The Flood Was Fast. The Failure Was Decades in the Making.

Why this Texas disaster was preventable, and the next one still is.

The search is still underway. Families are still waiting. But that's exactly why this matters now, because the same system that failed these kids is still unaccountable. And every hour we don't reckon with the systemic failures of leadership that led to this tragedy is another hour closer to the next one. This isn't about partisan politics. It's about preventing more loss of life in the next disaster.

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Photo source: BBC

20 Years of Warnings Ignored

A historic storm dropped up to 18 – 20 inches of rain in just a few hours, spurred by remnants of Tropical Storm Barry.

The Guadalupe River surged 20–29 feet within 45 minutes near Camp Mystic, sweeping away cabins and campers. Children sleeping in their tents at camp never heard it coming. No sirens. No alerts. No warning system at all in Kerr County, a place that sits squarely in what experts call "Flash Flood Alley."

This wasn't just an act of God. This was a catastrophe by a thousand cuts, built piece by piece, year by year, through the accumulated failures of leaders who chose profits over people, politics over preparedness, and denial over the hard work of protecting lives.

As of the latest reports today, at least 70 people have died statewide, including 59 in Kerr County, with 21 of the deceased being children. 11 girls and 1 counselor remain missing from Camp Mystic.

We grieve for these children and their families. We must. But grief without accountability and improvement is just another form of abandonment and dereliction of duty.

Yes, the water rose fast. But beneath the surface, this tragedy was decades in the making through policy choices, budget cuts, and willful negligence that turned a hazardous weather event into a preventable catastrophe.

Mother Nature doesn't pause between disasters to let us mourn. While we grieve these children, the same broken systems that failed them are already setting up the next tragedy. Climate change doesn't wait for our healing—it accelerates. Every day we delay accountability and systemic change is another day closer to the next preventable loss.

Downplaying this as "just a flash flood", a natural event, without examining the man-made factors dishonors every life lost while ensuring it happens again. Children and adults deserve more than thoughts and prayers—they deserve systems that protect them BEFORE the water rises.

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The System That Failed Them

I wrote a previous Threads post on how short-term thinking is starving America, and now it’s flooding America too. Thinking in systems means seeing the tangled, tethered web of short-sightedness and selfishness across all levels of responsibility and decision-making power. This was a predictable outcome of leadership that keeps choosing climate denial over preparedness, privatization over public safety, and profit over people.

The people of Texas deserve so much better from their leaders. Every level of government failed them.

At the federal level:

Devastating personnel and funding cuts: The current administration has slashed 600 positions from the National Weather Service (NWS), with internal warnings of "degraded" services. Forecasting staff shortages contributed to underestimating the storm. They cut 800 positions from NOAA, jeopardizing the very climate and flood forecasting that could have saved lives. This is part of a broader anti-science agenda that systematically weakens our defenses against extreme weather. The Pentagon even recently eliminated access for weather forecasters to data gathered by its special military satellites that can "see" through the clouds, right as hurricane season starts.

As climate change drives long-term global warming, hotter summers are just one visible symptom, and they’re making floods worse. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, leading to storms that dump intense rainfall in less time. At the same time, prolonged heat waves bake the soil, reducing its ability to absorb water. The result: faster, more destructive floods in places that were never prepared for them.

Even flood-prone regions are now facing floods beyond their designed capacity limits. And just when we need stronger early warning systems, we’re dismantling or underfunding them, leaving communities exposed to climate extremes that are no longer rare but recurring.

Unqualified leadership: We’ve seen over and over again how this administration has prioritized hiring key leadership on the basis of personal loyalty, not domain expertise or public service experience. It’s cronyism over credentials, and the country is paying the price. An immediate example affecting disaster response and relief is the current acting Head of FEMA David Richardson, who has zero emergency management experience, a concern reportedly expressed by many FEMA staffers.

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At the state level—over two decades in the making:

For over 20 years, Texas leadership has consistently prioritized deregulation and short-term profit over long-term public safety. They've repeatedly blocked climate adaptation funding, even as extreme weather events worsened. A 2023 Texas Tribune investigation revealed that bills aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving energy efficiency failed to pass in the Texas Legislature, while lawmakers advanced legislation to block cities from taking local climate action. Since 2009, numerous bills requiring state agencies to plan for climate change have "failed every time," often without even getting a hearing.

But Texas officials are now trying to blame the National Weather Service for this tragedy. This time, it’s not the National Weather Service's fault. Despite federal budget cuts, the NWS did its job, with messaging rapidly escalating beginning 12 hours prior to the events: “Flood Watch in mid-afternoon, "heads up" outlook in late afternoon, flash flood warnings and emergencies around 1 a.m.” This was undoubtedly an extreme event, but it wasn't unforeseen.

Austin meteorologist Avery Tomasco, defending his colleagues' work, stating: "The forecast was there. It was solid. It can always be better, but I'll be damned if I don't defend the work of devoted local meteorologists in the face of scrutiny." He shared video of his Wednesday forecast predicting incredibly heavy rain in the Hill Country.

Growing reports indicate that the failure appears to be with the Texas Department of Emergency Management (TDEM), which should have relayed those federal warnings to the public through emergency alerts. In many Texas counties, when weather conditions deteriorate, residents receive alarms on all devices—phones, tablets, everything. People get woken in the middle of the night for flood and tornado warnings. When the NWS issued a flash flood emergency in the middle of the night, the public should have been warned by TDEM.

The evidence was everywhere. The 2024 State Flood Plan revealed that millions of Texans live or work in flood-prone areas using outdated flood maps, with some regions that "either didn't have flood maps, or used outdated maps." The 2019 Texas Water Development Board assessment noted that "much of Texas is either unmapped or uses out-of-date maps," hampering local ability to understand and prepare for flood risk.

They refused to update floodplain maps or building codes, despite multiple catastrophic floods: the 2002 Hill Country floods, the 2015 Blanco River flood that killed over 20 people in Wimberley, Hurricane Harvey in 2017 that caused $125 billion in damage. Despite Harvey's devastation, Texas still lacks statewide enforcement of strong building codes. Counties can opt out entirely, and most of the state has among the weakest codes in the Gulf region.

Instead of investing in critical infrastructure or early-warning systems, they enabled unchecked development in known flood zones, paving the way for sprawl and profit—but not safety. This wasn't one bad policy cycle. It was decades of deliberate decisions that treated flood risk like an inconvenience instead of an emergency. And now, children are paying for it.

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At the local level:

Kerr County, where the brunt of the flooding hit, had no flood alert system. In a region known as “Flash Flood Alley”. Where deadly surges are known to occur. The campers slept through a flood that experts could have predicted, if anyone had been paying attention, if anyone had invested in the infrastructure that saves lives.

This was the result of years of delay, denial, and disinterest by local officials. Kerr County has known about its flood risk for decades, including a major flood at Camp Mystic in 1932. Neighboring communities along the Guadalupe River, such as Comfort where 10 people died in a 1987 church camp flood, have also faced deadly flash floods.

In 2015, Kerr County officials discussed installing a modern flood warning system with the Upper Guadalupe River Authority. A 2016 study confirmed the county's existing equipment was "antiquated and unreliable, requiring urgent upgrades to protect residents from rapidly rising waters." The study was clear: "Upgrading to automated sensors and sirens is essential to reduce the risk of loss of life during sudden flash floods in the Guadalupe River basin."

The warnings kept coming. In 2016, Kerr County commissioned a study to evaluate flood warning systems and plan infrastructure upgrades, but nearly a decade later, the county still hadn't installed a centralized alert system or modernized flood-response protocols. The 2023 Guadalupe Regional Flood Plan clearly listed flood warning systems, updated flood maps, and critical infrastructure protections among its top-priority, urgent recommendations, yet to date, none had been implemented.

Despite this, commissioners—including some who called sirens "extravagant"—voted against upgrades. A FEMA grant application in 2017 was denied, and no alternative funding was pursued. Commissioner Tom Baldwin dismissed the warnings: "I think this whole thing is a little extravagant for Kerr County, with sirens and such. Taking these funds out of special projects from the road and bridge department ticks me off a little bit."

Meanwhile, Comal County invested in sensors and sirens that provided early warnings during recent floods. Kerr County did not.

When the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, there were no alerts, only devastation. And even during the crisis itself, basic communication failed. According to Wired, local safety officials didn't publicly post flood warnings until 5 a.m. on Facebook, hours after the National Weather Service issued the actual emergency alert. "Clearly, there was a breakdown between when the warning was issued and how people got it," as one expert noted. By the time officials hit "post," it was already too late. The river had surged. People were trapped. Kids were already missing.

This is what systemic failure looks like—at every level, layered and lethal.

Let's be clear: no one is saying perfect systems would have prevented every death. Texas weather is deadly, and flash floods kill even when everything works right. That's exactly why the policy failures are so inexcusable. The danger of Texas weather makes investment in protection more critical, not less. When you know your state sits in Flash Flood Alley, when you know storms can rise significantly super fast, you don't cut weather services—you strengthen them. You don't ignore flood maps—you update them obsessively. You don't deem alert systems as “extravagance”- they should be a necessity with proper redundancies in place.

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What Underpins It All

Beyond the sheer incompetence, negligence, and short-sightedness in policy and preparedness, this is also a system operating from deeply entrenched political dysfunction, deflection and rot:

• Political Christianity as disaster laundering: They offer "thoughts and prayers" and quote Bible verses while blocking the budgets that save lives. They say there’s nothing that can be done and claim “helplessness”, that it’s “God’s will”, while deliberately and systematically dismantling the tools, research, policy, public input, personnel, access and science that could actually help it.

  This isn't about faith itself but about the weaponization of religion. True Christ-like behavior would mean protecting the most vulnerable, not using tragedy as a deflection from accountability.

  

  Texas Governor Greg Abbott said: "Prayer matters. [Prayers] could have been the reason why water stopped rising." This is the same leader who has spent years cutting flood prevention funding. This is performative and harmful, not faithful. This is delusion masquerading as leadership while children die from preventable policy failures.

• Collective denial baked into the system: Humans tend to not react to slow-moving disasters. Instead, we ignore them until they become emergencies, knocking down our door. But true leadership means seeing beyond the election cycle. Texan leaders didn't, because short-term thinking wins more votes than long-term prevention.

• Follow the Money. When we say “follow the money” after disasters, we’re pointing to a deeper, more troubling pattern: tragedy has become a business model. Rather than investing in prevention, resilience, or early-warning systems, powerful interests often wait until communities are devastated, and then swoop in to exploit the aftermath for profit. The worse the crisis, the greater the opportunity to seize land, push through unpopular policies, or secure lucrative contracts under the banner of "recovery."
  

  This dynamic is known as disaster capitalism, a term coined by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. It describes how private companies, developers, and political elites exploit disasters to accumulate wealth and power. Rebuilding, deregulation, and land clearance become revenue streams, while vulnerable communities are left to bear the consequences.
  

• Gerrymandering shuts down critical voices: When districts are rigged and accountability is gone, the same leaders get re-elected no matter how many people die. Gerrymandering rigs elections, and therefore rigs the associated economic, environmental, and public safety outcomes. It locks in state and local officials who ignore science, deny climate change, and block the very infrastructure that could save lives. It silences the voices of millions of Texans, especially in urban and racially diverse areas, where voters overwhelmingly support climate action, disaster preparedness, and evidence-based policy.
  
  This isn’t about “Texas is red.” That’s a lie told by maps, not by voters. Millions of Texans, especially young people, people of color, and working-class communities, have been systematically stripped of political power. Gerrymandering ensures their votes get diluted in representation, and their calls for change are drowned out by politicians who treat science as an enemy and corporate donors as their only constituents.
  
  The children who died came from all across Texas and the country, including blue areas that have begged for action for years. And they’re children. They didn’t vote for any of this. They trusted the adults in power to protect them. Instead, those leaders protected profits, power, and denial. And now, the price is being paid in lives.
  

• A Culture of Anti-intellectualism: At the root of all this is a hindering mindset. Beyond the policy failures and profit motives is a deeper decay: anti-intellectualism. It’s long been embedded in American culture, eroding trust in science, gutting education, and teaching people to fear complexity and resent expertise. We’ve been told that deep thinking is elitist, that caution is weakness, and that the only truth worth hearing is the one that feels good. And now we’re seeing the cost. Flood maps go unread. Expert recommendations go unheeded. Warning systems go unfunded. Climate science is sidelined until tragedy hits.

  Astrophysicist and science communicator, the late great Carl Sagan warned of this decades ago in his seminal book A Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: a society “dependent on science and technology, in which no one knows anything about science and technology.” He feared that we’d become vulnerable not just to disaster, but to those who profit from our confusion and ignorance. His prescient words are no longer a warning. It’s our reality.

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The Questions We Must Ask

Natural disasters intensify in frequency and magnitude. Communities grieve. But we don't stop there.

We name the truth, even when it's uncomfortable. We organize at the local level because counties can install sirens. We push for climate-resilient policy because budgets are moral documents of a society’s hopes, priorities and worldview. We can push for election reform to elect leaders who protect people, not profits.

But we must also ask deeper questions about what we're building toward. Because the old frameworks (even the well-intentioned ones) aren't enough anymore.

From Resilience to Regeneration:

Conventional climate resilience thinking asks: How do we bounce back? How can communities prepare for and withstand climate-related shocks (floods, fires, droughts)? What redundancies or backups can be built into critical infrastructure? This approach focuses on recovery, after the fact. This is tactical for immediate symptoms, but doesn’t get to the root.

Climate adaptation asks: How do we adjust to what's coming? What needs to be relocated, elevated, or reengineered in response to rising seas and shifting weather?How do we ensure equitable access to adaptation resources (insurance, rebuilding, relocation)? What policies must change to prevent rebuilding in high-risk zones? This is focused on more long-time adjusting to a new status quo with more climate shocks.

But climate regeneration asks the transformative question: How do we build systems that don't just survive or adapt, but actually heal, restore and renew?

We keep bailing water from a leaking canoe amidst rising waters instead of plugging the holes. Disaster recovery. Reactive funding. Thoughts and prayers. All of it focuses on throwing out the water after the boat is already sinking. But what if we fixed the canoe itself? What if we prevented the water from rising so high?

Resilience alone implies returning to a broken status quo. Adaptation accepts a degraded baseline. But Regeneration means creating communities, economies, and governance systems that work with natural cycles instead of against them - that returns more than what it takes. It means infrastructure that doesn't just withstand floods but helps watersheds function better. It also includes development patterns that enhance rather than destroy ecosystem services. It requires us to reshape political systems and personal mindsets to think across multiple generations, not news or election cycles.

The Regenerative Questions:

• What if flood management wasn't about controlling water but about designing with its natural flows?

• What if development enhanced rather than erased the land's capacity to absorb storms?

• What if our early warning systems were just one part of communities so connected and prepared that everyone looked out for everyone else?

• What if our leaders were accountable not just to voters but to the children seven generations from now?

• What would it look like to align our economies with the rhythms of nature?

• How can indigenous knowledge guide our regeneration strategies?

• Which ecosystems, watersheds, or soils can we restore better to act as carbon sinks and buffers?

• What role can circular economies, agroecology, and rewilding play in climate healing?

• How do we shift from extraction to stewardship of land, people, and futures?

This isn't some sort of “nice to have” system - it’s survival for a more climate-volatile and weather-hazardous future. Because the choice isn't between the world we had and some perfect future. The choice is between systems that keep failing catastrophically and systems designed to regenerate life.

This isn’t just an abstract issue for scientists, urban planners, or emergency managers. It’s a crisis that affects everyone, whether it’s flash floods in Texas, droughts in California, or hurricanes in Florida. And beneath the policy failures lies a deeper cultural problem: a mindset of denial, short-term thinking, and profit-driven complacency.

We demand more than reactive fixes. We demand preparation grounded in reality, not nostalgia or corporate convenience. We demand early warning systems that actually warn. We demand building and development codes that reflect the climate we have, not the one developers or politicians wish we still lived in. And we demand leadership willing to face the future by confronting the long-term discomfort of reality, not perpetuating the short-term comfort of delusion. Because survival shouldn’t depend on luck or ZIP code. It should be the bare minimum of governance.

But we also demand the vision, foresight and fortitude to imagine—and build—something entirely different for the future. Better. Something worthy of the children we've lost and the children still here.

Accountability must be systemic because the failure was systemic. You can't fix a three-level breakdown by only addressing one level. Federal budget cuts enabled state-level denial, which enabled local-level negligence. Each level of failure enabled the others, creating a cascade of vulnerability, a self-reinforcing mechanism that turned a hazardous weather event into a preventable tragedy. Partial accountability is no accountability at all; it just shifts blame while leaving the deadly gaps intact, passing the buck down to future generations who will bear the consequences of our inaction and bad decisions.

The children who died in Texas deserved leaders who would protect them. The children still alive deserve better than the system that failed their friends. We owe them nothing less than the complete transformation of how we think about, prepare for, respond to, and prevent these tragedies.

Their lives mattered. Their deaths must matter too. Not as statistics, not as talking points, but as the final, devastating proof that our current system of governance is broken, and that fixing it is the only way to honor their memory. To grieve without demanding change is to guarantee more children will die the same preventable death.

Because the flood was fast. But the failure was slow. And if we don't confront every piece of that failure—federal, state, and local—while also building regenerative alternatives, the next kids won't stand a chance either. Justice has been 20 years overdue. And it's long overdue.

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The people of Texas deserve leaders who choose preparation over prayers, public safety over private profit, and the protection of children over the protection of political power. Until they get them, tragedies like this will keep happening. And that's not acceptable.

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Thank you for reading. If this piece helped you process, understand, or speak out about this unfolding crisis, I’m grateful to be in community with you. If you’re in a position to support my work, a paid subscription helps sustain thoughtful, independent writing like this, rooted in care, justice, and regeneration. But most importantly, share this with those who need to read it. Let’s continue asking hard questions, holding leadership accountable, pushing for lasting systems change, honoring the lives lost, and building toward something better—together.

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Sources

Federal Agency Cuts:

• NOAA and National Weather Service Budget Cuts Analysis

• Weather Service Staffing Concerns Report

• Pentagon Pulls Weather Satellite Data as Hurricane Season Begins

Texas State-Level Policy Failures:

• Texas Officials Slam Trump’s National Weather Service for Botched Forecast

• Texas Tribune: Climate Bills Fail While Cities Lose Local Power

• Climate proposals withered at the Texas Capitol this year

• Dallas Morning News: Climate Planning Bills "Failed Every Time" Since 2009

• 2024 Texas State Flood Plan

• 2019 Texas Water Development Board Flood Assessment

• Meteorologists Say the National Weather Service Did Its Job in Texas

• Texas Officials Face Scrutiny Over Response to Catastrophic and Deadly Flooding

• Escalating Alerts of Dangerous Flooding Arrived When People Were Sleeping

• Texas Division of Emergency Management – Coverage & Criticism

• Texas Reddit Thread on Local Alert Failures and NWS Defense

• Study to weigh improvements to Kerr County's flood-warning system

• A 2016 study noted existing equipment was “antiquated and not reliable” and recommended upgrades

• Kerr County does not have a warning system

Flood Mapping and Improvement Issues:

• Texas’ broken insurance market proves the need for statewide building codes

• El Paso County Alluvial Fan Landform Floodplain Mapping Report

• Flood Experts Call for Better Warning Systems

Climate and Development Policy:

• Are Texas lawmakers in line with voters on climate change?

• Here Are All of Trump’s Major Moves to Dismantle Climate Action