Texas Take on the Horrific Flood
Fifteen Feet Above the River Wasn't High Enough
I have heard that some are blaming the deaths of dozens of little girls in the Texas flood on a half-staffed weather bureau in New Braunfels, TX. I don’t think this is true, and if we cast blame where there is none, it may backfire.
I'm the last person to let the Trump administration off the hook, but facts are facts. This post is not about the Trump administration; it's about Mother Nature in Texas.
I have lived in Houston, TX for 26 years now, which has made me keenly aware that the eastern half of Texas is liable to ferocious and unpredictable thunderstorms.
To give an outstanding example, some years ago we had a thunderstorm in Houston which dumped 29 inches of rain on one zip code and three inches on another overnight. My zip code had 9 inches of rain. There is no forecaster on the planet who could tell you which zip code would get the catastrophic load.
The storm on the Guadalupe was truly unprecedented. The girls camp had been in the same family for three generations and had never experienced anything close to that level of rainfall. The head of the camp, a man in his 70s, died trying to save three little girls. Neither he, nor his parents, nor his grandparents could anticipate this event. The camp buildings were 15 feet above the river level.
The camp's older girls survived because they were able to scramble up a very steep bank. The two cabins holding the younger girls were hit from floodwaters both from the river and a tributary stream simultaneously. This set up a swirling current that trapped them inside. Read article. Gift link.
This danger exists across the West. I rode across the country on a bicycle about 10 years ago and was advised never to camp in a wash. A wash is a dry stream bed in the desert. You don't camp there because a thunderstorm could hit miles away and send water down the wash from a storm you hadn’t even heard.
To give another example, Near North Houston had a derecho last summer. This is a particularly intense type of thunderstorm that CANNOT be predicted—it either forms or it doesn’t. As far as I know, this is the first derecho to hit Houston in the 26 years I’ve lived here. It made a path about five miles wide and 12 miles long. It knocked down one of my trees.
If you live in the New York City metro area, as I did for eleven years, you cannot imagine Texas weather. So, if coastal Americans display their ignorance of the sometimes violent weather of heartland America, I think many will think we are overreacting and we will change no one's thinking.
BTW, as a resident of Houston we need all the hurricane forecasting tools we can get.
Cross Cultural Footnote: In northern Japan, when there is a tsunami, a stone marker is erected to show maximum water level, so that no one builds below that level. In Kerr County, the marker has to be above 15 feet.
Thanks for this info and perspective. I was one who was horrified that we would shift money from the true mission of FEMA to concentration camps. And also freaked out that we have cut back staffing at NOAA. Could full staffing at those weather centers have helped warn sooner and more thoroughly? Can we learn how to do better?
Not sure. No clear evidence yet. I really appreciate the education from your post today.
As a Californian who lived in the Austin area for 6 years, I remember laughing at the giant deep culverts beside every rural main road. Until it rained. And it rains HARD in the south like nothing I have ever seen elsewhere! Once I was celebrating an event in Austin, weather predictions expected a storm that would drop over 20" of rain an hour. Note that the weather forecast in Austin was amazingly accurate compared to where I lived in California and I often talked about it. My house, 26 miles north and where my kids were, got 29" of rain in an hour while I got not even a downpour. Massive destruction along the rivers that had been barely a trickle in June. But those areas were warned and campgrounds and trailer parks were evacuated and lives saved. I read that there was not even a warning. That is the problem. Probably those at the camp would have ignored it because of past experience, but some lives would have been saved. We need the services we rely on to be as accurate as possible. Which means that we need qualified people running and staffing them. This is a bad experiment.