The Real Reason the Texas Flood Turned So Deadly

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There are two types of natural disasters in this country. Sometimes, it's the weather that's getting worse, as climate change leaves Americans exposed to new risks in places they thought were safe. Sometimes, it's the land use that's getting worse, as high costs and lack of regulation push people into locations with long-standing known dangers.

And then there is what happened on the Fourth of July on the South Fork of the Guadalupe River in the Hill Country west of Austin. On the one hand, this is a place that is known to be dangerous—part of Texas' Flash Flood Alley, where big storms, dry ground, and hilly terrain routinely combine to turn riverbeds into deadly torrents. On the other, it's a place where people have lived with, and mostly managed, that danger for a hundred years.

The Fourth of July floods, in other words, were mostly not an unforeseen act of nature nor a testament to poor flood zone planning. Instead, they represent a public safety failure—a collision of bad luck and human error that left anyone sleeping near the Guadalupe River at the mercy of a storm that everyone knew could happen.

In 1932, for example, the Guadalupe rose 35 feet in two hours. The summer camps nestled in the valley at the time were flooded by a wall of water that swept away diving boards and cottages, including at Camp Mystic. But no campers were lost, and the army colonel in charge of the cleanup committee was optimistic: “All these camps will be rebuilt, but the owners will correct the errors they have made,” OD Westcott told the Austin American. “No more will cottages be built right down to the river's edge. The builders will stay above this year's high water mark, and that will make them completely safe. The disaster is a mighty bad blow, but it really is a disguised blessing. The camps will be built up better.”

In 1987 another storm came, and 10 teenagers drowned when their van was trapped by floodwaters as they tried to evacuate the Pot O' Gold summer camp, located a few miles downstream of the county seat, Kerrville. A tragedy, certainly—but one that, locals thought, could have been avoided with proper planning. “The camps in this area have been here since 1928, and floods on the river are common throughout the year,” Larry Graham, owner of a nearby boys camp, told the Associated Press. “In over 60 years at La Junta, it has never been a problem.” At Camp Waldemar, counselors' cars drifted in the water. Camp Mystic carried out its evacuation plan, and the next year, when arriving campers were entertained to the Kerrville auditorium because of flooded roads, Mystic's sixth graders were “unflustered,” telling a reporter they had already seen flooding the year before.

So how, in an age of cellphones, computers, and better-than-ever weather forecasting, did Friday's rainstorms turn into one of the worst US floods in decades? Despite a few vacancies, a post-DOGE National Weather Service office in San Antonio issued a flood watch on Thursday afternoon and a flash flood warning at 1:14 am Friday. But Austin station KXAN reported that it took more than four hours for local officials to rebroadcast that message. To make matters worse, it was the middle of the night on a holiday, and some campers in the valley may not have been familiar with the flood risk. There was no siren system to warn of the danger.

Meanwhile, the rain came in faster and heavier pockets than the forecast had predicted, with rainfall of 10 inches or more in just a few hours, rather than the 5 to 7 that had been anticipated the night before. Even the lesser amount should have been enough to put residents on edge, but the unexpected intensity raised the stakes. W. Nim Kidd, the director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said at a press conference on Friday that the rainfall “was never in any of those forecasts.” Democrats in Washington also hinted that the NWS might be to blame.

Meteorologists fired back , with AccuWeather's chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter writing on Saturday: “The heartbreaking catastrophe that occurred in Central Texas is a tragedy of the worst sort because it appears evacuations and other proactive measures could have been undertaken to reduce the risk of fatalities had the organizers of impacted camps and local officials heeded the warnings of the government and private weather sources, including AccuWeather.”

Matthew Berg, a Houston-based rainfall scientist, told me that forecasters and first responders were dealt a very bad hand. “All of the things that were pain points were ratcheted up to the max,” he said, between hostile conditions like a warmer Gulf of Mexico and the flood’s arrival in the middle of the night. Further complicating the messaging was the area's varied topography, where the severity of the runoff varies according to soil conditions.