The Latest Texas Floods

Even though I was born in Houston and grew up in a small town near there, my Texas heart is in the Hill Country, so the recent flash flood disaster hit close to home.

I have family in New Braunfels, which is a little southeast of the disaster in Hunt, but also on the Guadalupe River. A year ago, we rented a place near Hunt to see the eclipse and spent much of our time downhill from that place floating in tubes on the river. It was a peaceful time and we enjoyed hanging out with relatives for several days.

I assume that the place where we stayed survived the damage (it was across a road and uphill from the river) but I’m sure the steps down to the river and the facilities there are gone. The worst loss there would be a bathroom and some tubes for floating. Fortunately, no one built homes too close to the river at that location.

Flash floods are a fact of life in that part of the world. In fact, the saying “turn around, don’t drown” was started by Hector Guerrero, a warning meteorologist for the National Weather Service in San Angelo, Texas, which is about 150 miles northwest of Hunt and also experienced flash floods in the latest storm.

While the Guadalupe River and other rivers in the Hill Country flood regularly, this event was particularly bad given the extreme amount of rain that fell quickly — about 15 inches in a few hours, which is about half the yearly average rainfall.

I listened to weather expert Daniel Swain’s discussion of the disaster on Monday morning and learned that one of the reasons the Hill Country is at great risk for erratic rainfalls like this one is because the Gulf of Mexico is so warm.

I knew the Gulf was warm, since I spent so much of my childhood at the beach playing in that water and was surprised when I moved to the East Coast and discovered that the Atlantic is not as warm, even in summer. (Much less the Pacific.) And of course, with climate change, the Gulf is getting warmer, which is why there is now greater risk from hurricanes.

But I didn’t realize how much affect such warm water has. In fact, the warmth of the Gulf and the winds and storms that it produces also are a cause of tornado weather all the way north to Canada. Different weather patterns crashing into each other – and that’s not the scientific explanation, just my grasp of it – cause a lot of problems.

Some of the flooding was also related to a tropical storm in the Gulf that hit Mexico and moved north, just as an example.

I was not surprised by the flash floods, because I know the area. I used to drive my father around the area west of New Braunfels since he liked to look at the wildlife. We would stop as we crossed every creek, to see if there was any water in it. Many of the creeks and even some of the rivers are mostly dry or close to it, except when it rains.

My father grew up near San Angelo, but he considered all of the Hill Country and a good bit of West Texas his stomping grounds.

We often drove out River Road from New Braunfels, which runs along the Guadalupe. There were signs of previous floods, even then, and while like everyone else I like sitting alongside a river, I realized that no one should set up households on the bank of a river that is likely to flood.

I would not live too close to the coast here on the West Coast for similar reasons and I would be even more careful on the East Coast, where the danger of sea level rise is more significant.

We humans cannot control the weather, though, as we are seeing with climate change, our actions can affect it. We can, however, learn how it works and how to live in keeping with it and with the other parts of our natural world.

This is, of course, in direct opposition to our recent history, where so many people have rushed to extract “value” from all our natural resources and to try to control them so as to get even more. It is behavior like this that has made the natural patterns of our world much more dangerous than they need to be.

So we build homes in areas that are likely to flood (or to burn) and put up barriers that won’t really stop that. And not only that, we don’t always set up good alert systems for possible disasters. Both of those things contributed to this disaster – the camps put cabins very close to the river, despite the history of flooding and the county did not have a good alert system or take action even though the Weather Service was sending out updates.

In The New York Times science writer David Wallace-Wells observed:

Every weather disaster now has both human and climate causes, but we often argue about which side of the ledger should get the blame when, either way, the headline message is that we were not ready.

While I’m sure there will be a lot of blame to go around here, accompanied by a great deal of litigation, what we must do is to take steps to get ready.

The most important thing to do, of course, is to stop contributing to climate change, which starts with quickly moving away from the use of fossil fuels. Unfortunately we have waited so long to take real action that even if we had an incredible turnabout in policy – something unlikely to happen in the United States, at least – that such changes will not prevent disasters in our lifetimes.

With luck, they will improve things in the future, but we must be prepared for many disasters in the meantime.

So that means we need good alert systems, used judiciously, so that people can actually evacuate. Saving lives is vital.

And we need an improved disaster relief program so that people can pick up the pieces of their lives. Too many people live in areas that are now vulnerable, even if they weren’t before. There will be harm done, and people will need help.

But we also need to develop better land use policies. In the United States, people scream when told they can’t build on their property, but in fact we must stop building permanent structures in flood zones, especially in areas where flash floods are likely. It’s probably that our disaster relief will need to include prohibiting re-building in some places.

We must continue to educate ourselves about weather patterns, including the effect of climate change on them. NOAA and the National Weather Service have done an excellent job of that over the years – forecasts these days are vastly better than they were even 40 or 50 years ago – but these agencies have been targeted by the forces out to destroy our government. They need to be saved and well-funded.

I don’t see an easy path forward, since I know the kind of fights we face with even mentioning climate change or taking care of people who are forced out by disasters, much less limiting what one can do with property.

But while we can’t “fix” the weather, we can change our policies to live in keeping with the planet so that our disasters are fewer and less deadly. It’s the only rational thing to do.

The Texas Hill Country is a beautiful place. We can figure out how to live and play there without risking lives and doing so much damage.

I hope we do.