Don’t politicize the Texas flood

It’s early Monday morning here in Central Texas, and the rain just keeps on falling. Over the wettest weekend any of us can remember, water has saturated the ground and overflowed every culvert. Dozens are dead, an untold number of properties damaged. The drought is over, point taken. We surrender. Now we have to figure out who, if anyone, is at fault. 

In the last few days, the blame has flowed faster and thicker than the raging muddy waters of the Guadalupe River. It started almost immediately on Friday morning, with a sickening torrent of anti-Texas vitriol from left-wing social media, the flip side of the horrible “God’s wrath” chatter we heard from the right during the Los Angeles fires. 

The nasty rhetoric quickly coalesced into a talking point that Trump Administration cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) had led to a breakdown of the warning system, leaving the state completely flatfooted by the generational weather event that’s still ongoing. But that was untrue. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch around 1 PM on Thursday afternoon, and an urgent warning at around 1 AM on Friday morning, when it became clear that this was no ordinary rain event. 

Then, on Friday, when the world learned that the storms had essentially washed away an entire Christian summer camp for young girls, officials from Kerr Country, Texas, a very different cohort of people than the ones you’d find on, say, BlueSky, also blamed the National Weather Service. This was obvious buck passing. There may have been DoGE cuts to the NWS, but they had nothing to do with this disaster. It became very clear over the weekend that Kerr County didn’t have the physical or information infrastructure ready to handle this generational flood. They posted to social media at four in the morning, when it was already too late. By the time the world woke up on Saturday, everything had washed away. 

The rain and flooding continued into the weekend. While there was definitely damage and a few deaths in the Austin metropolitan area, it wasn’t nearly as severe. The surrounding area is far more populated than Kerr County, and simply has better flood control infrastructure and messaging in place. I live on the border of Travis and Williamson counties, and my phone was sounding the warning klaxon from noon to midnight. The most populated areas didn’t get the worst of the storm, but we have also been on a heightened state of alert. 

President Trump declared Central Texas a disaster area, as well he should have. But as he often does, he blew his best shot at the moral high ground. “That water situation…was really the Biden setup,” he told reporters. “That was not our setup. But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it either.” 

Right, except that he kind of did, and that’s no better than Democrats blaming Trump. It wasn’t Trump’s fault, it wasn’t Biden’s fault, it wasn’t God’s fault. Kerr County was clearly not prepared, but it’s not like they did it on purpose. This was a disaster, an accident, a tragedy, literally a perfect storm of events that led to the saddest possible conclusion. 

On Sunday, The Texas Tribune reported that Texas lawmakers voted down a measure this year that would have established a grant program for counties to build new emergency communication infrastructure. Even if that bill had passed this spring, the money wouldn’t have been available over the 4^th of July. Still, it’s a sign that at least some legislators knew this was a problem. The author was a Republican representative from the Panhandle, who saw more than a million acres burn in wildfires last year. But Texas Governor Greg Abbott has refused to commit to an improved disaster comms infrastructure when the legislature begins its special session later this month. 

“What’s needed in that river basin at that location could be far different than it was needed in some other river basin across the state,” he said, in his usual noncommittal way. 

If nothing else, Texas is loaded with capable, responsible, self-reliant people, and this state’s relief and rescue infrastructure is second to none. But when disaster does strike, no one ever steps up to real responsibility. Some things, like taking every possible measure to prevent citizens from drowning in a flood, should be beyond the reach of partisan politics. The horrifying deaths of two dozen-plus little girls at summer camp can’t have been for nothing; we need to do everything we can to make sure this never happens again.