On the menu today: President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump will travel to Texas later today, where they are expected to meet with first responders in the area, receive a briefing from local elected officials, and meet with families affected by the disaster. As discussed on The Editors podcast, we’ve seen some progressive voices run the Hurricane Katrina playbook on this one, claiming that a terrible deadly catastrophe is the result of Republican policies, and disregarding all science and history in their claims. The same people who shrugged off Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s trip to Ghana after wildfire warnings for her city contend that Texans were doomed by Senator Ted Cruz’s family vacation to Greece. Meanwhile, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin does the right thing and attempts to dispel a conspiracy theory with facts and science, and the usual suspects in the media contend he’s spreading conspiracy theories. No good deed goes unpunished.

After the Floods

The editors of National Review declare in The Week:

To call the flash flooding that erupted across central Texas on July 4 a tragedy is to downplay the scope of the cataclysm. Trapped on all sides by high barometric pressure, a freak storm languished over several Texas counties for hours over the Independence Day holiday, dumping billions of gallons of water down on already saturated land. As a result, the placid Guadalupe River burst its banks by upwards of 26 feet in some places, and all in the space of just 90 minutes. One week later, 170 people remain missing or unidentified. At least 121 people died in the storm. It was a disaster.

Texas has a “Flash Flood Alley” that extends down the middle of the state, from Dallas down through Waco, tilting a bit southwest toward Austin and San Antonio, and then West to the Rio Grande. The Lower Colorado River Authority bluntly declares the region endures “one of the greatest risks for flash floods in the United States. The region is prone to flash floods because of its steep terrain, shallow soil and unusually high rainfall rates.”

As the Texas affiliate of NPR laid out:

As any Texan knows, the weather here is unpredictable. That’s because of the state’s unique position between cold, dry air from the north and moist, warm air from the Gulf of Mexico. Central Texas in particular is prone to intense rainstorms. Water fills the Colorado and Guadalupe rivers and their tributaries, making the area a popular destination for boaters and swimmers.
But when certain weather patterns collide like they did on Friday, the area is inundated with water that rushes through the hills and canyons. The abundant limestone keeps the water from soaking into the ground, so it rushes into the valleys, Sarah Spivey, a meteorologist with KSAT, told NPR.
Friday’s rain was particularly intense because of a lingering tropical storm that hit Mexico and migrated to Texas.

This is not a new phenomenon, which makes it difficult to attribute this month’s disaster to the effects of climate change, global warning, increased carbon in the atmosphere, and so on. A 2021 report published by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority in cooperation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency:

The Guadalupe River experienced major floods in 1936, 1952, 1972, 1973, 1978, 1987, 1991 and 1997. . . . Floods are not predictable. They do not follow measured cycles. They destroy homes, businesses and take lives. Unfortunately, an even greater flood will occur sometime in the future.

As the Austin Chronicle wrote after flooding in 2015: “Unlike Houston, which experiences ‘bathtub’ flooding (in flat terrain, floods flatten out and become more predictable), where homes can be raised on stilts to protect from future damage, Central Texas experiences flash flooding, which makes that impractical. When rains fall over the Hill Country, water runs downhill and collects in low-water crossings, streams, and rivers. Anything in its path is fair game.”

Reuters has stunning time-lapse video of the flood waters rising over a causeway in Kingland, Texas, on July 7.

For some people, a reflexive instinct when looking at the horror of such a terrible death toll is, “Why weren’t they prepared for something like this?” But NPR reports, “The river gauge closest to Camp Mystic is about five miles downstream of the camp, where the south and north forks of the Guadalupe River merge. It recorded a rise of more than 25 feet in two hours, before going silent for the rest of the day.” There are very few locations on earth that can handle a river rising 25 feet in two hours without catastrophic damage and serious risk to human life. Note this rapid rise occurred around 3 a.m., when most people are sound asleep.

As terrible as the death toll is, note this is likely to be the fourth-deadliest flood in Texas history, “after Galveston in 1900 (estimated 8,000 to 12,000 died) as well as San Antonio in 1921 (220 died) and 1913 (180 died).”

As the editors continue:

For some, it couldn’t be just a disaster. Even as the flood waters surged, media outlets and their Democratic allies rushed to blame Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE commission for budget cuts that left the National Weather Service helpless. The meteorological class soon reprimanded their colleagues in the media. Local NWS was fully staffed — indeed, overstaffed, per protocol — during the storm. Warnings were sent out about it twelve hours in advance, and a flash flood warning for the affected counties was issued three hours before it hit. There’s room to criticize local preparedness ahead of the floods, but DOGE’s marginal cuts to executive branch spending — cuts the Senate has yet to even ratify — were not to blame for this catastrophe.

You never want to blame the victims. But when warnings are issued, and those in the affected areas don’t act upon them, it is unfair to scapegoat the authorities. From the Texas Tribune:

And the [National Weather Service] issued increasingly urgent warnings through the night, which should have given most people enough time to escape death if they received and understood them, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Questions remain about whether people along the river had cell service to get the push alerts, had alerts enabled on their phones, or were even awake to heed them.
Had they been warned of the coming flood, many people could have walked in the rainy darkness to higher ground.
“This really does appear to be a case where had there been even a modest acknowledgement of the level of danger that was predicted by the weather service, I don’t think much of the scope of loss of life would have happened,” Swain said in a public video call Monday.

There is always going to be an audience for news or “news” articles or columns that argue, “This bad thing that happened occurred because of Republicans.” And make no mistake, different government policy decisions can generate different outcomes, and mitigate or exacerbate the effects of natural disasters.

But short of building two big, beautiful walls along the sides of every river in central Texas, it is hard to envision a government policy that could mitigate the serious loss of life when river levels rise more than 25 feet in two hours, around 3 a.m., in an area that has been prone to flooding for a century, and when the people in the affected area either don’t hear or don’t heed the warnings.

A Familiar Complaint About Ted Cruz

You probably saw some big-name publications giving Senator Ted Cruz grief for being on vacation in Greece with his family when the floods hit — the New York Times, CNN, the Daily Beast, the New York Post. The floods hit July 4, Independence Day, and Cruz was seen sightseeing at the Parthenon in Greece on July 5.

(I wonder if these publications expressed comparable concern about Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass choosing to board a flight to Ghana to attend the inauguration of the country’s president the day after National Weather Service warned of dangerous fire conditions.)

Cruz is a U.S. senator; there’s only so much a member of the federal legislative body can do during a natural disaster like this. If you want to say it’s bad optics to be sightseeing with his family the day after the floodwaters crested, fine. But supposedly it was some sort of terribly consequential mistake for Cruz to be vacationing with his family in Cancun in 2021 when a winter storm devastated his state. Last year, Texans had their opportunity to render their verdict on how Cruz had performed his duties in the preceding six years, and Cruz won reelection, 53 percent to 44.5 percent, a margin of more than 959,000 votes. In other words, the number of voters in Cruz’s margin of victory was larger than the population of South Dakota.

People who already hate Ted Cruz are very excited that they’ve found a new reason to hate Ted Cruz.

With that said, when the Cruz family plans an upcoming vacation, they should probably notify the Texas Department of Public Safety, just as a precaution.

ADDENDUM: Environmental Protection administrator Lee Zeldin issued an official report on contrails this week, declaring, “Americans have legitimate questions about contrails and geoengineering, and they deserve straight answers. We’re publishing everything EPA knows about these topics on these websites.”

The report states, right up at the top, “Contrails are a normal effect of jet aircraft operations and have been since its earliest days of air travel. If you are seeing a lot of contrails in your area it is because there are a lot of jet aircraft flying overhead. . . . ‘Chemtrails’ is a shortening of the term ‘chemical trails’. It is a term some people use to inaccurately claim that contrails resulting from routine air traffic are actually an intentional release of dangerous chemicals or biological agents at high altitudes for a variety of nefarious purposes, including population control, mind control, or attempts to geoengineer Earth or modify the weather.”

Allison Quinn of New York magazine greeted the EPA report by writing, “Trump’s EPA Just Released an Infomercial for Conspiracy Theorists.”

This is the sort of dramatic scene you would expect to see in an ABC Afterschool Special, right before the protagonist tearfully confesses that she never learned how to read.

Now if we could just get HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to read the report. In late April, Kennedy appeared in a town hall event with Dr. Phil McGraw and contended the contrails were the work of DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is part of the U.S. Department of Defense.