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| Aftermath of the Texas flood. At last report at least 27 people had been confirmed dead, and that toll was expected to rise |
As I wrote this early Saturday afternoon, CBS was reporting 27 deaths so far - 18 adults and nine children.
A lot of people are still missing -- officials haven't yet told us how many. We know about a dozen people, mostly children are missing from a Camp Mystic, a childrens' camp along the Guadalupe River.
If you try really hard you get glean some good news out of the tragedy. As of Saturday morning, around 850 people had been rescued. There have been 160 air rescues, and as of this writing, swarms of aircraft, drones and boats were looking for more people.
There have been some amazing tales of survival. KENS in San Antonio reported one woman had been swept 20 miles downstream and over four dams before being rescued from a cypress tree today. The woman reportedly had just minor injuries.
While I'm sure there will be other tales of survival, I'm dreading what the final death toll might look like. Not to mention the extreme damage to homes and businesses through a big part of central Texas.
HOW IT HAPPENED
The Texas tragedy had its roots in Tropical Storm Barry, a completely forgettable, weak tropical storm that splashed ashore in northeastern Mexico last Sunday.
Barry drew extremely humid air into Texas - extraordinarily steamy even by Texas standards. A small drifting low pressure system over central Texas drew in and consolidated that moisture. This is Texas Hill country, so the winds were forced to rise upward as ti traveled from the Gulf of Mexico to the rising elevations west of San Antonio, helping to unleash the floods.
This upslope flow has happened there frequently and has often caused floods, Enough to this area of Texas is sometimes known as flash flood alley.
The upslope flow, the remnants of Barry, the subtle low pressure system, the extreme humidity all converged over the Guadalupe River drainage basin and its surroundings. And just sat there. The result was extreme rainfall.
The fact that a crucial ingredient to this tragedy was a former tropical storm shows that people are not necessarily safe after a tropical storm or hurricane makes landfall. These things can produce floods far from the where the system came ashore.
Even here in Vermont. The remnants of Hurricane Beryl were a key ingredient of the extreme floods last July 10-11 in the Green Mountain State.
Back in 1995, another fairly lame tropical storm named Dean came ashore in Texas, much like Beryl did. Even though Dean was weak, its remnants interacted with a stalled weather front to produce severe flooding across northern and central Vermont - nearly 2,000 miles from where it made landfall.
We also have to remind ourselves that climate change has made downpours and storms often more intense than they otherwise would have been decades ago. I do not know to what extent climate change influenced this flood, but I suspect it was at least a small factor.
THE FLOOD FORECAST AND NOAA CUTBACKS
Some officials in Texas are blaming cutbacks at NOAA and the National Weather Service because of the Trump administration and is DOGE federal worker slash and burn program earlier this year. Their claim is the forecast underplayed the amount of rain that ultimately fell.
Those DOGE cutbacks might well cause forecasting errors and in fact might have already done so in other circumstances.
As Texas meteorologist Matt Lanza explains in his blog The Eyewall, the flash flood was well forecasted, even if the amount of rain that actually fell was unimaginable.
National Weather Service Forecasts on Thursday gave the region a slight risk of flash flooding, which might have created a false sense of security. Lanza said some high resolution forecast models predicted the huge amounts of rain that in fact materialized. In hindsight (my opinion here) those models should have perhaps been taken more seriously. But hindsight is of course 20/20.
In any event, the National Weather Service issued flash flood warnings shortly before midnight Thursday as the rains began to fall in earnest. In the early morning hours, the NWS declared issued flash flood emergencies, which triggers automatic warnings on everybody's cell phones.
Lanza said the NOAA budget cutbacks did not appear to play a role in this tragedy. Much has been made of cutbacks in weather balloon launches, which offer critical information on impeding storms. The National Weather Service office in Del Rio, Texas, and data from those launches helped prompt the NWS issue those dire "hair on fire" flash flood warnings.
Then the question was, how were those flash flood warnings received? Or were they?
A blame game has already started.
'AccuWeather, a private weather forecasting business said it also issued flash flood warnings and blamed camp directors for the tragedy. "These warmings should have provided officials with ample time to evacuate camps such as Camp Mystic and get people to safety,' "
As noted, this part of Texas is particularly prone to flash flooding. Lanza asks a great question: "Do we need to start thinking of every risk of flooding as a potential high-end event we should pre-evacuate the highest risk people (like children and elderly in floodways) for? Is that even practical?"
Some variation of that question is a great one to ask anywhere in the U.S., including here in Vermont. Climate change is helping make downpours more intense, and more likely to cause floods, or make floods worse than they otherwise would be.
FLASH FLOODS DANGEROUS
We do know that flash floods are extremely dangerous, and the United State has a long history of flash flood tragedies.
Perhaps the most famous and deadly flash flood in U.S. history was the Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood of 1889, which killed more than 2,200 people. Johnstown was hit again in 1977 in a flash flood that killed 84 people.
Other examples of horrible flash floods include one that hit Rapid City, South Dakota and adjacent areas of the Black Hills in 1972, resulting in 238 lives lost. A flash flood in Big Thompson Canyon, Colorado in 1976 claimed 144 lives.
Flash flooding in Kentucky killed 45 people in 2022. Another flash flood in San Antonio on June 12 killed 13 people.
Additional flash flooding has hit parts of central Texas today. As of early this afternoon a new flash flood emergency was in effect for Burnet County, Texas and parts of Williamson and Travis County. Six to 14 inches of rain fell there last night and this morning.
This includes parts of the Austin metropolitan area, The latest update is two people are dead and 10 are missing from this new round of flooding.
It goes on and on.
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