DOGE Cuts Turned A Predicted Disaster Into A Deadly Reality In Texas
from the the-thoughts-and-prayers-aren't-working dept
On Thursday, literally the day before flash flooding devastated Texas, the Texas Observer published an article warning that “Trump’s DOGE Cuts Are a Texas-Sized Disaster,” explaining how cuts to both the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would likely lead to disaster for Texas.
Twenty-four hours later, those predictions came true with horrifying precision. And as with so many tragic situations, rather than examining how their own policies contributed to the death toll, Republican politicians are talking about prayers, as if that’s the only thing that can be done. Texas’s Governor Abbott announced a day of prayer, claiming that “prayer works.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson claimed that “all we know to do at this moment is pray.”
Turns out there were, perhaps, a few more things that “we” could have done, including better staffing, better warning systems, and better preparations for how to deal with flooding.
The Texas Observer’s warning (again, from a day before the floods came) was chillingly specific:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the country’s central weather hub, provides the analysis undergirding forecasts of wildfires, severe storms, and heavy rain events, and its observation systems (high-altitude balloons, aircraft, satellites, ocean buoys) provide the data required to support this activity. When you watch TV weather or get a fire warning, it is largely an NOAA product.
Consistent with its aversion to talk of climate change, the administration’s policy guide, Project 2025, recommends dismantling NOAA. Those functions not eliminated would be scattered among other agencies, privatized, or sent to the states. This has not happened yet, but DOGE has fired many of NOAA’s scientists, and there are suggestions its Oklahoma Storm Prediction Center will be closed. Also, crucial data gathering systems are at risk. Federal ability to warn the public is being degraded, and it is a public service no state can replace.
The piece also warned about FEMA cuts, something that I imagine is going to be talked about a lot in the coming days, weeks, and months.
DOGE already cut roughly 20 percent of FEMA’s staff and moved to freeze its funds. And Donald Trump has repeatedly signaled his interest in shifting disaster relief responsibilities entirely to the states. On June 11, he made that threat more concrete by saying that his administration would start phasing out FEMA after this current hurricane season ends in November. “We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said. “A governor should be able to handle it, and frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor.”
That, of course, would be bad news for Texas, where Republican leaders routinely play politics with disaster response and relief. Further warming in response to continuing greenhouse emissions ensures that the cost of climate change-augmented storms, floods, and wildfires will only increase with Texans prominent among the victims.
The Policy Cuts Hit Exactly Where They Hurt Most
The NY Times reported that, indeed, the National Weather Service’s local offices in Texas were understaffed, which may have contributed to the lack of preparedness for the floods.
The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.
The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.
That office’s warning coordination meteorologist left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure.
Yes, that’s right. The person in charge of “warning coordination” took one of the DOGE buyouts just a couple months ago.
Some (including the White House) are saying that the lack of staffing at the NWS had nothing to do with this, given that the flood warnings were still issued. But issuing a warning is only the first step. The missing staff would have helped coordinate the response as conditions deteriorated:
The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.
The local infrastructure was equally lacking. Kerr County, where many deaths occurred, had no local flood warning system:
The shortages are among the factors likely to be scrutinized as the death toll climbs from the floods. Separate questions have emerged about the preparedness of local communities, including Kerr County’s apparent lack of a local flood warning system. The county, roughly 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, is where many of the deaths occurred.
In an interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending.
Emergency Communications Reduced To A Broken Social Media Platform
Perhaps most damning is how government agencies handled public warnings. A report from NPR shows that most of the warnings appeared to be posted on ExTwitter, a platform that has shed users, is increasingly buggy, and requires an account to view most content.
Think about the absurdity: in a life-or-death emergency, government agencies are relying on a social media platform that many people can’t even access without creating an account. This is what happens when public infrastructure gets hollowed out—essential services get outsourced to private, proprietary platforms that may or may not work when you need them most.
The timeline NPR put together shows over and over again that the remaining folks at the NWS seemed to rely on ExTwitter as their main tool for getting word out:
At 9:47 a.m. Texas Division of Emergency Management posted on X weather guidance in both English and Spanish, informing followers about what to do in a flood, adding: “As we head into the holiday weekend and the flood threat in West & Central TX continues, stay weather aware!”
[….]
At 3:35 p.m., the National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio announced a flood watch on X, saying “pockets of heavy rain are expected and may result in flooding.” A flood watch is used when the weather conditions make a flood possible but it does not mean a flood will occur.
Friday, July 4th:
At 12:42 a.m., the National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio posted on X upgrading its flood watch to a flood warning for part of the impacted area. In a post from 2:14 a.m., that area was expanded. A flood warning occurs when flooding is imminent or already happening.
At 1:26 a.m., the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center said “flash flooding likely overnight with significant impacts possible.” This message was posted on X a minute later.
When Prayer Becomes Policy Deflection
The politicians now calling for “thoughts and prayers” are the same ones who systematically dismantled the infrastructure that could have saved lives. They cut the staff who coordinate flood warnings. They pushed out the meteorologists who work with local emergency managers. They eliminated the positions specifically designed to help communities prepare for exactly this kind of disaster.
Then, when people die, they call for prayer.
This isn’t about whether natural disasters happen—they do. It’s about how humans determine just how catastrophic they become. The Texas Observer saw this coming from a mile away, almost down to the day. The staffing cuts hit exactly where they would hurt most. The warning systems were reduced to posts on a social media platform many people can’t access.
Every “thoughts and prayers” statement is an attempt to avoid this discussion. It’s an attempt to treat preventable deaths as acts of God rather than consequences of policy choices. The Texas flooding wasn’t unpredictable—it was predicted. The infrastructure failures weren’t unavoidable—they were the direct result of deliberate budget cuts and dismissals.
Natural disasters happen. But the scale of human tragedy is often a choice. And when politicians choose to gut disaster preparedness and then deflect responsibility through prayer, they’re making that choice clear.
Filed Under: donald trump, fema, flash floods, hill country, noaa, nws, texas, warnings
Comments on “DOGE Cuts Turned A Predicted Disaster Into A Deadly Reality In Texas”
Notifications on Social Media are worthless
Posting emergency communications on a platform ran by algorithms that almost guarantee they won’t be seen until far after they’d be useful has got to be the biggest dereliction of duty a government can do.
Our county has e-mail and text weather alerts you can opt into. Nobody should rely on FB or ExTwitter or Mastodon, etc. for emergency alerts. And if your local government does you need to hold them accountable for tragedies like this.
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Giving the current Twitter promoted tweets/posts, if it has nothing to do with immigration or alt/far right, a weather alert won’t be boosted.
Maybe if Mexicans or Jews are blamed for the flood, theses alerts would have a chance to be seen…
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You know things have gotten really bad, when essential government services are reduced to providing urgent advisories/warnings to the general public solely via a social media platform — a platform that’s become so unpopular and toxic that the platform owner has to threaten lawsuits and government intervention to force advertisers to use that platform.
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My town’s water system had a failure over the holiday weekend that necessitated a boil order this morning. The failure occurred up to four days ago and no one knew, sounds like we don’t have anything that notifies someone in the event of a failure. They posted the boil order on Facebook this morning. Eventually they taped flyers to every door about the boil order. We too are hesitant to spend money as a small town, but the outrage that we don’t have a way to be notified about stuff like this may force this change.
Doesn’t matter if it’s something benign (hopefully) like this or life threatening like in Texas, our governments need to do better.
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Wow, couldn’t wait for a full casualty count before starting the blame game… Classy
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I’ll pray for your hurt feelings.
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You need more people to be confirmed dead before even one preventable death is worth criticizing government officials for not doing their jobs over…?
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You say that like there’s anyone else to blame but the people in charge. And if all those people are Republicans…well, tough shit for them, but they have to actually take responsibility for their failures here.
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Kandiss Taylor, MTG, Mike Flynn, Anne Vandersteel were way out ahead there with the blame game.
They’re basically blaming Jewish Space Lasers.
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‘Look just because he’s holding a flamethrower and there’s several empty canisters of fuel next to him is no reason to accuse him of starting that fire before a proper investigation!’
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Why does it matter? By your reaction I’m going to assume you voted to kill those kids and more.
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Tater tots and pears for your bruised anus.
Re: “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”
Even little Alice saw through that one… and she was actually asleep at the time.
I’m beginning to see why MAGA types think “woke” is such an insult.
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First of all, none of this is a fucking game. Second, weather doesn’t wait for you to be satisfied we’ve sat quietly long enough; something similar could happen somewhere else tomorrow. The sooner the fairly obvious cause-and-effect is highlighted the sooner it can be rectified. It takes time for you chucklefucks to be convinced how stupid these budget cuts are after all.
Harbinger
Texas is just a harbinger for what is coming for the test of the country.
State politicians cut taxes rather than spend money on flood control or monitoring and local officials didn’t think the cost was worth it: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/us/texas-flood-warnings-sirens.html
So we have Texas which is supposed to be a model for the country having a epidemic of an easily controlled disease and people dying from an easily avoidable disaster. The NWS issued an alert 12 hours before things got really bad. About 7 hours before thing got bad the NWS issued an emergency alert of what was going to happen. Too bad they had no way to actually get the information to any of the affected areas.
Soon, this won’t just be texas, it will be the whole country and the scale will be much bigger.
Where’s the guy that always says the republican party is a death cult. This kind of proves it.
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Well, okay, but they’ve literally been telling people to pray to a dead guy for as long as I can remember, so it’s never been subtle.
Republican voters. You killed children. Good job.
Re: Yeah that's not really a deal-breaker for them
Oh they’ve already been doing that what with RFK Jr.’s response to the measles outbreak and they’ve ensured much more dead children with the pending cuts to medicaid and SNAP, so this is just more dead kids on the pile for them.
'Nothing could be done', says person who did nothing.
If prayers are so powerful for republicans how about a deal?
The obscenely rich get ‘thoughts and prayers’ going forward, and everyone else gets all that useless ‘money’ for things like public safety and assistance programs.
I know it’ll be hard for the public to lose out on the highly valuable ‘thoughts and prayers’ while being left with only millions/billions of funding, but as the republicans just showed the way to make america great is to do everything possible to help the people who need help the least, with the expectations that they’ll then lift everyone else with them.
Re: Not quite
That is not the “expectations” but the “implausible excuse”. The expectation is the one demonstrated by Trump himself, namely that the financial superiority will be used to shield themselves from even giving the properly earned payments for wares and services to less well-endowed contractors and using their wealth strategically to stiff them in courts.
It is not really “trickle-down” economics, it is “bleed those suckers” economics.
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Well, that it was done proves it could be done. It could probably be done again.
I read what Trump said, I was SHOCKED to learn that it was Biden’s fault!
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Haven’t you learned yet? Everything is Biden’s fault! I mean, he’s not in office, or running anything, but you can ignore that part. It’s totally (not) important or anything!
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That blasted presidential time travel/teleportation machine that Biden absconded with strikes again!
Re: Perfectly plausible
If Israel can blame Hamas for indiscriminate bombing of civilians because sneakily some of them can be counted upon to be less enamored with Israel, turning the others into human shields…
Why the same logic can be applied here for blaming Biden. If Biden had not sneakily hidden wagonloads of incompetent people in disaster prevention, DOGE would not have to indiscriminately bomb out, I mean, fire everyone.
Biden had been abusing competent disaster prevention and remedy personnel as human shields for his politicized civil employees not unilaterally foaming at the mouth for love of Trump and thus America.
Firing them all was the only remedy. In particular since climate change is a hoax and warning about consequences of it such as flooding is just playing into the hands of the hoaxers.
There will be a lot of Biden blaming for the partly catastrophic consequences of the DOGE rampage. You can be sure of that. The exact storyline will keep changing around like the image of a screensaver so that no particular explanation’s utter stupidity will burn itself into people’s memories until next election.
Bad Religion
I’m not anti-religious but I am against bad religion. I was raised Catholic and we were taught that we had to take care of our own problems and prayer is just how you communicate with God. That’s what the Lord’s Prayer is: Jesus’s example of the proper way to pray, which is done in private and is only about praising God. Jesus said public prayer was for phonies who got their reward in this world due to all the attention they get while people who pray privately get their reward in the next world.
But the religious right is taught that belief alone is enough for God to save you from your problems and prayer is how you wish for things; as if God is a magic Genie with unlimited wishes if you believe he is. That’s why they oppose government regulations because they think God will solve our problems and government is just about controlling people; since that’s how they use it.
And it’s why they’re so angry and confused because nothing works out like they’re told it should. But they’re told to blame themselves or an enemy; not the system of prayer that obviously doesn’t work and isn’t biblical. Never once did Jesus say prayers are wishes. He only talked about helping others and praising God.
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I’m minded of a joke about a preacher stranded on a house roof during a flood. A boat came by and offered to take him off to safety, but he refused saying “God will save me.”.
The water kept rising, and he kept praying. Another boat came along and offered to save him, but he refused saying “God will save me.”.
The water kept rising, and he kept praying, until the water had almost covered the top-most bit of the roof. A helicopter hovered overhead and urged him to get in the basket before the flood washed him away. He refused, saying “God will save me.”.
He was washed away and drowned.
In Heaven, when it was his turn in front of God, he asked “God, why didn’t you save me?”. God replied “I sent you two boats and a helicopter to save you. What more did you expect me to do?”.
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That story is in an episode of The West Wing, and from my understanding, it’s not a joke, but more an analogy on people being incapable of taking action for themselves because they expect someone/something else to do it for them.
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It’s a joke, even if it’s also an analogy or parable. I think it was already going around as a joke before The West Wing used it.
Proof prayer doesn't work
Texas governor still in a wheelchair
Re: Proof prayer doesn't work
Maybe his faith wasn’t strong enough.
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I think the word you are looking for is not “faith” but “fart”.
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Only a stubborn or nostalgic fool would still be using farts to move their own wheelchair. Almost every sane wheelchair user has moved on to using miniature rocket engines.
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Or, in some cases, steam-powered wheelchairs that also fire rockets.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/TheWildWildWestS2E21TheNightOfTheBrain
Trump should use a tiny bit of those budget cuts to create a Department of Thoughts & Prayers. Do away with those inefficient manual offerings of T&P! Streamline it. Let the professionals develop a billion-dollar AI system to produce customized T&P for every disaster!
Acountability is on the Way! MAGA Style!
Trump’s supporters are already,calling it murder calling for accountability, and new laws to prevent it happening again.
But they’re not blaming DOGE or the BBB.
They’re blaming “They”, who manipulating the weather.
MTG is going to introduce a bill…
Banning Cloud Seeing and Weather Manipulation..
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Yes — actual news, not just a sarcastic joke
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There’s no way anyone’s gonna make it illegal to see clouds. From the ground, anyway.
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Haha, I accidentally dropped the d in seeding … cope..
Because when it comes down to it, it’s not funny…
Sure MTG’s bill is a waste of time, jut like TN’s , it won’t stop events like this, and it will put an end to some -useful- uses of of our minor ability to manipulate the weather.
But if you dig down a little deeper, you find the militia nutcases who think radar stations are causing storms, not trackig them.. and seem to be looking to take them out..
So what havens if they topple a nexrad station in tornado alley, and the forecasters are blind, as well as understaffed?.
Also..
And these idiots freak out when they see a mackerel sky…
So yes, they also don’t want to see at least some kinds of clouds.
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Okay, that makes more sense. But cloud-seeing is also a concern, what with the cuts to satellite weather radar. We often don’t see the clouds from ground level till it’s too late.
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Now I’m curious…
What’s their problem with “mackerel sky” cloud formations?
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“if they topple a nexrad station in tornado alley”
And remember, the NEXRAD system is already stretched long past the original service life. Units have been functionally out of production for something like thirty years at this point and spares&repairs are already stretched tight.
In theory NOAA (and the FAA and the air force and the NWS, all groups who are terrible at deploying big new systems in almost any time scale) is working on a replacement system but you can expect that to have been shelved indefinitely under the MAGA regime.
A concerted attack by loonies could leave holes in the system that are patched slowly, if ever.
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What’s the betting Trump will pass an EO making it illegal to look up at them, though?
I’m reminded of the message on the front of the New York Daily News issue from the 3rd of December 2015: God Isn’t Fixing This
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God wants us to fix it, God gave us the tools to fix it. If we don’t fix it, God will be angry with those who did nothing.
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I’m not a believer, but if I was God I would be pissed that I’d given humanity the ability to wield the extraordinary power of science and technology for our benefit, and we just turned around and said “Nah, you take care if it for us.”
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Where much is given, much is required. *nod nod*
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That’s easy to say, but would you really? Perhaps a god would be more upset that all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. Maybe they’d be more focused on the dying bees, or one of the other millions of planets harboring intelligent life. Maybe what we call “life” was just an accident, and God’s much more interested in black holes and the aesthetics of planetary orbits.
Hell, when I play a video game like Civilization, I sometimes forget about one of my dozens of cities for quite a while. Why would we expect God to be any more interested in continued micro-management, even if we posit they’d be more skilled?
So, what is missing is a Department Of Prayer Efficiency.
Musk, any spare time to lead this?
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That’s DOPE!
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Sounds like something Musk really would be into.
Guys, the federal government is just instituting the purge without calling it a purge. As long as those in power aren’t affected this whole ordeal was exactly what was intended.
Now it will be interesting to see if the right people are held accountable for this but you already know they won’t be.
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That’s because the left people will be held accountable for this.
The use of social media to defend the general public was well saterized in the new duck tales cartoon. Gizmo duck is una le to help people and is stuck telling people they have to install the Waddle app then subscribe to the hero service just so that Gizmo duck can save them.
Perhaps this is when the religious leaders call it a vengeful act of god for all the sin occurring in Texas or is that only reserved for liberal leaning areas?
Clarification please
If they are calling for prayer AFTER a disaster, is it to have their god resurrect those people who died in the disaster?
Otherwise, I’m not sure the purpose for post hoc prayers.
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And if they’re calling for prayer before/during a disaster, the implication is two-fold:
It’s all about feeding egos, really.
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Hmmm… That was a christian girls’ summer camp, wasn’t it?
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You Are Fake News
https://apnews.com/article/texas-floods-hill-country-weather-warnings-238d4325bb58f0b410015f74684738b6
“The National Weather Service office in New Braunfels, which delivers forecasts for Austin, San Antonio and the surrounding areas, had extra staff on duty during the storms, Runyen said.”
Even the AP says that your premise is false. DOGE cuts did not negatively impact staffing levels..
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And yet, that extra staff on hand didn’t get any alerts out to people in ways that could’ve warned people about the dangers of this storm system and helped them evacuate in time. Nearly 100 people are confirmed to have died because of this storm and the flooding it caused, and that includes several children. What good did that extra staff do if they didn’t actually help save lives that could’ve been saved?
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Hey asshole, read the article.
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Your own link includes this:
It also does not conflict with what the NYT reported: that the people focused on actually responding to the weather alerts were not there. The AP report notes that they had meteorologists, not the support staff, which the NYT noted was missing.
Indeed, it has been reported that the “warning coordination meteorologist” is not filled after the last one left in a DOGE purge. So, uh, Koby, stop fucking covering up for this kind of nonsense, which comes from the people you support.
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The response system was NEVER there. Budget cuts did not eliminate some magic army of federal employees driving former cop cars with a bullhorns strapped to the roof, shouting warnings off into the countryside.
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Other ways to inform people about potential weather emergencies exist beyond your childlike understanding of rural areas. Phone alerts, for example, would’ve been a huge help. I get them every time a severe weather warning is in my area. But it seems like most of the alerts in this instance were sent via social media apps instead, and not everyone has those installed on their phones—or has notifications for them turned on if they do. Maybe if the support staff had been there, they could’ve actually sent out the alerts that could have saved lives. But they weren’t, so they couldn’t (and didn’t), and now several dozen people are dead.
You may not like the fact that Republicans are so anti-science that they’ll literally defund NOAA and other essential weather services to deny that climate change exists and has an effect on the severity and frequency of storms like this one. But you hitched your little red wagon to the train that is their anti-science, anti-knowledge, and anti-life ideology. For once, you should either own their ideology and celebrate the cuts they made or own the responsibility of having put a bunch of reckless death-seeking assholes in charge of this country. Deflecting and trying to excuse away their choices—we can’t really call them mistakes because they didn’t do this shit by accident—only makes you look like a desperate bootlicker, and you’re not supposed to make a three-course meal out of leather.
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That you are too ignorant to understand how alert systems work is on you, Kobes, but I’ve got no time to educate someone who has proven they have no interest in learning.
Just know: these deaths on your watch. The people you insist are brilliantly doing good things created the circumstances that lead to this. I know you’re too stupid and too full of yourself to understand it, but the world knows your complicity.
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Every accusation a confession.
Devoting a large portion of a press conference to patting themselves on the back & praising the god emperor while parents are waiting for any fragment of information.
Governor telling parents perhaps they didn’t pray hard enough to save their kids.
Speaker of the House of Rep. all we can do is pray.
ICE Barbie blaming old systems.
Member of Congress blaming bureaucrats, trying to shore up it was the fault of anyone but the people alleged in charge & who are supposed to care about citizens.
Prayer is an amazing dodge for them being stupid worthless pieces of shit.
They made a decision to not have the most basic things required, sirens. Its a proven technology (when maintained) but to save a few bucks on a line item they stopped. People honestly don’t understand that the costs of a disaster with no real warning, are way higher than the few bucks it cost to have that sort of system.
Mind you they have a magical statewide Blue Alert to fire off everytime something bad happens to a cop, it can be 200 miles away from where you are but they push it to everyone. Databrokers know your location to within meters, but we don’t have an alert system that can target. Pushing for vouchers for ‘christian’ schools matters much more than public safety.
An agency that has been DOGEd, had their satellite data turned off, most of their operations the jeebus freaks don’t understand stopped b/c they must be wasteful are under attack by the jeebus freaks who tied their hands.
They go on and on about how much these things cost…
(from a meme I’ve posted before online, prolly drop it on my bluesky today too.)
Image with text on a black background.
“Take my $1.37,” “I want my PBS,”
“Take my $.46,” “I am all for federal funding of art programs,”
“Take my $.46,” “I love my museums, colleges, and libraries,”
“Take my $.11,” “I support developing minority businesses,”
“Take my $.66,” “I am for entrepreneurship and innovation,”
“Take my $1.60,” “I want us to export more goods overseas,”
“Take my $0.43,” “I would like to see more American manufacturing,”
“Take my $0.88,” “I think community policing needs vast improvement,”
“Take my $1.48,” “I support programs for women,”
“Take my $1.55,” “I believe in due process for all,”
“Take my $0.48,” “We need a civil rights division in the justice department,”
“Take my $0.38,” “I think we need to defend our Mother Earth,”
“Take my $0.03,” “I know more work needs to be done for climate change,”
“Take my $8.95,” “because we need more sustainable energy,”
“Take my $2.71.” “because we should reduce our carbon footprint.”
“IF SAVING THESE PROGRAMS MEANS I’M OUT $22.36 A YEAR, I’M GOOD. NOW GIVE ME BACK THE $575 I PAY TO KEEP THE WAR MACHINE RUNNING AND THE $368 I PAY IN CORPORATE WELFARE TO BIG OIL AND WALMART.”
Re: I suggested
To a person that we pay 1/2 our taxes to the Pentagon, for tanks, plane, guns, and sell them to other countries, and never get paid back.
He suggested that THEY do pay it back.
I asked then WHY do we have to pay for the Pentagon AGAIN Next year.
And the Cost to Drop 1 Bomb isnt CHEAP. Those we hit Iran with, (I think) are over $1 million Each, Plus the Bomber, Plus the Fuel.
And the Current wage of a PFC…Over $20k. Which only happened a few years back. 3 times min wage.
Still think a Universal DAY OFF, across the USA would WORK VERY WELL.
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Oh, politicians understand. They understand that if they can keep costs low while they’re in power, people will like them better. Then when disaster strikes, they can just say “thoughts and prayers. What else could you expect us to do? We don’t have the money for more preparedness!”
Rinse and repeat.
“Pray to the Lord, but row away from the rocks!”
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Or to quote Kipling, so beloved of the political right…
“They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose”
Prayer does not replace a proper local warning system with staff coordinating low warnings they can send out warnings thru txts all large buildings in area,s prone to flooding within a mile of a river should have 24 personnel actively looking out for weather warnings and flood warnings we have websites and they can send emails and txts to the public and to local officials and police .
So the republicans talk about prayer while fema is being reduced to a skeleton staff .
disaster move across the usa floods wildfires
its ridiculous to shut down fema while giving billions of tax breaks to the rich.
meanwhile the budget for ice is being raised to staff 1000,s more staff.
measles is spreading rapidly from texas as rfk jr continues to cast doubt on the safety of vaccines
or refuses to push for general public free vaccination against measles
This was almost entirely preventable
Speaking as someone who has trained professional rescuers in tactics and strategies, including incident command:
The NWS, despite the insanely stupid cuts made by DOGE, did its job, did it well, and did it in a timely manner. Texas officials failed to pay attention and to act immediately and decisively. The warning the NWS issued at 1:26 AM in an area with a history of severe flash flooding should have resulted in a full callout of every available person and vehicle, with the latter dispatched to a pre-determined list of locations that are (a) close to the Guadalupe River and (b) likely to be full of people in the middle of the night. Including: a summer camp that’s been there since forever and is well-known to everyone.
The river was rising at that time (1:26 AM), but the catastrophic increase in flow didn’t happen until around 5:15 AM — most of 4 hours later. [1] They had all that time to send firetrucks, buses, vans, anything that could carry people to higher ground. They didn’t even manage to get warnings out, e.g., every available local and state police car should have been on the roads nearest the river with full sirens and lights waking everyone up. They should have fired up the tornado sirens. They should have sent Jim Billy Bob and his friends and their high-clearance pickup trucks out to get anybody they could find and get them to higher ground. They should have called and texted every phone, repeatedly. And so on.
If local officials had done even a half-ass job they probably could have saved almost everyone.
[1] I know this because I pulled the data from the USGS gauge. At 1:30 AM river flow was 12 cubic feet/second — pretty much a trickle in a river that size. At 3:30 AM it was 279 CFS — still not very much for a river that size, about enough to float a canoe. At 5:15 AM it was 315 CFS, still not very much. And then all the water from upstream began arriving: an hour later, at 6:15 AM, flow was 118,000 CFS. So they had from 1:26 AM until 5:15 AM, a precious 3 hours and 49 minutes, and they squandered it.
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I guess it’s fair that a summer camp would be in a flood-prone area. Being in nature is the point, and natural water bodies are popular for activities. But this is not “flash” flooding in the sense of a dam-break; it still took a couple of hours for the water to rise. And if it was well-known, shouldn’t they have been prepared even without the government warning? I mean, a summer-camp 30 years ago wouldn’t have had warning, unless maybe someone saw foreboding clouds and turned on a radio. I’d expect them to have disaster plans and training, just as I’d expect them to have first-aid plans and training.
I’d hope there wouldn’t be too many other flood-prone areas “likely to be full of people in the middle of the night”. The picture of the submerged houses represents a huge policy failure long before the flooding. It’s not one or two rural landowners recklessly asserting their “rights” to build anything without approval, government warnings be damned, but an entire supposedly-professional real-estate development that somehow got built in a flood-prone area. The builders should’ve known better than to build it, government officials should’ve known better than to approve it, insurance companies should’ve known better than to insure it, and of course buyers should always run away from un-insurable properties.
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Rescue trainer again: it’s certainly true that people shouldn’t be building things in flood-prone (especially flash-flood-prone) areas. And if they’re already built things there, then they should be encouraged (by policy, by economics, etc.) to move them. This is a proactive way to minimize the risk to life and the damage to property when floods materialize.
But it’s expensive as hell; it runs smack into property rights; it (as you noted) doesn’t work so well for operations that are deliberately located by rivers; and it takes a LOT of time. And then there’s one other problem (at least): “flood prone area” isn’t what it used to be. It’s a lot more. Areas that would probably have been reasonable places to build structures even 20 years ago aren’t reasonable places now, because global warming has shifted rainfall patterns and especially the peak totals from short rainfall events. (There’s a lot of research on this for obvious reasons.) Floods that were extremely unlikely in 2005 are only somewhat unlikely now. Floods that were somewhat unlikely are edging toward likely, and so on.
I think of it this way: we’re not going to relocate hundreds of billions of dollars of structures any time soon, so the best we can do is focus on saving lives — with more climate and weather research, more climate and weather measurements, more research and forecast staff, more extensive warning systems, more disaster planning and response: pretty much all the things that DOGE et.al. want to eliminate.
The one thing you’re wrong about is that this was absolutely a flash flood, and yes, the river did in fact rise at the speed of a dam break. Here’s the graph:
Guadalupe Rv at Kerrville, TX – 08166200
Note that the left-hand scale is (a) CFS and (b) logarithmic. If you mouse over it (requires Javascript enabled) you can see that at 5:15 AM flow was 315 CFS. At 5:30 AM: 3700 CFS. At 5:45 AM: 13500 CFS. At 6:00 AM: 36100 CFS. At 6:15 AM: 118000 CFS. That’s just about what you would expect to see at a site some distance below a failed dam. (Keep in mind that water flows at finite speed, so when a dam breaks, it takes time for the water to arrive at points downstream: it doesn’t all get there instantly or at the same time. In this case, it took time for water to run off all the hills upstream, funnel into the valleys upstream, and then it make it way down smaller streams into the river.)
This is what it looks like — and I don’t know for certain that this is the Guadalupe River event because it was taken during daylight hours, and the Kerrville flooding happened just before dawn. Perhaps this was taken downstream slightly later that morning as the water arrived. But in any event, this is what a flash flood looks like:
Shocking video shows how quickly the Texas flood waters rose over 20 feet in as little as 37 minutes
If I were the one behind the camera, that video would have stopped about 20 seconds in.
Because I would be running.
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Yikes. I thought I’d read it took 3 or 4 hours, but 20 feet in 37 minutes… not a lot of time from “should we be concerned about this?” to “we’d all better be miles away in the next 10 minutes”.
As for “expensive as hell”, well, that’s only if the stuff’s already built, right? And then it’s expensive as hell anyway, when people (insurers and their rate-payers) have to pay to re-build it all. Building in certain areas was always going to expensive as hell, if you consider the deferred costs.
I’m thinking again of the main picture for the “Texas-Sized Disaster” story. This wasn’t some nut-job insisting on property rights, or some long-established neighborhood. Those hundreds of similar houses can’t be more than a few decades old. That is, they must have been built during a time when we had the science to identify areas as flood-prone.
I’m less confident than you that it’s very recent climate change we couldn’t have known about. Climate change seems to be giving us once-in-a-hundred-year weather every decade or two, but you did write “in an area with a history of severe flash flooding” (in reference to the 2025 flooding). We (in the general sense) knew the risk was present, in that exact area, even if we severely under-estimated it. And regarding Hurricane Harvey, Wikipedia says “one analysis discovered that more than 7,000 housing units have been built within the 100-year floodplain in Harris County since 2010.” That number should be zero (or just a handful of crazy people who ignore every warning in the hopes that God will save them—and to reference the joke elsewhere in this thread, “I sent you several dire warnings; what more did you want?”).
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Your missing a couple of points. Had the locals been paying attention to the NWS, or had the NWS been able to communicate with the correct people, the local authorities should have began prepping their plan by around 2:00 PM Thursday and at least implementing initial phases by 7:00 PM Thursday when the NWS had already predicted what was going to happen.
They had more than 6 hours from the time the NWS said it was going to be bad before things really started to go south.
The core of the problem was that all the people who knew who to call and how to get a hold of them no longer work at the NWS. So the locals never really understood there was a problem until they happen to notice the low water crossings were looking might full of water. By that time it was too late to do anything.
We’ve come to rely on federal agencies to warn us of things like flash floods, so we tend to sit around and do nothing until they alert us. Now days, that gets people killed.
I challenge the second part of that assertion. States can absolutely replace it if they so choose.
But maybe if you want to cut the federal funding for this sort of thing, wait a year or two so the states know they have to step up. States can replace it – but they can’t replace it instantly.
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That’s probably less practical than you make it out to be.
Many states in the U.S.A. are bigger than European countries, and one might note that these small countries actually have such systems. But, in fact, they don’t generally launch or operate satellites; it’s too expensive, so they join together to do such things. Maybe they generate the warnings themselves, but they need good data sources.
The “U” in “U.S.A.” suggests similar ideas, and in fact that’s how things worked till this year. But the current Federal administration is de-funding the agency that managed this type of satellite data, and as of July 31 will be witholding this data from them and everyone else. Which means the states won’t have data to generate all the warnings that had previously been generated federally; not till they create and launch their own satellites, or make deals with private or foreign operators (if those operators are even collecting data relevant to the continental U.S.A.).
It’ll take a lot longer to un-fuck things than it’s taking to fuck them up.
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And Texas probably won’t replace it because there’s no profit in it for them.
Whitehouse already calling it a "deranged lie"
They have lashed out against articles like this one blaming the cuts to FEMA Trump causing the disaster
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Of course they have. They’re allergic to accountability.
Some talking head was interviewed by the BBC…
He laid some of the blame on watch or warning being confusing to people.
It took me 45 minutes to find my eyes I rolled them so hard.
He also said that if you have a kids camp you should have multiple devices to warn you.
There isn’t an app to alert you to notices posted on FB or X, but you know a really fucking loud siren gives LOTS of notice something bad is coming & perhaps you should check the news.
Rafael Edward Cruz going on and on how we shouldn’t politicize the tragedy… I guess he was flying back from Greece and missed the press conferences that were 90% talking about how awesome the GQP leadership and the god emperor were while parents hoping against hope & praying as hard as they could were left waiting for any fragment of information.
Press Liar Barbie standing at the podium trying to defend the NWS having done a good job, while members of congress/ICE leadership are screaming they screwed up it can;t be the fault of the emergency managers who were breifed hours before the bad part hit.
Re: BBC
The BBC Verify also looked at this event. They have little to benefit from sugar coating this.
I suspect NOAA/FEMA/DOGE/Trump just had a very near miss – their cuts probably had little impact in this event. 2026 hurricane season won’t be anywhere near so lucky.
However, the use of ExTwitter to ‘alert’ in Texas is clearly…. suboptimal. That does lie with the penny-pinchers at all levels of emergency planning.
Re: Re: some effect
Not sure I can agree. Sacking the guy whose job it was to coordinate weather warnings might have had some effect on the distribution of weather warnings.\
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Um… there is. Or “are”. I’m pretty sure Facebook’s and X’s own apps will tell you when things are posted. For (pre-X) Twitter, it was kind of the point. Isn’t that why people view the things as addictive?
Glory be. Your prayers are answered.
Your Lord God has answered your prayers. He demands you send a small portion of your income(those that don’t have much to give are not subject. Those that have more to spare are to make up for those that don’t)to your local treasurer to build and maintain a system that monitors for storms and warns the population of possible disasters.
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They were given 5 million.
They refused to spend it because they hated Biden.
Because they worried the money might go to another state who would use it in a way they wouldn’t approve of they didn’t return it.
Maybe it’s time for the responsible states to get together and provide themselves the services the government refuses to. I bet a smarter person than I can take
and point out that a joint task force, funded by each state, doesn’t meet those requirements. Besides, who would even have standing to sue?
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This would still be an “Agreement … with another State”, theoretically forbidden by Article I, Section 10, Clause 3.
But it does say “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.” It’s fair to say there’s imminent danger, and the feds themselves have been using legal powers on the basis of “invasion”.
Wikipedia also says:
It’s possible this would be a viable tool. It does seem a bit crazy for states to get together to design and launch their own weather satellites—and it might encroach on the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over satellite communication. But I don’t see any basis for the feds to object to states buying satellite access from other countries, or from private American satellites already authorized by the F.C.C.
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Much like “interstate commerce,” “increase the political power of” is a term which can mean anything if the courts want it to. Everything results in a change in political power.
Obtaining satellite access elsewhere ensures that the feds cannot use satellite access as a lever against the states. That is, if the courts want it to be, an increase in the relative political power of the states. Much like refusing to engage in interstate commerce where someone previously did engage in interstate commerce is, when the courts want it to be, still interstate commerce.
`Thoughts and Prayers'?
When their response is thoughts and prayers, they should not have become politicians, they should have joined a monastery.
Re: thoughts and prayers
At this point, they should be praying, offering up contrition for their bad act and omissionns such as eliminating the person in charge of coordinating disaster warnings and failing to install tornado sirens.
Soon this administration will say the 91+ deaths are “pwning the libs lol” etc.
If they claim JUST illegal immigrants and liberals die in floods, the MAGA base will eat it up.
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I’m cynical and jaded as fuck, and even I know they’re not going to pull that shit.
Nothing will change
If recent history has taught us anything, it is that this event will ultimately result in absolutely no net changes. Certainly not improvements. America has proven that we are willing to sacrifice children lives to maintain the illusion of “freedom”, lest we dare suggest additional legislation is the answer or, even worse, that the most darkest of evils be conjured: TAXES!
Besides, it’s Texas. Basically just a massive sociopolitical experiment in FAFO…
And if I were Hindu, I might actually believe it was deserved as a result of Trump and Musk’s actions due a karma, but that’s a cruel philosophy I can’t believe in.