Natural Disasters

The Texas Floods Were a Natural Disaster, Not a Policy Disaster

There's no evidence that cuts to the National Weather Service impacted the response to the weekend's tragic flash floods.

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weather map | © Douglas Butner/Dreamstime.com
( © Douglas Butner/Dreamstime.com)

It's a news cycle as old as the weather.

A terrible natural disaster results in the loss of life and property.

The chattering classes immediately begin to heap blame on their political enemies for bringing about the disaster, while partisans on the other side insist that they are blameless.

Initial comments from officials—who often have an interest in defending the performance of their agency—are taken at face value or taken out of context.

Such has been the case with the weekend's flash floods in central Texas, which have reportedly killed 94 people thus far, including (tragically) dozens of children at a summer camp along the Guadalupe River.

In the immediate aftermath, some local and state officials in Texas were quick to point the finger at the federal National Weather Service (NWS), whose initial forecasts from earlier in the week predicted much less rain than the region ended up getting.

This criticism was accepted by liberal commentators and Democratic elected officials, who in turn blamed faulty NWS forecasts on the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency cuts to the agency, which did leave some local Texas NWS positions unfilled.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.)  has called for a probe into whether cuts to the NWS played a role in the weekend's disaster.

NWS has contradicted claims that it was understaffed in the run-up to the weekend's floods.

"We had adequate staffing. We had adequate technology," Greg Waller, service coordination hydrologist with the NWS West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth, told The Texas Tribune. An official with the NWS union also told the Tribune that local staffing was adequate to provide timely warnings.

Independent meteorologists have also defended NWS's performance.

Texas meteorologist Matt Lanza writes on his Substack that "we have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and the NWS played any role at all in this event."

Lanza writes that while federal officials' weather modeling and forecasts of rains from earlier in the week underpredicted the eventual flooding, these models and warnings were also periodically revised upwards in advance of Friday's flood.

The timeline of NWS warnings also shows that it was providing advance notice of increasingly dangerous conditions in the areas that eventually experienced flash flooding.

The agency issued a flood watch on Thursday afternoon, a flash flood warning by 1 a.m. on Friday (about an hour after rains started), and a flash flood emergency urging evacuations at around 4 a.m.—about an hour before the most serious flooding occurred.

There did appear to be some delays when those NWS warnings were transmitted to the public via social media by local officials.

Lanza says that the weekend's tragic deaths from the flood resulted not from inadequate advance warning, but seemingly rather from people on the ground not responding fast enough to the warnings they were receiving.

"I think we need to focus our attention on how people in these types of locations receive warnings. This seems to be where the breakdown occurred," he writes on his Substack.

Getting people to respond quickly and appropriately to flash flood warnings, Lanza notes, is a difficult task, especially given that the weekend's flood occurred in the wee hours of the morning when most people are inside and asleep. That means they were less likely to see text warnings of the impending disaster.

More generally, meteorologists who spoke to Wired stressed that precisely predicting how much rain will fall from a thunderstorm, and where it will fall, is extremely difficult. There's always some element of chance involved.

That complicates when to warn people of potential flooding. It also makes it harder to get people to take flood warnings seriously.

More frequent and more ubiquitous extreme weather warnings can backfire, as anyone who's ever ignored a "tornado" or "flash flood" text alert on their phone should be able to appreciate.

The more warnings one receives about a disaster that doesn't end up happening, the less likely they are to take the next warning seriously.

It's worth noting, too, that even given central Texas' history of flash floods, the weekend's floods were still an outlier event.

As one meteorologist told Wired, the amount of rainfall central Texas witnessed in a six-hour period exceeded the 1,000-year rainfall rate, meaning there's less than a 0.1 percent chance of that happening in a given year.

Even the best emergency management systems will struggle with outlier events like that.

The Texas floods are, in that sense, reminiscent of the Los Angeles wildfires from earlier this year. Just as central Texas floods with relative frequency, so too does the Los Angeles hinterlands burn with relative frequency.

Like the weekend's flooding, this year's L.A. fires were more severe than normal, and thus caught people off-guard and overtaxed the systems designed to prevent and respond to them.

In the aftermath of California's fires, it was largely conservatives blaming various liberal policies for the loss of life and property.

And yet, as I wrote in the aftermath of the fires, the real culprit was bad weather, not bad public policy.

In a general sense, better public land management, better urban planning, and better insurance regulations could lessen the destruction from California wildfires. None of those things would have stopped 100-mile-an-hour winds from blowing burning embers into urban neighborhoods that have been standing for nearly a century.

Likewise, advance weather warnings, better local responsiveness, and more weather sirens can all reduce the death and destruction from flash floods. They can only do so much in the face of a 1,000-year flood that causes a river to rise 30 feet in a few hours in the middle of the night during the prime recreation season.

At the end of the day, people will pay a premium to live in the California woods, even if there's the off-hand risk that a wildfire will burn their house down. Similarly, people like to camp and recreate next to rivers during a hot Texas summer, even if there's a small risk of a flash flood.

The fact that the Trump administration's cuts to NWS didn't affect this most recent disaster in Texas doesn't tell us much about the wisdom of those cuts.

One could argue the agency is functioning well, despite having fewer staff, and that's proof that there was fat to cut at NWS.

Meteorologists in the media have countered that the Texas disaster shows how important a fully staffed NWS is for providing advance warning of impending disasters. Cuts to the agency could leave it under-resourced for future disasters.

It's a worthwhile policy discussion to have. It's not one we're having in the aftermath of the weekend's tragic floods.