Texas Flood Victims Deserve Better

National Tragedies Deserve Empathy Not Rage Bait

News of the horrific flood that swept across Central Texas reverberated through my social media this weekend. It came from friends from Texas sharing their stories about attending the camp, mothers imagining the horror of losing a child, and political influencers taking shots at Trump and the people who voted for him.

I want to talk about the latter, but before I get into it I think it’s important to try to parse through some of the information circulating online right now because there is a lot to digest and a lot of misinformation.

Reports indicate that over 100 have died as a result of the flooding including at least 27 young campers and counselors from Camp Mystic. This is one of the deadliest floods in the US in the last 100 years. Over the last decade, an average of 113 people are killed by floods each year, according to the National Weather Service.

Initially, social media was saying that there was no warning. This was not true. The first flood watch was issued by the local National Weather Service office at 1:18 pm Thursday. At 1:14 am on Friday the National Weather Service office in Austin/San Antonio issued a flash flood warning sufficient to trigger the FEMA Wireless Emergency Alert system. At 4:03 am, they issued an urgent warning that raised the potential of catastrophic damage and a severe threat to human life.

Trump has fired lots of people at the National Weather Service and two Texas positions were unfilled at the time, including a position held by a veteran warning coordination meteorologist in San Antonio who took an early retirement buyout in April. However, Houston-based meteorologist Matt Lanza told Axios “the warnings were "meteorologically sound and adequate," but they weren't received by people due to the timing of the storm and because that area didn't have an alert system.”

Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top elected official, said the county considered a flood warning system in the past that would have functioned like a tornado warning siren, but they didn’t pursue it becuase “[t]he public reeled at the cost.”

As reported by Kat Vargas, the Texas legislature recently took up and did not pass a bill “to improve Texas’ disaster response, including better alert systems, along with a grant program for counties to buy new emergency communication equipment and build new infrastructure like radio towers.” The state Rep. representing Kerrville, Wes Virdell, said he’s now reconsidering his vote against the bill.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has called on the inspector General of the Commerce Department to investigate whether staffing shortages at the National Weather Service contributed to loss of life. Texas Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro made a similar point during an interview on CNN, “When you have flash flooding, there’s a risk that you won’t have the personnel to make that — do that analysis, do the predictions in the best way,” he said.

Ted Cruz, who was on vacation in Greece during the floods, said “The fact that you have girls asleep in their cabins when the flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warning to get kids out of harm’s way.”

“There’s going to be a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking,” said far-right Republican Rep. Chip Roy, whose district includes Kerr County.

Trump is tentatively scheduled to travel to Texas on Friday, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. He’s not going earlier so as not to disrupt recovery efforts. Last year Trump accused President Joe Biden of “sleeping” at his beach house in Delaware instead of visiting the North Carolina hurricane victims. Like Trump now, Biden was not visiting so as to not disrupt recovery efforts.

Fox News posted exceptionally snide content about how grotesque it is that people would be talking about climate change during an extreme weather event. It was very reminiscent of right wing outrage about discussions of gun control after a mass shooting. The thing is, these conversations are integral to building the narrative that drives political action.

UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said on BlueSky, "[T]his kind of record-shattering rain (caused by slow-moving torrential thunderstorms) event is *precisely* that which is increasing the fastest in a warming climate.” He also noted “There's growing evidence not only that precipitation extremes will increase (in general) due to climate change--but also that the most intense, rarest, & most dangerous rain events will increase faster than more "moderate" extremes.”

There’s no way to untangle politics from these events. Politics is how we decide what problems to solve and how we’ll do it.

We’ve spent a lot of time discussion right wing influencers on EYP, but the growing progressive influencer ecosystem is duplicating some of their tactics, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. My friend Kat (aka HowdyPolitics) called out Meidas Touch writer Ron Filipkowski this weekend in a conversation that ended up going viral. Ron implied that the people killed and injured in this horrible flood deserved it because they voted for Trump.

This is the kind of outrage-bait, click-worthy content that Meidas makes. And the thing is, it works. This kind of content does really well online in an environment that rewards contrast framing.

There’s nothing wrong with anger. But there’s a difference between anger that fuels action and anger that feeds the algorithm.

Right now we owe these families the time and space to grieve. First responders are still engaged in recovery effots. But we also can’t ignore the fact that these stories don’t exist in a vacuum. In the attention economy, tragedy draws eyeballs. And in politics, eyeballs mean power. That’s why we need to be intentional about how we engage. The way we talk about these moments will shape what happens next. The stakes aren’t just emotional. They’re political too.

The Texas Tribune has a page on how to help, find that here. Kat recommends following Ryan Chandler for on the ground reporting. Find Kat at HowdyPolitics.