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In the early hours of July 4, the Guadalupe River flooded. Heavy rainfall, enhanced by atmospheric moisture leftover from a recent tropical storm, dumped water across parts of central Texas. By 6:10 a.m., a gauge in Hunt, a community in Kerr County, measured that the river had become a 37.52-foot wall of water, flowing at a rate far exceeding the average flow over Niagara Falls. A swollen Guadalupe washed away houses and highways, and yanked up trees by the root. The death toll has ticked upward each day since: The latest estimate—roughly 111 people, but likely more—includes at least 30 children.
It didn’t take long for the finger-pointing to begin. While search-and-rescue operations were getting under way (at least 161 people remain missing in Kerr County alone), false claims circulated on social media that Texans received no warnings about the impending flash flood. Some state officials suggested that the National Weather Service—a federal agency responsible for issuing weather-related warnings—hadn’t accurately forecast the severity of the rain. Experts questioned whether the Trump administration’s staffing cuts to the NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had affected emergency response. The speculation prompted the weather service to release a timeline of their flood alerts. Congressional Democrats are demanding an inquiry into whether NWS staffing shortages have affected the death toll, and President Donald Trump took a swipe at Joe Biden for setting up “that water situation,” before conceding that he couldn’t blame Biden, either: “This is a hundred-year catastrophe.”
After a tragedy of this scale, one human impulse is to try to extract answers from the onslaught of collective grief. Another impulse can soon follow: the desire to assign blame. But that comes at the risk of oversimplification. “A common refrain in the emergency management and disaster community is that a disaster is rarely the result of one failure or event,” Alan Gerard, a retired NOAA official, recently wrote on his Substack. It’s more often the result of a confluence of events ungovernable by one person or one decision.
Another name for the Guadalupe River and the surrounding area is “Flash Flood Alley.” The region’s steep terrain, rocky soil, and high levels of rainfall make the river especially prone to high-water runoff. In Texas Hill Country, through which the river runs, some residents are inundated with flash-flood warnings during rainy seasons. These warnings come frequently but usually do not materialize into a visible threat. Flash floods are among the most difficult weather events to forecast, in part because current technology doesn’t allow us to determine where a storm will hit with exact precision and ample lead time. Cellphone reception in the area can also be spotty, meaning that the loud phone notifications for flash flooding may not come through for everyone.
The NWS had communicated the threat of moderate to heavy rainfall two days before July 4. Despite claims that the agency’s local offices were understaffed, the New Braunfels office—which is responsible for some of the areas hit by the flood—reportedly had five forecasters working during the storms. On clear days, they usually would have two. (New York Times reporting did find, however, that the Trump administration’s cuts left vacant a role for a warning-coordination meteorologist, who would have worked with local officials to plan a response.) Meteorologists reviewing the NWS’s alerts have repeatedly affirmed the agency’s timeliness. Some factors the agency’s forecasters couldn’t predict: how late in the night the river’s threat would become imminent, and how fast and hard the rain would fall.
Most of the deaths, including at least 27 children and counselors from Camp Mystic, an all-girls summer camp, occurred in Kerr County. The area is no stranger to the Guadalupe’s surges. On July 1 and 2, 1932, heavy rains bloated the river; its waters crested at 36.6 feet and killed seven people. Flash floods swept away summer-camp cabins that had lined the river banks, including Camp Mystic’s, but didn’t kill any campers, in large part because the river rose during the daytime, giving them notice to evacuate. On July 17, 1987, 11 inches of rainfall near the Guadalupe’s headwaters produced another flash flood; this time, the river engulfed a bus and van that were evacuating the Pot O’ Gold camp, killing 10 teenagers.
After the 1987 flood, some alarms were installed along the Guadalupe to monitor the river. But in 2017, Kerr County officials dismissed a proposal to install a flood-warning system, citing the high cost after the county’s bid for a $1 million grant was rejected. Earlier this year, Texas state lawmakers voted no on a bill that would have established a council responsible for an emergency-response plan and a grant program for emergency-communication infrastructure. The bill would have gone into effect on September 1, and the initial cost was estimated at $500 million, a factor that many lawmakers pointed to when declining the measure.
Nonpartisan support for weather services is souring. Natural disasters and extreme weather have lately fueled conspiracy theories from government officials: Responding to Hurricane Helene’s path through majority-red areas last year, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene ominously said that “they can control the weather.” These events are also treated as a way to get a leg up on political opponents, a tactic fine-tuned by Trump himself, who visited Helene-ravaged Georgia ahead of Election Day and falsely claimed that the state’s governor hadn’t been able to reach Biden, because he was “sleeping.”
The specter of Trump has loomed over social-media discourse and Democrats’ talking points this week. He is pushing to eliminate FEMA, which distributes disaster-relief funding, meaning that states might have to spend more on disaster response than they do on preparedness. His plan for NOAA involves lopping off about 27 percent of its budget for the next fiscal year and eliminating federal research centers that study the weather, oceans, and climate. But that budget has yet to be approved by Congress, and so far, this year’s NWS cuts don’t appear to be a dominant reason behind the flash flood’s high death toll (though this assessment is subject to change as more information about the flood is revealed).
In the meantime, the blame game is a distraction. Alan Gerard, the retired NOAA official and meteorologist, told me that he is concerned that such squabbling will turn policy makers’ attention away from the real challenge: “How do you prevent this from happening again?” The president’s 2026 proposal for NOAA’s budget opens the possibility of commercializing America’s weather services, an idea ripped straight from the Project 2025 playbook. Critics warn that this could result in private companies creating a pay-to-play system for states that need access to crucial warnings and safety infrastructure. Corporations would reap little financial benefit from investing in the poorest rural areas of America, places highly susceptible to weather-related calamities.
People tend to bank on hope as protection against natural disasters, which works until it doesn’t, Gerard said. In other words, we keep playing a game of chance with forces indifferent to us—until we are finally reminded of the cost of losing.
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What’s Brilliant About the New Superman Movie
By David Sims
In most Superman movies (and there’ve been a fair few of them over the decades), no one else like Superman exists. The blue-and-red-costumed Kryptonian is typically unique in our world—an alien god plopped into an unfamiliar society, inspiring both reverence and fear. Not so in this latest iteration, the character’s first solo movie in 12 years. Directed by James Gunn, the new Superman both reintroduces the character and relaunches the on-screen DC Universe, following Zack Snyder’s grim and operatic take on the franchise. Gunn’s bright and bouncy film conceives of the hero as just one of Earth’s many gifted do-gooders. The busy energy this storytelling choice brings to the movie is crucial: Surrounding Superman with his peers helps define why he stands out in the first place.
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