Just a reminder of why we’re supposedly here, the non-THC reason.
Sixteen months had passed since Hurricane Harvey tore through the Texas coast in August 2017, killing more than 80 people and flattening entire neighborhoods. And when Texas lawmakers gathered in Austin for their biennial session, the scale of the storm’s destruction was hard to ignore.
Legislators responded by greenlighting a yearslong statewide initiative to evaluate flood risks and improve preparedness for increasingly frequent and deadly storms. “If we get our planning right on the front end and prevent more damage on the front end, then we have less on the back end,” Charles Perry, a Republican senator from Lubbock who chairs a committee overseeing environmental issues, said at the time.
In the years that followed, hundreds of local officials and volunteers canvassed communities across Texas, mapping out vulnerabilities. The result of their work came in 2024 with the release of Texas’ first-ever state flood plan.
Their findings identified nearly $55 billion in proposed projects and outlined 15 key recommendations, including nine suggestions for legislation. Several were aimed at aiding rural communities like Kerr County, where flash flooding over the Fourth of July weekend killed more than 100 people. Three are still missing.
But this year, lawmakers largely ignored those recommendations.
Instead, the legislative session that ended June 2 was dominated by high-profile battles over school vouchers and lawmakers’ decision to spend $51 billion to maintain and provide new property tax cuts, an amount nearly equal to the funding identified by the Texas Water Development Board, a state agency that has historically overseen water supply and conservation efforts.
Although it had been only seven years since Hurricane Harvey, legislators now prioritized the state’s water and drought crisis over flooding needs.
Legislators allocated more than $1.6 billion in new revenue for water infrastructure projects, only some of which would go toward flood mitigation. They also passed a bill that will ask voters in November to decide whether to approve $1 billion annually over the next two decades that would prioritize water and wastewater over flood mitigation projects. At that pace, water experts said that it could take decades before existing mitigation needs are addressed — even without further floods.
Even if they had been approved by lawmakers this year, many of the plan’s recommendations would not have been implemented before the July 4 disaster. But a ProPublica and Texas Tribune analysis of legislative proposals, along with interviews with lawmakers and flood experts, found that the Legislature has repeatedly failed to enact key measures that would help communities prepare for frequent flooding.
Such inaction often hits rural and economically disadvantaged communities hardest because they lack the tax base to fund major flood prevention projects and often cannot afford to produce the data they need to qualify for state and federal grants, environmental experts and lawmakers said.
[…]
This week, the Legislature will convene for a special session that Abbott called to address a range of priorities, including flood warning systems, natural disaster preparation and relief funding. Patrick promised that the state would purchase warning sirens for counties in flash flood zones. Similar efforts, however, have previously been rejected by the Legislature. Alongside Burrows, Patrick also announced the formation of committees on disaster preparedness and flooding and called the move “just the beginning of the Legislature looking at every aspect of this tragic event.” Burrows said the House is “ready to better fortify our state against future disasters.”
But Rep. Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos, a Democrat from Richardson, near Dallas, said state lawmakers have brushed off dire flood prevention needs for decades.
“The manual was there, and we ignored it, and we’ve continued to ignore these recommendations,” said Rodríguez Ramos, who has served on the House Natural Resources Committee overseeing water issues for three sessions. “It’s performative to say we’re trying to do something knowing well we’re not doing enough.”
Funny how there’s always money for tax cuts but never for most other priorities. Anyone want to bet on a different outcome this time around?
You may have noticed that this article listed the number of missing as just three. Yes, that’s a big change.
The number of people missing in Kerr County after the July 4 flood was revised to just three Saturday evening, according to a news release from county officials.
Until the Kerr County Flood Disaster Joint Information Center released the new tally, the figure had stood at more than 160. County officials said Saturday that “many individuals” who had been reported missing were safe and removed from the list.
“We are profoundly grateful to the more than 1,000 local, state, and federal authorities who have worked tirelessly in the wake of the devastating flood that struck our community,” Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said. “Thanks to their extraordinary efforts, the number of individuals previously listed as missing has dropped from over 160 to three.”
“This remarkable progress reflects countless hours of coordinated search and rescue operations, careful investigative work, and an unwavering commitment to bringing clarity and hope to families during an unimaginably difficult time,” Rice said.
No explanation given for the change, so who knows how that came about. I assume that the data they had was messy and had duplicates and needed verification, and now they’re at a point where some followup could be done. Or maybe there were a lot of people who were on the missing list without realizing it, and they came forward. I’m delighted that this number was so greatly reduced without an accompanying increase in the fatality count. I’m just a little whiplashed by it.
This story has the headline “New details emerge about chaotic rescue effort at Camp Mystic” and it’s about how director Dick Eastland and many of the young campers died in the flood. It gets right into it in the first paragraphs. You may or may not want to read that, so I’ll just leave it right there.
The Hill Country does have flood warning sirens. Here’s where they are and how they work.
In fact, sirens have been in place for years in some nearby Hill Country counties — and officials say that although they’re far from foolproof and are not an all-in-one solution, they have been well worth the cost and effort.
Comfort, the cities of New Braunfels and San Marcos, and parts of Comal County installed sirens along rivers more than a decade ago, and they’ve recently spent more to replace and upgrade parts of the systems.
It’s impossible to say how effective sirens would have been in Kerr County on July 4. It would depend how many there were, where they were located, when they sounded and whether people in the path of the flooding heard them and knew what to do.
But despite their limitations, it’s better to have sirens than not, say officials in communities that have invested in them.
“If this just saves a couple lives, it’s well worth it,” said San Marcos’ emergency management coordinator, Rob Fitch.
We can debate the answer to that question, and why some places had sirens and others didn’t all we want. At this point, any place in the high risk zone that doesn’t have some form of alert system that can be easily heard at night and isn’t dependent on possibly flaky cell service is a choice. The Lege can make it an easy choice if the Republicans want to prioritize that. We’ll see.
Response to deadly Texas floods was ‘a masterclass in how not to communicate,’ experts say
After devastating floods tore through the Hill Country on the Fourth of July, government representatives faced intense scrutiny about how they’ve handled the disaster, and whether earlier public warnings could have saved lives.
In response, President Donald Trump, Gov. Greg Abbott and other officials have pushed back against pointed questions and stayed mostly silent on what local leaders did during the crucial early morning hours before the Guadalupe River surged.
“It’s a masterclass in how not to communicate,” said Tom Stewart, a Texas public relations specialist who has worked in the past on storm response.
Professional crisis communicators like Stewart watched the news conferences with dismay. Deflecting blame is not helpful if politicians want to build trust with the public, they say.
“There’s no comms plan in the world that will take away the number of deaths and the pain of the families that lost children and relatives,” said Jeff Eller, another public relations veteran based in Austin. “What it can do is give comfort that the government cares, understands that there was a tragedy here and is making the resources available to make it better.”
Yet, “the more the questions came, the less credible they became,” Eller said.
Parents like Kristen Washam, a Hill Country native who now lives in the Houston area, intently listened to the official responses from day one. She didn’t like what she heard.
Washam’s 11-year-old son was at a camp along the Guadalupe River on July 4, though he ended up staying out of harm’s way. She listened to press conferences streaming on her home TV, but turned it off when she said she heard officials patting themselves on the back instead of providing crucial and timely information.
“People like myself, we want those in charge to be transparent, and it doesn’t seem like they’re being transparent. We’re getting a lot of deflection,” Washam said.
[…]
Missing from the defensive comments, Dallas-based public relations professional Jo Trizila said, is empathy and humility in acknowledging that mistakes had to have been made somewhere for so many to have died, even if it’s not clear yet what went wrong or what could’ve been better.
“So far, we see people trying to blame somebody else. It just looks like a big cover-up. And I don’t think that’s what it is. I think nobody wants to admit that we failed,” Trizila said.
“What people want to hear is: ‘Hey, we screwed up. I’m sorry. We’re going to do better, and this is what we’re going to do, and these are the lessons we learned,’” she added.
To address the issue from the previous story, their track record of being accountable is not great. I’d keep my expectations modest. Twenty-nine days to go.
Republicans lie; no amount of goodwill gesture from bloggers or news media will change the fact that those evil people lie all the time. No one will ever know how many people died that day, as Republicans control the narrative.