The Texas Disaster Freezing Sacrifices At The Alter Of Wind And Solar Power
POSTED BY: JEWELSTAITEFAN
UPDATED: Sunday, September 14, 2025 08:00
VIEWED: 11410
PAGE 16 of 18
Texas flooding rescue effort takes grimmest turn yet as death toll soars past 100
https://x.com/Daily_MailUS/status/1942475584220618982
Ted Cruz: "To the best of my knowledge, there is zero evidence of anything related to anything like weather modification. Look, the internet can be a strange place. People can come up with all sorts of crazy theories."
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1942245577447616620
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Kerr County asked Texas to help pay for a flood warning system for 8 years. Can it happen now?
By Neena Satija, Keri Blakinger | July 8, 2025 4:09 p.m.
https://tinyurl.com/mpw8x579 (Houston Chronicle URL)
Nearly a decade before catastrophic flash flooding killed at least 94 people in Kerr County, including 30 children, several local officials were hard at work convincing their peers to buy into a new early flood warning system.
The once “state of the art” program installed along the Guadalupe River back in the 1980s was in desperate need of an upgrade, they argued. It wasn’t good enough for Kerr County, which sits at the heart of “flash flood alley,” a portion of the Texas Hill Country whose climate and terrain make it uniquely susceptible to sudden and catastrophic floods.
“I’m not trying to put a dollar on a life or a flood, but the fact of the matter [is] floods do happen, and we need to be prepared for them,” then-Kerr County Commissioner Bob Reeves noted during a series of public meetings that began in 2016. And, his former colleague Tom Moser pointed out, “We also have more summer camps than anybody else along the Guadalupe River.”
The wide-ranging discussions back then — captured in transcripts archived online — proved to be a chilling precursor to the disaster that unfolded early on July 4. That’s when a slow-moving, massive rainstorm caused the Guadalupe River to rise by 22 feet in just three hours, catching those living and camping on its banks off-guard in the middle of the night.
But the new warning system never became reality. Though local officials agreed to spend $50,000 on an engineering study, which made specific recommendations for such a project in 2016, they never secured the $1 million they estimated would be needed to implement it – despite asking for help from state officials at least three separate times.
“We never were successful in getting that funding, or putting the matching funding with it to do anything,” said Moser, who retired in 2021, in a phone interview. He said he hopes the county can “go back to the drawing board on this, and hopefully it’ll be a model that could be used all over the United States.”
In 2017, Kerr County and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority asked the state to give them federal disaster relief dollars, but their application was denied. They tried a second time after Hurricane Harvey, when more federal funds became available and Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged local entities to submit applications. They were rejected again.
Both applications would have been handled by the Texas Department of Emergency Management, whose spokesman, Wes Rapaport, said the agency could not immediately respond to specific questions because “we are in the middle of ongoing response operations.”
The governor’s office did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Abbott said in a news conference that flood response will be handled during the state’s upcoming legislative session, which starts on Monday, July 21.
The river authority, UGRA, also applied for state funding through the Texas Water Development Board. But the agency only agreed to chip in 5% of the estimated $1 million cost, according to documents from the river authority and the water board. The remaining price tag was too steep for Kerr County, whose annual budget in 2016 was about $30 million. UGRA has far fewer resources; last fall, the authority approved spending about $2.3 million.
“At that point we sort of dropped it,” said William Rector, president of the board of UGRA, which has supported the effort for years and paid for a portion of the 2016 study. Abbott appointed Rector to the board in 2016 and named him president two years ago.
In response to questions about why the river authority didn’t get more money to fund the project, the Texas Water Development Board said it was looking into the matter and would respond “as soon as possible.”
In an interview with Fox News on Monday afternoon, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the county should have had siren warning system
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Could have paid for it. Too busy giving that money to Democrat illegal invaders though.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Kerr County is run by Trumptards. Texas Trumptards are the stingiest and most selfish semi-humans in America. If each Trumptard had donated $10 for the flood warning system, those hundred people won't had died, but $10 is a million times more valuable to a Trumptard than saving a hundred from death.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Could have paid for it. Too busy giving that money to Democrat illegal invaders though.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Candidate
Donald Trump (R) 21,594 76.8%
Kamala Harris (D) 6,299 22.4%
Chase Oliver (LB) 161 0.6%
Jill Stein (GR) 65 0.2%
https://www.statesman.com/elections/results/2024-11-05/race/0/texas#ke
rr-county
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely (because Trumptards’ stinginess and stupidity killed those kids)
When it comes to disasters, accountability delayed is accountability denied
By Paul Krugman | Jul 10, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/should-we-politicize-the-texas-floo
d
Whenever natural disaster — like the flash flood that just killed large numbers of people, many of them children, in Texas — strikes, we can count on a quick response from officials, both federal and state, who arguably could or should have done something to avert or minimize the disaster. Namely, there will be self-righteous denunciations of anyone trying to assign responsibility: “Now is not the time to politicize this tragedy.”
In fact, now is exactly the time to put officials on the spot and ask how much responsibility they bear for the horror. Because the reality of America today is that if we don’t make an issue of how this happened within the next few days, nothing will be learned and nothing will change.
OK, you could make a case for putting off hard questions if you believed two things. First, you would have to believe that the relevant officials are well-intentioned and open-minded, that they will make a good faith effort to learn from the disaster. Second, you would have to believe that the news media will stay on the story, as opposed to quickly dropping it in favor of more pressing topics like Zohran Mandami’s college application.
And you might believe these two things if you’ve spent the past 40 years in suspended animation.
The reality is that the people now on the spot are right-wing hard-liners, who are the opposite of open-minded. Their mindset was perfectly captured by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who denounced efforts to politicize the disaster, then suggested that the problem may be that we have too many federal bureaucrats.
It also more or less goes without saying that there’s massive hypocrisy involved. Trump officials are reacting with rage to any suggestion that their policies may have contributed to the Texas disaster, but Trump was quick to make completely false attacks on the Biden administration’s responses to natural disasters on its watch.
So let me offer some suggestions about the lesson we should be learning from the Texas tragedy.
The specifics are still coming into focus. We know that thanks to payroll cuts, the National Weather Service was short-staffed. Its forecasting was fine, but the official in charge of “warning coordination” — basically, getting the message from the forecasts to the relevant local officials — had taken the DOGE buyout and hadn’t been replaced.
We also know that local officials had been told repeatedly over the years that the affected area needed a better warning system, including sirens, but refused to raise taxes to pay for it and were denied a grant from the state.
We’ll probably learn more about failures to prepare for floods in a river plain that was known to present major risks, and perhaps about the failures in officials’ real-time response. We may never know how many lives might have been saved if Elon Musk hadn’t taken his chainsaw to the National Weather Service or if local officials had been more responsible. But we don’t need specific numbers to understand that this kind of tragedy is only to be expected after politicians have spent decades denigrating government and degrading its effectiveness.
There was a crucial turning point in both attitudes toward government and the resources devoted to public goods — basically, goods we can’t expect the private sector to provide, like, say, weather prediction and flood protection — in 1980. That was when Ronald Reagan, who insisted that government is always the problem, never the solution, took office, and this attitude has been pervasive in U.S. politics ever since.
Overall government spending continued to rise despite political hostility, because federal civilian spending is dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the combination of an aging population with rising h
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Democrats Should Say Who’s Really to Blame for the Flooding in Texas
Republican lawmakers have Texan children’s blood on their hands. Democrats shouldn’t let anyone forget it.
In just 45 minutes, early Friday morning, intense rain caused sections of the Guadalupe River in Central Texas to rise by nearly 26 feet. Four months’ worth of rain dropped within hours. By late Monday afternoon, more than 100 people had been confirmed dead, including more than two dozen campers and counselors at a riverside Christian summer camp. As the search for victims and survivors continues, more heavy rain is expected this week.
When a tragedy of such proportions occurs, the temptation to point fingers is strong. Some Republican officials in Texas have found their scapegoat in the National Weather Service, which they’ve accused of failing to predict the storm’s full intensity. They’ve got the wrong guys; despite grappling with deep cuts imposed by the Trump administration, the NWS put out early and increasingly urgent warnings about the coming deluge. There’s plenty of blame to go around, though. Democrats, accordingly, should do a lot more than merely call for investigations into how White House attacks on the NWS might have hampered preparedness efforts. They should connect the dots, again and again, between Republican policy and its lethal consequences. Democrats should hammer Republicans not just for undermining Texas’s and America’s disaster preparedness and response infrastructure but for having spent decades blocking efforts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. GOP lawmakers have Texan children’s blood on their hands. The more say that the Republican Party has over governing a climate-changed world, the more people will die.
More at https://newrepublic.com/article/197662/democrats-should-say-who-really
-blame-flooding-texas
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely (because Trumptards’ stinginess and stupidity killed those kids)
And nobody is listening to any of you.
Awwwwwww...
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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102 people died in the Lahaina Hawaii fire. The governor is a Democrat, both Senators are Democrats and the mayor was a Democrat.
The Camp Fire in California burned more than 150,000 acres and killed 85 people. The governor was Democrat and Butte County leans Democrat.
Not to mention the recent and very expensive LA fire: Democrat "woke" mayor, Democrat governor (county supervisors are nonpartisan but LA voters are overwhelmingly Democrat).
The point is, lack of foresight is a non-partisan issue.
If the flood disaster are "Trumptard's" fault, the fires and deaths are "libtard's" fault.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
102 people died in the Lahaina Hawaii fire. The governor is a Democrat, both Senators are Democrats and the mayor was a Democrat.
The Camp Fire in California burned more than 150,000 acres and killed 85 people. The governor was Democrat and Butte County leans Democrat.
Not to mention the recent and very expensive LA fire: Democrat "woke" mayor, Democrat governor (county supervisors are nonpartisan but LA voters are overwhelmingly Democrat).
The point is, lack of foresight is a non-partisan issue.
If the flood disaster are "Trumptard's" fault, the fires and deaths are "libtard's" fault.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
Quote:6ix and Signym, you two have no idea that both of you are absolutely evil. And you will never understand why being evil is why your lives are full of well deserved drama, hardship and suffering. In glaring contrast, this is how good people react:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely (because Trumptards’ stinginess and stupidity killed those kids)
And nobody is listening to any of you.
Awwwwwww...
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Sirens alone won’t save us from floods. Texas needs a culture shift. | Editorial
By The Editorial Board, Opinions from the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board | July 11, 2025
https://tinyurl.com/mpcsmpza (Shortened URL from Houston Chronicle)
Is Texas cursed? Are we being punished?
Our state is so beset by drought, flood, fire, disease and violence, we can’t help but ask: Why us?
The stories coming from the Texas Hill Country after the July 4 floods shake us to our core.
Sisters who died with their hands locked together. A wife who perished trying to drive to safety but who made sure her husband escaped. Parents found dead, their two young sons missing. When last seen, the father was clinging to the boys as the Guadalupe River surged through the RV park where they were vacationing. Only their young daughter was found safe.
Rescue efforts are now focused on recovering bodies entangled in miles of downed trees and metal debris. The death toll has surpassed that of Hurricane Harvey. And still, it keeps rising.
What’s most difficult to process is that these deaths were largely preventable. If Texas is cursed, it is because over generations our leaders have not just abandoned us to tempests, but have enabled man-made catastrophes.
Biblical weather events are out of our control, but repeated and catastrophic loss of life is of our own making. We choose where to build. Whether to install warning systems. And how we respond to urgent alerts. Our politicians choose to ignore the same calls to action after each unprecedented flood, each devastating hurricane.
Yes, it’s true that other factors contributed to the lethality of the July 4 floods. It was a holiday weekend. The rains came in the middle of night. The rocky and steep hills unleashed a fast-moving wall of water.
And yet, no one had to die. Not children at camps. Not families in a RV. Not the couple attending their law school reunion. If these people had realized the floodwaters were coming, they’d have been somewhere else, somewhere safe.
This week editorial board writers asked what can be done to prevent the next tragedy like this one. A range of experts — forecasters, engineering professors, industry consultants — gave us the same message again and again: Technology alone will not save us. Texas needs a culture shift.
Local officials in the hardest hit areas, including Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, have said that no one predicted the speed and force of the floods. It is true that forecasters often cannot pinpoint where the heaviest
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
102 people died in the Lahaina Hawaii fire. The governor is a Democrat, both Senators are Democrats and the mayor was a Democrat.
The Camp Fire in California burned more than 150,000 acres and killed 85 people. The governor was Democrat and Butte County leans Democrat.
Not to mention the recent and very expensive LA fire: Democrat "woke" mayor, Democrat governor (county supervisors are nonpartisan but LA voters are overwhelmingly Democrat).
The point is, lack of foresight is a non-partisan issue.
If the flood disaster are "Trumptard's" fault, the fires and deaths are "libtard's" fault.
SECOND: 6ix and Signym, you two have no idea that both of you are absolutely evil. And you will never understand why being evil is why your lives are full of well deserved drama, hardship and suffering. In glaring contrast, this is how good people react:
Sirens alone won’t save us fromfloods.fire.TexasCalifornia needs a culture shift. | Editorial
By The Editorial Board, Opinions from the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board | July 11, 2025
https://tinyurl.com/mpcsmpza (Shortened URL from Houston Chronicle)
IsTexasCalifornia cursed? Are we being punished?
Our state is so beset by drought, flood, fire, disease and violence, DRUG ADDICTION AND HOMELESSNESS we can’t help but ask: Why us?
Just substitute California (or Hawaii) and fire and it's the same story.
Or New Orleans and floods.
Why build there?
Why only one evacuation route?
Why was door to door notification required? (Or in Hawaii's case, why no notification at all.)
Why was infrastructure not built to mitigate risk?
Every time a preventable disaster happens, there's A LOT of justified blame to go around. Many pointed questions to ask, and changes that SHOULD be made.
BUT THIS HAPPENS EVERYWHERE.
Blaming "Trumptards" doesn't really get to the heart of repeating disasters, and therefore doesn't point to a solution. It only shows that you have TDS.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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