I met someone from D.C. once. I’m not saying she’s an exemplar of the residents, there, but she made it clear to all (this was in Austin, in the ‘80’s, when I worked for a law firm before law school. Don’t get hung up on the details.) that she was now in the boonies on the ass end of the civilized world.
Yeah. Everyone got along well with her. What brings her to mind is a phone conversation she had with her boyfriend. Everyone within 20 feet could hear her end of conversation. He wanted to go to one of the highland lakes outside Austin that weekend. She was literally terrified at the prospect . What I still remember is her fear a “squall” would come up suddenly and capsize their boat and all would be lost.
You have to understand Texas has no natural lakes. The lakes in Texas are manmade. The highland lakes are created by dams on the Colorado River. Storms are a feature of the Hill Country (obviously). Squalls are not. You got to know where you are.
I remember a lawyer I worked with talking about the terrain of the Hill Country, and the danger that posed to visitors. People who liked the (then, this was 40 years ago) “wildness” of the area, and wanted to camp there, would bed down in a smooth spot, only to find it was an arroyo (a dry creek bed) and there’d been a thunderstorm upstream. People caught in, and killed by, flash floods was not uncommon then, or now. Flash floods are a feature of the area.
And here’s the thing about flooding: unless you are on Galveston Island, mere inches above sea level, best advice is usually: hunker down. Houston tried to evacuate before Hurricane Rita. If it had hit, the loss of life from people in cars trying to escape would have been enormous. The very first thing floods hit is transportation. Better to get on your house rooftop, than the rooftop of a flooded car. Don’t go to the flood. Let the flood come to you.
Camp Mystic, where the greatest damage was done and the greatest number endangered, reported the highway was damaged and no one could leave the camp. Imagine carloads or bus loads of children on that road when the flash flood hit. You can’t stop a flash flood. You can only head for high ground, or hunker down.
So this kind of speculation is pretty damned useless:
Floods happen and often with little warning. That's why they're called flash floods. But with the particularly deadly floods that just hit Texas it's important to ask to what degree massive DOGE cuts to weather reporting/emergency warning systems contributed to this loss of so much life.
It’s a fair question, at the right time. This ain’t the right time.
And then JMM doubles down:Trump and Elon made massive cuts to all US weather tracking and warning systems in the spring of 2025.
JMM is responding to this comment by Trump:
Now, I despise Donald Trump, and I’m waiting to see if he decides to let FEMA help with this or not. But that’s later; this crisis is now, and Trump, as ever, is as useless as tits on a boar hog. But unless NOAA was previously forecasting flash floods in the Texas Hill Country two weeks in advance and evacuating people in that time frame (pro tip: NOAA wasn’t), this disaster has bugger all to do with cuts of any kind to NOAA. I lived in Central Texas for 15 years. I’m fairly familiar with the weather, there. “Particularly deadly” floods are going to hit in Texas as the Hill Country grows increasingly popular. I’ve slept through at least two flash floods. One, when I was in college, and woke to find out I was in a federal disaster area (flash flood, but I was on the third floor of a dormitory, sawing logs), and the Memorial Day flood in Austin when Shoal Creek swept almost everything in its flood plain south to the Colorado River, including a parking lot of new cars from a car dealership. I was in South Austin, the other side of the river; we were high and dry.
Weather is weird that way, is my point. When Harvey inundated Houston, it took 8 hours to pick up my daughter from work one day, because of road closures after the rain stopped (and the traffic that caused). That, and where the closures were. Other people in her office, living in other parts of town, had no travel issues at all.
I’m familiar enough with the geography of the Texas Hill Country to know floods are unpredictable, and that they happen, especially there. I’m also familiar with the beauty of the Hill Country, and why do many commercial camps are there (now recalling some of my best childhood memories). Information is good, but it won’t stop the flood, and used the wrong way, information may even leave you worse off. There were 1000 people at Camp Mystic. Mostly, for maybe the first time in the camp’s history, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If you gave JMM a map of Texas and said “identify the Hill Country,” I doubt he’d do very well. If you asked him to describe the geography of the area, he probably wouldn’t get past “hills.” East Texas has hills, too; and a great deal more annual rainfall. But far fewer flash floods. Geography can make a helluva difference.
We should all consider our ignorance on this subject. And consider what’s more important: the people affected? Or political talking points? And act accordingly.
