I Go Pogo

 Reasonable speculation:

The original forecast that we received Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6 inches of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches in the Hill Country,” said Texas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd at a press conference Friday. “The amount of rain that fell at this specific location was never in any of those forecasts.”

And ultimately worthy of investigation and criticism. But the two flash floods I mentioned from days gone by? One was easily 50 years ago, the other 40. And the damage done was due to far heavier rainfall than predicted. I’ve seen rainfall predictions for my neighborhood come to nothing, while the rain inundates someone else nearby. I’m skeptical about how much has changed for NOAA since January.

I get it. This guy wants a scapegoat. But if NOAA had predicted 10 inches of rain, would the affected areas have evacuated? I understand more than 1000 people were at Camp Mystic alone. That ain’t exactly at a crossroads of interstates. Imagine warning 1000 children and counselors a ten inch deluge was coming. Good prediction, but then what? How many roads are there out of that area? The flood-damaged highway is probably a two lane affair.  A state highway, not a federal interstate (you don’t go there to be near a major highway). Sure, get in cars as the flood waters come, in the dark. That’s a good idea.

NOAA issued a flood watch Thursday evening. By  Friday morning it was a flood watch. Those usually come too late. All you can really do is hunker down. Or not be there in the first place.

So I have other questions, for the state. What’s the infrastructure and emergency planning for a camp this large? The last time the Guadalupe rose this high was in 1987, so it’s unusual, but it’s not unknown. What’s the designated flood plain of the river, and what’s been built in it? And why?

We had plenty of notice of Harvey. We knew the floodplains of the creeks and bayous. We even knew where the water would go from the Corps of Engineers reservoir, designed to hold and release water, built in the ‘40’s. We built in those areas anyway; and they flooded; and people died.

47 years ago, when I moved to Austin, the Hill Country to the west was rural and lightly populated. Even after I moved to Houston and started trekking to Stonewall, Texas (west of Austin, just east of Fredericksburg), to get fresh peaches, I would go directly through south Austin into the hill country.

I don’t do that anymore. I go well to the south of Austin and take state ranch roads, because the traffic out of Austin is terrible, and it doesn’t get better (like it used to) until I’m nearly to my destination (still just a wide spot in the road, but a wonderful orchard and marvelous peaches.). The Hill Country been “discovered,” and everybody and his second cousin wants to live there. Which hasn’t changed the geography and geology and climate of the area one jot. What has changed is the number of people living there, in a naturally flood prone area.

The Hill Country floods the way forests in the West burn. It’s the ecosystem. And it goes on, whether people are there, or not. You think I’m beating a dead horse, but when I lived in Austin, signs began to go up marking the “Edwards Aquifer Recharge zone.” The aquifer is an underground lake stretching from Austin to the Panhandle. It is literally the reason there is agriculture in west Texas and the Panhandle. And the reason people can live in Austin, and San Antonio (the aquifer is that big). And it’s being used up. Because of people. Mostly because of people in the recharge zone, using the water beneath them. More and more and more people. The same reason flooding in the Hill Country is more of a problem than ever. More people are there than ever before. More people don’t change the geology, or the geography, or the rainfall (yes, global warming has made our predictions less reliable, but flash flooding is still part of the landscape).

What are we doing about it? Blaming NOAA? Blaming Trump and Musk? Yeah, that’ll help. Maybe we should pay more attention to where we are,  and less attention to who we think is responsible for our actions. In the end, Pogo is right: we have met the enemy, and he is us.