First The Frame:
Rescue crews continued searching Saturday along the swollen Guadalupe River in Central Texas after catastrophic flooding left at least 52 people dead, including 15 children.
Dozens more remain unaccounted for, according to The NY Times, including around 27 girls from a nearly century-old Christian summer camp in Kerr County. Most of the confirmed fatalities occurred in Kerr County, where more than 850 people were evacuated. Four deaths were also reported in Travis County, which includes Austin. Officials warned the death toll is likely to rise as search efforts continue.
Horrors continue to unfold.
But then there's this from The New York Times:
Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.
Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation.
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.
An "unusually abrupt escalation" of the storm combined with staffing shortages made this horror story a whole lot more horrible.
Let's set aside climate change as having anything to do with these floods:
Meteorologists said that an atmosphere warmed by human-caused climate change can hold more moisture and allow bad storms to dump more rain, though it’s hard to connect specific storms to a warming planet so soon after they occur.
“In a warming climate we know that the atmosphere has more moisture to give, to hold on to and then to release. But also the thing that we know about climate change is that our rain events are not as uniform as what they used to be,” said Shel Winkley, a meteorologist with Climate Central. “So, you’ll get these big rain events happening in localized areas, tapping into the historic level of moisture in the atmosphere.”
Because, of course, the science has been officially MAGA-denied by the MAGA-cult and the MAGA cult-leader, Donald J Trump.
But let's look further down the times story. To this:
The amount of rain that fell Friday morning was hard for the Weather Service to anticipate, with reports in some areas of 15 inches over just a few hours, according to Louis W. Uccellini, who was director of the National Weather Service from 2013 until 2022.
“It’s pretty hard to forecast for these kinds of rainfall rates,” Dr. Uccellini said. He said that climate change was making extreme rainfall events more frequent and severe, and that more research was needed so that the Weather Service could better forecast those events.
An equally important question, he added, was how the Weather Service was coordinating with local emergency managers to act on those warnings as they came in.
And this:
“You have to have a response mechanism that involves local officials,” Dr. Uccellini said. “It involves a relationship with the emergency management community, at every level.”
But that requires having staff members in those positions, he said.
And then this:
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.
Some of the openings may predate the current Trump administration. But at both offices, the vacancy rate is roughly double what it was when Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January, according to Mr. Fahy.
John Sokich, who until January was director of congressional affairs for the National Weather Service, said those unfilled positions made it harder to coordinate with local officials because each Weather Service office works as a team. “Reduced staffing puts that in jeopardy,” he said.
The storm was bad. It was going to be bad no matter who was in The White House. There's a distinct possibility that it was made worse by climate change - and the science investigating that has been denied by the current administration. There's also a more than distinct possibility that however bad the storm was, it's effects were made worse by the current administration's DOGE-style downsizing.
Hate to say it, but Texas is having the day it voted for.
I'm just surprised it happened so soon.
