Texas Flood Raises Leadership Questions
With our hearts still heavy as we watch the ongoing epic disaster in central Texas – the flooding and rampaging Guadalupe River – it is not too early to ask the tough questions, even though we still wipe the tears of empathy that make us human.
Although this is clearly not the time for political opportunism or claws-out defense – and shame on any of us who engage in it now – it is highly appropriate, actually necessary, to set ourselves on that path when the time comes. We can wait no longer.
As of this writing, 129 deaths have been confirmed with the count of the missing topping 170. Many of them were innocent children or teens with the entire 21st century – if not more – in front of them. Gone.
But this is not the first time the Guadalupe River has swollen, created damage, and claimed lives. Same thing for so many other sites around the country, Simple as this next question is, it's the first e must answer
Why rebuild?
Why do we insist on rebuilding where tragedy will surely strike again? Here's an indisputable lesson we've been given by The Netherlands – over and over again. Had we listened and acted 72 years ago, weld likely be free of the anguish of this past week – and hundreds more like it.
The Disaster of 1953 and Its Lessons
On January 31, 1953, an unusually angry and massive storm arose from the North Sea, striking the southwest region of The Netherlands. For two full days, that area of the country suffered a beating like never before or since. One-third of the country lies below sea level and this is it. Here was the toll (The Netherlands' population was 10,3 million, packed into an area about the size of New Jersey).
Losses
When all was said and done, 9% of the total land area was flooded, 47,000 buildings were damaged and 10,000 were totally destroyed. More than 30,000 livestock perished and worst of all was the human toll: 70,000 evacuations and 1,836 killed. The scope!
Disaster Lesson #1
Don't rebuild. Mother Nature will rage again, for sure. Since the Dutch disaster 72 years ago, 51 category 3, 4, and 5 hurricanes have made landfall in the U.S. – and we have rebuilt after every single one. Countless other storms, not only hurricanes, fill out this picture, The Dutch? Once was enough, thank you, and that land, now bolstered by dikes, has been used for grazing and research. It is also environmentally kind. No more losses, no more deaths.
Disaster Lesson #2
Prevent all future disasters No sooner than the Dutch reached the decision not to rebuild, they thought long into the future to envision what would be the most the most extensive, most elaborate engineering project in human history: The Delta Works, a series of locks, sluices, levees, and other wonders that actually control Mother Nature when she gets upset, Nothing kike ever did or likely will equate. And to round out the future vision of this project, planning and construction of it is still going on. Take some time to research it if you can't visit it like I did years ago.
Leadership Lessons
And so, as we continue to grieve collectively, it is not too early to ask these questions and be willing to learn these lessons
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The Texas flash flood is a preview of the chaos to come
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway. Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm? Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it. President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people's everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable. Climate change doesn't chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we're now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year's cataclysmic floods. We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can't hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck. The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall. There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week's extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain 'this very exceptional meteorological condition.' That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000. The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world's leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It's one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense. What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump's administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment. Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation's chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation's seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency's core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has — as of last week — signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the country's industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is 'in alignment with evolving priorities' of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating. Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. 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