Found on Facebook Texas flood
Sarah and I moved to Austin on August 1st, 2009 in the midst of what was then a record-breaking heatwave, featuring a month of elevated temperatures that subsided neither in the shade nor after sundown. At the time, we figured we would adjust to the climate in our new home state fairly easily: after all, we had just come from the Middle East, having spent summers in deserts that routinely hit triple digits. We learned within a few days of moving to Texas that things were different here: the state was enduring what was thought to be a decade-long drought largely exacerbated by a host of unnatural variables. The Middle East was, as a whole, adapted to the heat both functionally and culturally, but in Texas. the weather systems that produced that particular heat wave simply had not been around that long. The state was so unprepared for its slow reckoning with climate change that the governor’s actual response was to call for prayers for rain. In response, over 30,000 people showed up to a football stadium, hoping for a little condensation.
In the 16 years since, it has been rare for the weather to pattern itself predictably, while outsized anomalies have come to typify each season. Central Texas was able to celebrate the end of its decade-long drought in the mid 2010’s, but only due to a series of hundred year floods so drastic that regional weather services ultimately changed the standards for what constituted hundred year floods. Every winter, Texas now has an annual dalliance with power grid failures and state-wide deep freezes. Since 2020, Central Texas has since dipped back into another years-long drought, our lakes and rivers drying out once more. What was once rare has become common, but, alarmingly, what we then began referring to as rare or extreme has itself become more probable. One could say events like the Bastrop Fire (2011) or Hurricane Harvey (2017) are the stuff of improbability, but they are increasingly the stuff of everyday life, a yearly rite of passage the whole of Texas endures, collectively shouldering an impossible burden from which there is no relief.
The most recent floods in the Texas Hill Country, which saw river surges of 30 feet and have resulted in dozens upon dozens upon dozeens of deaths, typifies this state’s catastrophic lurch toward the untenable reality described above, one in which we are confronted by once-thinkable horrors with a regularity that is as overwhelming as it is constant. The victims of the July 2025 floods–who are local residents and travelers, children at sleepaway camps and their counselors, the young and old alike–are still being counted, with nearly 2,000 members of law enforcement and public safety searching for bodies. The losses are going to remain with the families and members of the communities affected forever, even as we collectively slouch toward a return to normalcy. Here in Austin, the waters receded as quickly as they came: our street flooded over entirely in what ultimately was a fairly mild surge of knee-deep water in a heavily urban area. It was unnerving to see this kind of flooding for the second time here, on city blocks that are not thought of as being within the flood plain. It makes the rising waters coming out of the Guadalupe River on July 4th seem almost unimaginable.
Driving through the Texas Hill Country, one can understand the apparently impossible problems that confront anyone trying to mitigate major weather events. Roads are narrow, loosely paved, and follow the gentle rise and fall of the hills for which the area is named. There are many often-dry riverbeds over which there are 1- or 2-lane bridges capable of allowing only 1-2 cars to pass at any given moment. Mass evacuations are difficult and themselves become an additional challenge when not organized well or effectively. The decision to call for an evacuation is itself left to loosely organized local officials –judges; city managers; county commissioners–who often are operating with limited knowledge of what might come next.
Of course, many of these concerns could be mitigated: counties and states routinely do not fund or fundraise for the kinds of technology and infrastructural improvements that would help better equip rural communities to respond to flooding. The laissez-faire brand of Texan libertarianism that permeates the state’s politics–encouraging people to simply do what is best for them in moments of crisis–belies the state’s loud claims at being pro-life. In the hours after the floods’ immensity became apparent, Texas’s Lieutenant Governor noted that he had made phone calls to local authorities to let them know a storm was coming, but that it was ultimately up to them to decide what was best. That is, to everyone’s knowledge, the sum total of the support and preparation that the state provided in advance of the flooding.
That the flooding of the Guadalupe River was seemingly so improbable as to be unlikely to occur again should provide no comfort to anyone. All of the probabilities that go into predicting weather are less and less relevant as weather patterns change and tend to defy expectations more than adhere to them. We need to adjust to this reality now, with an urgency that similarly defies expectations at the risk of experiencing these sorts of disasters month after month, year after year. That may sound alarmist, and it should: rains have come down in Central Texas every day this past week, hampering rescue efforts and preventing families from learning of the fates of loved ones.
Already, the powers that be have retreated to their usual theatrics. Greg Abbott and Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick are calling once more for thoughts and prayers for the deceased, an insult to those who pray and an unmitigated betrayal of everyone who has died in some previous catastrophe where the same feckless well wishes were belatedly offered. Donald Trump has continued to be a vacuum of apathy, offering a tweet to the dead, having spent the first six months of his presidency undermining and undoing the kind of federal response groups that would be best prepared to help mitigate these kinds of weather events. In lieu of substantive support from the federal government, Texas has been sent an utterly unprepared Kristi Noem to address the difficult journey ahead for the bereaved. Her only public observation to date has been that it is difficult to predict the weather. This, coming from a person who has spent every moment since her appointment as the Secretary of Homeland Security denigrating, stymieing, and calling for the disbandment of the very departments that should be here right now supporting the living and searching for the dead.
These people are all monsters, and worse, they are all dangerously imbecilic. Every one of them has spent years claiming climate change is a hoax; calling for programs that ensure public safety be underfunded or defunded entirely; and refusing at every juncture to critically examine any of the conditions that lead us to precisely where we currently find ourselves and will inevitably find ourselves again. If you believe it is too soon to rise in anger and call out the charlatans who run the Texas State Government; if you believe it is inappropriate to do so because the bodies of the dead have not even been recovered; if you believe that we should be patient and exercise our grief for some other day; then I would suggest to you that this will inevitably happen again; that we cannot wait any longer; that the day will come when these calamities will happen to you, to yours, to the degree that they have not already. The crisis is here, and it is now, and there are too many dead to believe otherwise.
All Texans deserve more than the blithe word salad of consolation coming from the state and federal government this week. Texans deserve more than a fly-through from unqualified shills who have precisely nothing to offer because to offer anything would require them to acknowledge the cataclysmic errors of their judgment that ultimately brought us to this moment. All Texans deserve more than a chief executive who has absolutely no capacity for empathy, forward planning, or management. Texans deserve better. The bereaved deserve better. The dead deserve better.
If the shamefully weak condolences from our state and federal leadership have taught us anything, it is that we are alone here: they will come to salvage the wreckage, but they will not be here to prevent the next already-forming disaster that looms somewhere in the distance. It is the model of their abominable governance, evidenced at every juncture, observable in the aftermath of every tragedy. It should alarm everyone, everywhere, that the most well-resourced nation in the history of humanity can muster no more than vague abstractions to aid the communities who have lost so much in recent days. Were a storm to rise out of the horizon tomorrow and fill the dry riverbeds of the Texas Hill Country beyond their capacity, there is no evidence at all we would be better prepared now than we were last week.
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on the Texas floods. The author nailed it at every level
"If I owned Texas and Hell, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell." 
Take it and Run!!! 
