What went wrong in the Texas floods?

LONG BEFORE the sun rose the waters came rushing. Heavy rain swelled the rivers of Texas’s hill country until they burst their banks, drowning people, cars and trailers before dawn on July 4th. Greg Abbott, Texas’s governor, announced five days later that the storm had killed 109 people and that 173 are still missing. More than two dozen of the dead are children and counsellors from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp for girls whose cabins dotted the bank of the Guadalupe River. As ground crews comb the mud for bodies, many people are asking the same question. What went so terribly wrong?

Officials in Kerr County, where most of the deaths took place, were quick to blame the National Weather Service for issuing warnings that were too little too late. Yet meteorologists say that the forecasts were good, perhaps even unusually good given the information they had. The Trump administration fired most probationary staff at the weather service earlier this year, but that did not hinder Texas weather offices’ ability to forecast the storm, says Tom Fahy of the National Weather Service Employees Organisation, a union. Offices in nearby San Antonio and San Angelo were well-staffed and communicated with local officials throughout the night. The warnings went out in all of the affected areas at least one hour—and in some three or four hours—before the rivers surged. “This was the best that science would allow,” says Daniel Swain, a climate researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.

It was not enough. Rainfall was concentrated in what the county’s top elected official calls America’s “most dangerous river valley”. Thunderstorm clouds dropped 12 inches of rain over a ten-square-mile zone where two rivers prone to flash floods meet. The Guadalupe rose by 29 feet in under three hours (see chart). The storm was deadlier because it struck in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, when people were asleep by the water.

The “last mile” of communication—what happens after the weather service warns of dangers—failed miserably. In 2017 Kerr County considered building its own flood-warning system, but decided it was too costly. That is not unusual for a rural place with small government and little access to capital, says Avantika Gori, an environmental engineer at Rice University. But for years state politicians refused to help, even as the risk of floods rose.

The Texas Division of Emergency Management, which was tasked with allocating $100m in federal funds for disaster preparation after floods killed 20 Texans in 2016, twice denied the county’s request for $1m to upgrade its water gauges and sensors, and to create an online alert system. Although the state’s water board recommended $54bn of state funds for flood control across Texas over a year ago, lawmakers have so far only allocated $669m. This spring the Texas senate nixed a bill that would have paid for warning sirens and given grants to the most flood-prone places. The House member who represents Kerr County now regrets voting “no”. The lieutenant governor, who runs the Senate, wants the state to pay for sirens along the river by next summer.

Sirens may have saved more people, but a Kerr County meeting record shows that years ago taxpayers wanted to invest in alert systems instead, which they didn’t end up getting. “Flashing lights or barricades or sirens” are more useful for “tourists” like the campers, they reckoned, who are “not familiar with the area and wouldn’t know what to do”. After a 1987 flood that killed ten campers in the same area the federal government installed radio towers to spread warnings on walkie-talkies. Those messages were sent out, but they were not effective.

The girls had gone to bed after the weather service said flash floods were likely. Later the weather service sent screeching alerts to people’s phones but some residents say they never received them because of spotty reception; others probably slept through them. Some locals had opted out of the state’s emergency warning system entirely before the storm, annoyed by the volume of “blue alerts” about police officers being shot across the state, often hundreds of miles away. Emergency responders worry about warning fatigue.

Today one in six Texans lives or works in a flood hazard area and soon more will. Flash-flood alley, the winding strip of land that the storm ravaged, and Harris county, home to Houston, a city known as the country’s flood capital, are gaining more people than anywhere else in the state. As the low-lying plains become more inhabited—and climate change brings more unpredictable storms—Texas’s politicians will have to plan better. On Tuesday Mr Abbott said that asking who is to blame for the deaths is “the word choice of losers”. Nevertheless the governor has called lawmakers back to Austin to investigate. ■