alias_sqbr

my readership is likely aware of cataclysmic Central Texas flooding that took place over the 4th of July and in the days after the holiday. at drafting, there were at least 109 fatalities associated with this event. at publication, there are 119. i suspect there will be many more even after publication—the numbers have continued to climb for days now with no obvious plateau, and now they're reporting over 160 missing. it is the worst flooding disaster in the United States in 49 years. it is also an example of how there is no such thing as a natural disaster.

do not let people lie to you. do not let local officials gaslight; and do not let the climate-accelerationist federal government tell you sweet little nothings about how sometimes people just die in tragedies and nothing can be done about it. everyone knew something like this could and would happen here. this situation was completely predictable in every sense and at every level. there is no ambiguity here.

the Guadalupe River is one of the most flood-prone rivers in the United States and has a long history of murderous floods; it killed 10 people in 1987 and another 31 in 1998. the region it sits in is, likewise, literally nicknamed "Flash Flood Alley" and is geographically optimized for serious flash flooding events. flood events in this part of Texas are like hurricanes on the Gulf Coast: this is what the weather is like here—and local officials are extremely aware of this fact. one-time Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer¹ agitated for an outdoor siren system during his time in office, and Kerr County commissioners first debated creating one in 2016 and have continued every year since. inadequacies in the existing flood alert system were also publicly and privately acknowledged after floods in 2015, and then again, and again, and again. it's very clear that everyone knew—eventually—a major flood was going to strike Kerr County and cause havoc. it's also clear that they all knew the imperfect—or in some cases outright nonexistent—warning system would be a particularly serious problem for the region's many youth camps. almost all of these were built in high-risk flood zones (defined by FEMA as having a 1-in-100 annual chance of flooding) and have flooded at one time or another during their existence. (in fact, the fatalities from the 1987 flood were all associated with one such camp.)

the things they wish you were stupid enough to not understand

of course, being aware that a catastrophe could happen—and doing the bare minimum to stop it—still doesn't actually make you look very good when the catastrophe happens and it has a body count like this one. the past few days have been rife with ass-pulls like "Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming" that are obvious bullshit to deflect blame away from where it rests.

the fact of the matter is that local officials, for all their knowing that a catastrophe could happen, seem to have simply not cared enough to actually prepare themselves for such an emergency. now that catastrophe is here, and they look very bad. so they deflect. they blame the National Weather Service for not giving them an adequate forecast in advance or providing ample warning time of the flooding, even though the NWS did on both counts (and was actually remarkably on the ball all things considered). they treat the deaths as acts of God as it simultaneously comes out they refused to coordinate with the NWS in the moment, and retrospectively admit to things like "[not knowing] what kind of safety and evacuation plans the camps may have had". or they insist that warnings almost exclusively communicated through Facebook (relying internet access) and their CodeRed system (relying on cellphone signal) wash the blood from their hands, even though—if they had done their diligence—it was known that in places like Camp Mystic

the young campers [...] likely wouldn’t have seen [such warnings] since cell phones, smart watches, iPads and anything with Wi-Fi capability were considered “unacceptable electronic devices” to bring and “not allowed,” according to a recent list of instructions sent to parents.

it's nothing short of delusional to pretend the buck stops anywhere besides with Kerr County for what a clusterfuck this has been.

ecological murder-suicide

maybe we wouldn't be here if Kerr County actually spent some money. but the thing about proactive disaster mitigation is that it sometimes isn't cheap and Kerr County is extremely stingy. in 2016, even a $50,000 contract to "conduct an engineering study for a proposed high water detection system" drew pushback from one county commissioner who thought it was rather extravigant; when the county lost out on a grant of $1 million to implement a more refined warning system in 2018, the county could have picked up the tab (it has a budget of almost $70 million) but opted not to and has mostly dawdled ever since (even after receiving other potential sources of money to finance such a thing such as ARPA funds). spending millions of dollars, according to both former and current county officials, would have been deeply unpopular and/or required raising taxes—actions that county commissioners are afraid of doing and which, in any case, county residents would raise hell over. as judge Rob Kelly expressed to the New York Times:

[...]the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending. “Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Mr. Kelly said. Asked if people might reconsider in light of the catastrophe, he said, “I don’t know.”

you may bristle at taking the word of county officials here given their ass-covering everywhere else, but i don't actually find this particular claim hard to believe. there are a lot of people who genuinely hate taxation and think being compelled to pay for something that will ensure they won't die is government overreach—and rural and exurban areas are particularly filled to the brim with people like that. in the case of Kerrvile you need only drive an hour south to the outskirts of San Antonio to find a suburban "liberty city" whose brilliant model of municipal funding is sales taxes and no property taxes.² there's also the fact that the Texas Legislature, earlier this year, quietly killed a bill that would have "established a grant program for counties to build new emergency communication infrastructure."³ the antipathy is deep for spending, or at least certain kinds of it that don't advance a hard-right political agenda.

so if we grant their honesty on this one count, which i am inclined to, what is happening should probably be understood not quite as a form of social murder and more as a combined murder-suicide, if you will. Kerr County and its elected officials are unambiguously cowards who should have done more, and are lying when they say they couldn't have done more, but they inevitably reflect the people who elected them. and the people who elected them were pretty clearly fine with—and may still be fine with, even after this event—an indeterminate number of people dying in service of keeping their tax bill down.

this is going to keep happening

at the end of the day what conservatives want you to believe is that your anger about this is placed at federal employees whose agencies are being defunded and destroyed with a thousand job cuts rather than county officials who thought spending money on evacuation sirens might dampen the county's beauty somehow. they want you to think that what happened here is natural, inevitable, and something we just have to plan around—but it fucking isn't. every part of this was preventable, if not necessarily every death.

Kerr County—or Texas—could have spent money on a comprehensive warning system; they did not for a variety of reasons. Kerr County could have made actual emergency plans and reviewed the procedures for getting people in the camps out of harm's way; it did not because its leadership doesn't seem to have cared enough. its leadership could have coordinated with the NWS, passed along warnings, and ordered evacuations when the severity of the situation became obvious early in the night; but none of this happened until it was far too late. the list is endless, and the commonality is that all of these are human—within our control to influence. Kerr County made a series of choices, fully human ones, that guaranteed many more people would die here than needed to.

similar human-controlled variables are making this possible at the macro-level too. while the consensus seems to be—if anything—that the NWS had more staff on call than it usually does at that time of night, that is in spite of what is being done to the agency as a whole. mass-death like this is an inevitable product of the systemic defunding and de-staffing it is currently being subject to under the Trump administration. Chris Gloninger summarizes what is happening here admirably, saying that:

The FY 2026 federal budget, championed by the Trump administration, proposes slashing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) by nearly 30% and gutting its weather and climate research division by 74%. These cuts are already reshaping the agency: more than a thousand veteran NOAA employees have taken buyouts or been laid off this year, and thousands more cuts are looming. At a single farewell event in May, roughly 1,000 staff walked out the door – taking with them 27,000 years of combined experience. At the NWS alone, hundreds of meteorologists and technical specialists have been dismissed or pushed into early retirement. In total, NOAA has lost an estimated 27,000 years of forecasting expertise in under a year – a brain drain of knowledge that can’t be replaced by algorithms or fresh graduates overnight.

this is problematic if you want people to not die. our success in minimizing mass-casualty floods is in large part because we seriously fund and staff our federal weather service (although there's always been room for improvement on the second count). better infrastructure across the board—nationwide radar, ease of proliferating weather information, the development of highly detailed flood maps and flood datasets, etc—make it possible to identify where harm is likely and get people out before they can be harmed. all of that needs manpower and money, though, and that money is being deprived now in service of a fascist political agenda that denies climate change and devalues work like this as a whole.

our reliance on fossil fuels is another input that cannot be ignored. individual events are difficult to link causally to climate change—so i will not do that here—but catastrophic flooding events, and intense rain events more generally, are made demonstrably more likely by climate change. the mechanics of this are simple and rather intuitive, as Andrew Dessler describes:

Warmer air can hold more water vapor — about 7% more for every degree Celsius increase in temperature. Consequently, the air converging into a storm system in a warmer climate carries more water vapor. Since most of the water vapor entering the storm’s updraft will fall out as rain, everything else the same, more water in the air flowing into the storm will lead to more intense rainfall. That’s it. Not terribly complicated.

so even if we cannot say definitively that the Kerr County flood is a result of climate change, it is inevitable that more floods like this will happen if we continue warming the planet. the recourse here is the same as all things related to climate change: stop using fossil fuels. there is no other option.

if there's any summary i have for all of this it's the title. it's why i made it the title. there are no natural disasters—and this in particular was not a "natural disaster," but rather an entirely predictable outcome. this will happen again if we don't learn from it, and address the underlying things which made it such a disaster in the first place.

notes

¹ someone who, it should be noted, responded as a deputy to the 1987 flood on the Guadalupe River that killed 10 people.

² as an aside: that this city—Von Orny—has been a trainwreck that can't pay for basic services (and has still been facing a fiscal cliff pretty much since its creation) tends to be conveniently glossed over by libertarians.

³ one of the votes against in the House was, in a morbidly ironic case, Representative Wes Virdell (R, HD-52), whose district includes Kerr County. he now says he'd vote differently—i'm sure his constituents are thankful it has taken killing 109 and counting people to change his mind here.