The deadly floods in the Texas Hill Country have cast fresh doubt over whether forecasting systems and emergency responses are keeping pace with the growing risks of a changing climate.
Questions are also being asked on cuts to the federal workforce, driven by the White House, and if they might have contributed to the disaster. The National Weather Service (NWS) office in San Angelo is said to have been understaffed, with at least one senior meteorologist taking early retirement as part of the Trump administration’s effort to reduce government headcount.
Nationwide, the NWS lost about 15 per cent of its staff in the months after President Trump’s inauguration through a combination of retirements and layoffs. Many of those who left were directly involved in producing forecasts. In April, the agency warned of “degraded operations” due to worker shortages.
• Nearly 70 dead after worst floods in Texas for 40 years
The worst-hit area, Kerr county, lacked a local system to warn residents of flash floods — and residents were reluctant to fund one, according to reports.
The region is no stranger to sudden downpours. “Flash floods are not uncommon in the Hill Country area of Texas,” said Jess Neumann of the University of Reading, Berkshire. “When very heavy rain falls on steep hillsides, this can create the conditions for raging torrents to be created in previously dry riverbeds in just a matter of hours.”
Even so, the scale of the recent deluge outstripped expectations. In some areas nearly 400mm of rain is believed to have fallen in a matter of hours in the early hours of Friday. The Guadalupe River surged by almost 8m in just 45 minutes.
The Guadalupe River burst its banks
On Wednesday, the Texas Division of Emergency Management had warned of “increased threats of flooding in parts of west and central Texas”. At about midnight on Thursday, NWS offices in San Angelo and San Antonio issued flash flood alerts, urging residents to move immediately to higher ground.
“Warnings were issued,” said Professor Hannah Cloke, a hydrologist at the University of Reading. “But the systems do not seem to have been in place to get information to those in harm’s way fast enough.
“It is not good enough for authorities to say they were not aware that floods were coming. Warnings were available but the message just didn’t get through.”
More broadly, climate change is fuelling increasingly volatile storms, largely because a hotter atmosphere holds more moisture, which later falls as rain. The most recent storms, laden with moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, stalled over central Texas.
Flood waters left debris scattered in Louise Hays Park in Kerrville, Texas
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Camp Mystic, where the children went missing
RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The inside of one of the cabins at the camp
RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
As weather systems intensify and evolve more rapidly, forecasting precisely when and where the worst will hit becomes harder. Yet scientists say that the broader direction of travel is clear.
“The tragic events in Texas are exactly what we would expect in our hotter, climate-changed world,” said Professor Bill McGuire of University College London. “There has been an explosion in extreme weather in recent years … Such events will only become more commonplace.”