Downed Weather Balloons and Missing Gauges: What Went Wrong With the Central Texas Floods
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 7:50 am
It’s a familiar cycle. Texas bears witness to a terrible tragedy, and citizens soon raise questions. Could the loss of life have been prevented or mitigated? Who, if anyone, bears responsibility? Those in power respond with “Now’s not the time” or point fingers at other authority figures. And then little is done. Uvalde. The West fertilizer explosion. The 2021 winter freeze. Hurricane Beryl. Texas politicians have a knack for shifting blame and limiting their exposure to accountability.
And so the cycle begins again with the horrific flooding in the Hill Country, where at least 119 people have died, including 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic. Another 173 remain missing. State officials have blamed the National Weather Service for botched forecasting. The Trump administration is defending the DOGE cuts that decimated the weather service. Kerr County officials, meanwhile, are arguing, essentially, that the flooding was merely an act of God, and the loss of life couldn’t possibly have been mitigated. (Some social media users, helpful as always, are overdosing on conspiracies about cloud seeding and Egyptian gods.)
On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott lashed out when asked a question about who bears responsibility. “Who’s to blame? Know this: That’s the word choice of losers.” He then made a lengthy football analogy. Losing teams look for culprits, he said, while championship programs respond to mistakes by saying, “We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again, that we’re going to win this game.”
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-polit ... as-floods/
And so the cycle begins again with the horrific flooding in the Hill Country, where at least 119 people have died, including 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic. Another 173 remain missing. State officials have blamed the National Weather Service for botched forecasting. The Trump administration is defending the DOGE cuts that decimated the weather service. Kerr County officials, meanwhile, are arguing, essentially, that the flooding was merely an act of God, and the loss of life couldn’t possibly have been mitigated. (Some social media users, helpful as always, are overdosing on conspiracies about cloud seeding and Egyptian gods.)
On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott lashed out when asked a question about who bears responsibility. “Who’s to blame? Know this: That’s the word choice of losers.” He then made a lengthy football analogy. Losing teams look for culprits, he said, while championship programs respond to mistakes by saying, “We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again, that we’re going to win this game.”
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-polit ... as-floods/