Opinion | The Central Texas Floods Show How Ill-Prepared We Are
Two summers ago, in Hawaii, flames blasted by winds upward of 80 miles per hour rolled downslope like an avalanche of fire, destroying Maui’s Indigenous capital, Lahaina, and killing 102 in the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century. The death toll from Friday’s floods in Texas Hill Country has now exceeded it.
The flooding killed at least 119, including dozens of children from Camp Mystic, and according to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, at least 173 other people are missing. The disaster is one of the most lethal the country has faced this century, and yet the tsunami-like storm surge itself competes with the death toll for sheer horror.
When a river rises 26 feet in 45 minutes, it is hard to know what might’ve been done to staunch the damage — or to believe that we are anything close to adequately prepared for the storms to come. Too often, we’re responding to obvious threats of weather disaster less by properly adapting than by acclimating to them — with government offering a kind of shrugging indifference, too.
Think of flooding disasters and you’re likely to imagine hurricanes walloping the coasts — Harvey, Sandy and perhaps above all Katrina, which in 2005 killed more than 1,800, sent a major American city into a decade-long tailspin, and seemed at least temporarily to discredit not just a president but also his entire party. Last year, Helene offered a novel variation on the harrowing hurricane script, moving inland and ultimately inflicting much more devastation there, especially in western North Carolina, partly because the region was so unaccustomed to, and unprepared for, hurricane-scale flooding.
These days, more and more disaster stories appear to be playing out far from the coasts, in defiance of naïve intuitions about climate risk and even of our recent experience of climate horror. Five years ago, I would have told you that the most searing reminders of the worsening crisis were images of wildfire. Over the last few years, though, I’ve been more and more struck by harrowing images of inland flooding, with cities and towns entirely overrun with water, their streets transformed into rivers, and everything trapped or left behind in them turned into so much flotsam. These images are surreal showcases of a novel-seeming disaster; taken together, they also sharply expand our conceptual model of defensible space.
In the United States, the database of billion-dollar disasters long maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has drawn criticism in recent years, for failing to distinguish among the relative contributions of intensifying weather extremes, patterns of development and economic growth to eye-popping increases in the number of such disasters; this spring the Trump administration officially retired the database. But as a simple tally of dollars in damage, the database tells at least one undeniable and unmistakable story about the rapidly growing nominal cost of extreme weather. In 2024, five hurricanes crossed the billion-dollar threshold, as did one wildfire, two winter storms and one “drought event.” More quotidian “severe storm events” crossed the threshold 17 times. Almost two-thirds of spectacular-damage events that made the list came from unspectacular-sounding storms.
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