummeled the Texas Hill Country. Counselors and other camp personnel began evacuating campers between 2 a.m. and 2:30 a.m., said Jeff Carr, a spokesman for the Eastland family, whose members have operated the camp for generations.

Carr said the time frame is an estimate offered by family members who were at the camp as the disaster unfolded.

RELATED NEWS: Camp Mystic was in nation's most dangerous river valley. Did parents know?

In the NWS lexicon, a warning means dangerous weather is happening or is extremely likely to happen soon. Warnings are delivered on social media, by email and directly to cellphones enabled to receive them.

The Washington Post was first to report on the gap between the flood warning and the evacuation.

Carr said camp officials are still putting together a precise, detailed timeline of how the catastrophe unfolded.

'Actively assessing'

Dick Eastland did not sit idle after receiving the NWS warning, Carr said.

“He got that alarm. He went out on to the property to assess. He called the rest of the family on the walkie talkies,” Carr told the San Antonio Express-News. “He was actively assessing conditions across the camp ... and things sort of ensued from there.”

More than 15 inches of rain fell on south and central Kerr County during the dark, early morning hours of July 4th. The deluge caused the Guadalupe River to rise 30 feet in 3½ hours.

At 1:40 a.m. that morning, the Guadalupe stood at 7.75 feet, its normal level. By 5:10 a.m., the river had crested at 37.52 feet — an all-time high.

The downpour far exceeded the NWS forecast for widespread rainfall of 1 to 3 inches, with isolated pockets getting 5 to 7 inches.

Camp Mystic sits on a bend in the south fork of the Guadalupe River, a few miles southwest of the town of Hunt and 18 miles west of Kerrville. Children were asleep in cabins when the emergency began. The campsite lost power, and cellphone and Wi-Fi signals were unreliable.

Eastland’s wife, Tweety Eastland, 72, and other family members were at Camp Mystic along with Dick Eastland, Carr said.

Hundreds of other children staying at the campsite were evacuated. Some waded through the floodwaters to climb to higher ground and waited with counselors until help arrived.
An aerial view of two cabins at Camp Mystic on July 8, four days after a catastrophic flood killed 25 campers, two counselors and the camp's owner.

'I can't be the only one'

A San Antonio probate attorney whose two daughters were rescued from their cabins at Camp Mystic said she has unanswered questions about how camp personnel responded to the crisis.

“The more that comes out, the more questions I have every day,” said Serena Aldrich, 41, who said she has received vitriolic messages from strangers since she began voicing her concerns publicly.

Her daughters, ages 9 and 12, escaped the rising waters and moved to higher ground with their counselors. The younger girl escaped through a cabin window with other children and waded through chest-high waters to reach a higher elevation.

Aldrich said communications from the camp have been sparse since the disaster. She called the flow of information “abysmal” and said she has received no explanation from the Eastland family or its representatives about how events unfolded that morning.

“I didn’t pass any blame — I just said they should have been on top of this ... and they should have,” Aldrich said in an interview.

“Obviously, I wish they had evacuated everybody ... It just seems like it would have been more prudent.”

Aldrich wonders if the parents who are publicly defending Camp Mystic had children at the camp at the time of the flood. She feels fortunate her own daughters made it out alive.

“I can’t be the only one” with concerns, she said. “We just want answers.”

Aldrich attended Camp Mystic as a child and said it was well known even then that a low bridge over Cypress Creek, a tributary of the Guadalupe that cuts through the camp, would flood to a minor degree, cutting off some of the girls’ cabins from the rest of the property.

But she said she never imagined a catastrophe on the scale of July 4th.

“I think they weren’t prepared to deal with it,” Aldrich said.

'Flash Flood Alley'

The remains of 106 victims have been found in Kerr County since the flood swept through the area, officials said. About 100 other people are still missing.

Camp Mystic was established in 1926 as a nondenominational Christian retreat for girls. The camp, which can accommodate up to 750 children, had flooded many times before the July 4th disaster but without loss of life.

Parents had to sign a liability waiver before sending their children to the camp. The 1,300-word document mentions floods only once, in a long list of possible risks that campers may encounter. It says nothing about the history of flooding at the site.

By signing the release, parents waived the right to sue the camp, its officers or employees over property damage, personal injuries and even deaths — "except in cases of intentional wrongs, recklessness or gross negligence."

Camp Mystic is located in a swath of Central Texas known as “Flash Flood Alley.”

The nickname stems from a recurring weather pattern: Storms sit above the Edwards Plateau and dump large quantities of rain onto the steep, rocky terrain. Rain sheets off the limestone bedrock and into narrow, shallowed-bottomed streams and rivers. Sleepy waterways can turn into raging torrents within minutes.

Destructive floods have struck the region repeatedly. During the storm of July 17, 1987, one of the worst on record, 10 teenagers at Pot O’ Gold, a Christian summer camp near Comfort, 36 miles east of Camp Mystic, died when the swollen Guadalupe swept them away as they tried to leave the site.

On Dec. 31, 1984, Dick Eastland’s wife, Tweety, then 31, was about to give birth when she became “trapped on the south bank of the Guadalupe River by floodwaters at Hunt,” the Kerrville Mountain Sun reported. An Army Medevac helicopter from Fort Sam Houston airlifted her from the site, the newspaper reported.

Tweety was taken to a Kerrville hospital, where she gave birth to her fourth child.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, July 16, 2025 12:17 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN

The OP:

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Some may think this is about the weather which visited Texas the past week or so, but their disaster has been ongoing for years.

Texas has claimed to be at the leading forefront of Tech power, replacing reliable Power sources with Renewable Power, such as Solar Power and Wind Power.

Solar Power output was 0% in the past week, just like in Yurp.
Wind power failed as well. Just like in Yurp.

They have been practicing rolling blackouts for years now, knowing their Renewable Energies wer4e a failure, but just ignoring the problem.

Without energy, pumps could not fuel the trucks. Loaded semis sat idling at the edge of the Texas blackout zone, while store shelves remained empty. Milk had to be dumped, as well as eggs, and livestock died without energy.

Clearly our resident illiterates have discovered that Texans are freezing to death on July 4th.

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Wednesday, July 16, 2025 12:29 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Back on topic:

https://www.ft.com/content/e6e1fe13-36f7-4fe5-84ba-77717dca68a8

https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/05/06/green-energy-experiment-by-spa
in-and-portugal-fails-with-power-grid-collapse-and-blackout/

https://www.dw.com/en/spain-portugal-blackout-renewables-wind-solar-en
ergy-grid-v2/a-72606531

And illiterates found that the largest Wind and Solar Farm in Texas is called "Camp Mystic"

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Wednesday, July 16, 2025 6:39 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

So many didn’t have to die. Texas must fix the failures the Hill Country floods exposed
For years, local leaders knew the risks of flooding along the Guadalupe. Warnings went unheeded, protections unfunded — and more than 130 Texans died.

By Lisa Falkenberg, Senior Columnist – Texas | July 16, 2025

https://tinyurl.com/y5ecrk8s Shortened link from the Houston Chronicle

A haunting quote from Camp Mystic’s late patriarch, Richard “Dick” Eastland, has resurfaced in news coverage since the devastating July 4 flood along the Guadalupe.

“The river is beautiful,” Eastland told the Austin American-Statesman in 1990. “But you have to respect it.”

It’s sage advice — and, in a way, it also applies to how political leaders should engage with Texans today.

It’s fine to marvel at the beauty of Texans’ strength, generosity and resilience amid inexplicable tragedy. In recent weeks, more than 13,000 volunteers have given their time, treasure and perhaps even their own mental wellness to clear debris, work in shelters and join countless law enforcement officers and military personnel in search of missing flood victims.

In a news conference Friday in the hard-hit Kerr County hamlet of Hunt, President Donald Trump noted the “unity and competence” he’d seen on his tour of the area. No doubt, grief and pride have walked side by side in the days since the raging Guadalupe took more than 130 lives, with at least 100 still missing.

But our leaders, from the president to the governor on down to local officials in Kerr County, need to have some respect as well – for Texans’ right to know what happened and what didn’t happen, for the right to understand why hundreds of friends, family members, and fellow Texans are dead, for the right to insist that when the special Legislative session starts in just a few days, lawmakers will ensure that river communities will never again be so vulnerable.

At Friday’s news conference, Gov. Greg Abbott did vow to consider the myriad ideas being proposed to keep Texans safe, including warning alerts and sirens: “We’re going to work on alerts, we’re going to work on every single solution to make sure things like this don’t happen again, not just in this community but in other river basins across the state,” Abbott said. “We will work to get it right.”

This is exactly what concerned citizens want to hear. But days earlier, the governor dismissed those demanding accountability as “losers” playing the blame game. He used a convoluted football analogy to say that team players don't fault each other for a fumbled play. But, governor, don’t they study the tape on Monday to learn some lessons before the next game?

Likewise, isn't it fair for Texans to look at this tragedy and ask what could have prevented at least some of the deaths? To ask why an area known as "flash flood alley" could be caught so off guard by a flash flood? To ask why the 230-mile Guadalupe River has only four working flood gauges while the dammed-up, 87-mile Blanco River has 14? One answer to that last question is that, after flooding along the Blanco killed 13 in the Wimberley area in 2015, local leaders asked the hard questions and acted to better protect people.

And yet, when a reporter with CBS Texas asked Trump during the news conference about families who were upset about delayed warnings, the president lashed out: “I don’t know who you are but only a very evil person would ask a question like that," he told her, then told the public officials and first responders in the room, "I think it’s been heroism, the job you’ve all done."

No one denies the heroism, from Coast Guard rescue swimmers who saved hundreds of girls to Dick Eastland, who died after trying to drive three campers to safety.

But heroism after the fact has nothing to do with decisions made in the hours, or even years, before the raging floods began to swallow cars and cabins and entire families whole.

Decisions and consequences

Eastland himself was inconsistent in following his word of caution about the river. While he successfully advocated for a short-lived flood warning system after a devastating 1987 flood, the Associated Press reported that Camp Mystic repeatedly and successfully appealed to FEMA to remove dozens of its buildings from the 100-year flood map. That move loosened oversight and reduced insurance requirements but did nothing to improve the safety of the campers he loved so much.

Eastland’s actions during the predawn flooding also raise questions. The Washington Post this week quoted a family spokesman saying that Eastland waited more than an hour to begin evacuating young campers from their cabins after he received a severe flood warning at 1:14 a.m. from the National Weather Service citing “life-threatening flash flooding” in Kerr County.

No one denies the unprecedented nature of this flood. Jeff Lindner, a Harris County Flood Control District meteorologist who has conducted post-storm field surveys across the Gulf Coast for two decades, wrote on Facebook last week that the destruction along more than 70 miles of Guadalupe River "was about the worst I have ever seen. ... it was like the combined forces of hurricane storm surge and a tornado."

Even officials in “the most dangerous river valley in the United States,” as Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly called it, weren’t expecting the river to rise 26 feet within 45 minutes.

But maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe we should stop being so shocked by the devastation wrought by a river that keeps outdoing herself. A 1999 safety guide issued by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority and FEMA called a 1998 flood that killed 12, including several in my hometown of Seguin, "the flood that many thought would never happen." Perhaps our fellow Texans thought the same thing after other major floods in 1936, 1952, 1972, 1973, 1978, 1987, 1991 and 1997.

Just last fall, Kerr County wrote in a report to federal officials obtained by The New York Times that “it is likely” the county would experience a flood event in 2025 and it could result in “increased damage, injuries, or loss of life.”

So why didn’t officials prepare for that? Why didn’t they come up with a way to better alert people to flooding danger?

Nearly a decade ago, Kerr County Commissioner Tom Moser tried to heed the warning of the deadly flood in the Wimberley area by proposing a centralized flood warning system for Kerr, complete with river gauges and sensors and even sirens to alert people in a hilly region known for spotty cell service and where frequent weather alerts on phones can make people numb to them. But even when Moser scrapped the unpopular sirens, which some feared would blast false alarms across the majestic landscape, commissioners balked at the $1 million price tag, which one called “extravagant.”

The system never materialized, not even years later when the county received $7 million in COVID relief funds. Two earlier requests for grant funding were denied by the Texas Division of Emergency Management, one in 2017 because the county lacked a natural disaster plan and one in 2018 when the state prioritized areas hit by Hurricane Harvey. Last year, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority declined a modest offer by the state water development board to match 5 percent of the cost of a system – a figure calculated in part based on the area’s average household income, The New York Times reported.

Asked in a recent interview if he thought the flood warning components could have saved lives, Moser said, “I’m confident they could have.”

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick echoed that on Fox News soon after the July 4 flood: "It's just clear those sirens need to blast," Patrick said. "If the cities can't afford it, we'll step in." That's progress, especially when you consider that the Texas Senate Patrick oversees killed a bill last session that would have created a statewide strategic plan and grant program to help communities invest in emergency communications, alert systems and first responder equipment.

Another question: Why did the county wait hours to send text alerts through its opt-in CodeRed system? Officials initially claimed they didn’t have any alert system at all but Texas Public Radio learned the CodeRed system had been in place since at least 2009 and that when an Ingram volunteer firefighter requested an alert be sent in the early hours of July 4, a dispatcher said she didn’t have the authority.

In news conferences, Kerr officials have deflected questions about what they could have done to warn people sooner, urging journalists to “bear with us” as recovery efforts continue and officials tend to the grim task of informing victims’ families when their loved ones are found.

Some on social media have suggested it’s too early or even disrespectful to ask hard questions.

A sense of urgency

Nothing is more disrespectful of human life than refusing to do everything we can to preserve it.

It’s not too early to demand answers and accountability; it’s too late, actually, for those who might have been saved by a well-functioning flood warning system or even a noisy siren that could have alerted sleeping campers of the danger rushing toward them. The nearby town of Comfort had such a system and suffered no casualties although the town also had the benefit of daylight.

Politicians need the political will to act, especially when they’re weighing whether to spend millions of taxpayer dollars. That means people must still be paying attention when problems and solutions are debated. Sadly, the countdown clock on public interest starts immediately. Within days or weeks, many people move on to the next big headline.

“If we don’t talk about it now and get the fire underneath everybody, it’s going to get shuffled again,” Raymond Howard, council member in nearby Ingram, told The New York Times. “And I don’t want to see that.”

Nobody does. If Abbott and Patrick are serious about funding warning systems and other flood-prevention, they have their work cut out for them. Texas’ growing backlog of flood mitigation projects totals about $54 billion, the Times reported. That’s slightly more than the $51 billion lawmakers approved in property tax cuts.

It’s all about priorities. If this tragic loss of life doesn’t spur action, nothing will. Flood mitigation is expensive but even in a conservative state, or in bright red Kerr County, it should be clear by now that the cost of inaction is far greater.

Falkenberg is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has covered her home state of Texas for 25 years.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 17, 2025 9:23 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Texas Officials Say They Didn’t See the Flood Coming.

Oral Histories Show Residents Have Long Warned of Risks.

By Logan Jaffe | July 16, 2025

https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-floods-oral-histories

In late September 2000, longtime Kerr County, Texas, resident W. Thornton Secor Jr. sat down with an oral historian to tell his story. Like many of the residents recorded as part of a decades-long effort by the Kerr County Historical Commission to document the community’s history, Secor had a lot to say about the area’s floods.

“It always seems to happen at night too,” Secor said of local floods he and his family had experienced. “Can’t see most of it.”

Secor said he remembered a time in the spring of 1959 when his father tried to warn one new-to-town woman about building a house so close to the river.

“‘Oh,’ she says, ‘that will never happen again,’” Secor recalled. He said her body was found in a tree a few months later after a flood swept her and the roof she stood on away.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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