On July 3, all three generations of my family—including all four grandchildren—started the long Independence Day weekend with a perfect way to celebrate America’s birthday. We joined 2,000 fans at Sinsheimer Stadium to cheer on the San Luis Blues as they defeated the Arroyo Seco Saints.
This, however, would be a July 4 that will “live in infamy.” That morning, Texas was reeling from a torrential flood in the Hill Country northwest of Austin. Up to 15 inches of rain poured down on the drought-baked soil; one estimate put the figure at 20 inches. In less than an hour, the Guadalupe River surged almost 30 feet over its banks, wiping out campgrounds, mobile home parks, and a series of popular summer camps. More than 150 people are still missing and more than 110 people have died, including dozens of girls from Camp Mystic, most of them 8 to 9 years old.
The Camp Mystic victims included the twin granddaughters of the former publisher of the Miami Herald, David Lawrence Jr. Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt lost a 9-year-old girl from his extended family. As a grandfather, I can imagine the immense grief enveloping these families.
In 1985, Texas introduced its anti-littering campaign “Don’t Mess With Texas” starring Stevie Ray Vaughan—a slogan still in use 40 years later with a Texas-sized marketing success.
The flash-flood warnings issued by the beleaguered and short-staffed National Weather Service (NWS) weren’t so successful. Rosie O’Donnell might have said it best in a TikTok video posted that Sunday: “What a horror story in Texas. When the president guts all the early warning systems and the weather forecast abilities of the government, these are the results. … He’s put this country in so much danger.”
The survivors of this devastating tragedy are asking a lot of questions: Why weren’t they warned to evacuate the riversides before the flood? Who dropped the ball? In short, who’s been “messing with Texas”?
State and local officials clearly messed up; their emergency planning and preparedness systems were an abject failure. They can’t explain why they failed to convey NWS flash-flooding alerts, nor to evacuate people along the constrained course of that river, a region known for a long history of flash flooding. They’re scrambling to justify a 2016 decision to reject installing a “more robust” warning system, citing the cost and an aversion to the sound of sirens.
Federal officials share plenty of blame, too: The Trump administration and the GOP Congress have been systematically kneecapping key federal agencies responsible for preparing for and responding to such catastrophes. Their impunity is nothing short of staggering:
• On the same day that heroic rescue crews were plucking survivors from trees and rooftops along the Guadalupe River, the president ceremonially signed into law his “big, beautiful” budget bill that slashes 30 percent of funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the NWS. (He failed even to mention the unfolding Texas tragedy).
• As usual, U.S. Sen. Ted “Cancun” Cruz of Texas was elsewhere, visiting Greece, as the deadly flooding slammed Kerr County.
• The GOP congressman who represents the flood zone, Chip Roy, said simply, “I can’t say enough about the local officials’ response to this disaster, … extraordinary job.”
The facts, however, reveal enormous gaps at all levels in the government’s response to this tragedy. There’s been a massive exodus of more than 600 experienced staff from the NWS, including a key Texas meteorologist with responsibility for coordinating with local officials to disseminate severe weather alerts. The agency has cut back 20 percent of high-altitude weather balloon launches, crippling its ability to monitor threats such as the storm in Texas last weekend.
The entire Federal Emergency Management Agency is on the chopping block in Congress; it has already lost 20 percent of its permanent staff. FEMA can’t simply replace them nor hire new talent due to hiring freezes. Contracts for essential services in evacuation and flood response have expired. For months, FEMA closed emergency preparedness training on mass casualty response, hazardous materials, and catastrophic natural disasters.
San Luis Obispo County is no less vulnerable to extreme weather events driven by climate change, but we are better prepared. We’ve got a state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center here, ready 24/7 to direct our response to natural or human-caused disasters. Because we host a nuclear power plant, we have a siren system that can alert most of our population in SLO, South County, and the North Coast to imminent danger. That’s the same type of system that local officials in Texas’ Kerr County refused to fund as recently as 2023.
All too often, Texans brag about their state’s low taxes and anti-government ethic—but it’s also the state with the highest death rate from natural disasters. Among all 50 states, Texas ranks 31st in life expectancy (75.4 years); California comes in at No. 10 (78.3).
Dozens of young girls in Texas won’t make it even to age 10. Their families should know that we’re grieving their loss right alongside them. We can all do better in planning for the next natural disaster: It can happen anywhere and anytime. Even here. Δ
John Ashbaugh tries to be prepared for any disaster, including a presidential election. Send a response for publication to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jul 10-20, 2025.
It’s a tragedy those lives were lost in the flooding in Texas, however, national weather service or not, it takes two seconds to pull up a plethora of radar readings and satellite data clearly showing inclement weather. The weather system didn’t just go dark, sir. Try as you might, you can’t blame this all on Trump. For weather, I like using the http://windy.com site. This tragedy was a result of poor planning and geography.
From Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” July 10:
On July 4, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) for the disaster, but reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m., and 6:06 a.m.
But four hours passed before the police department in the City of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn’t until 7:32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the weather service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the “Department of Government Efficiency” and has not been replaced.
Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending by requiring her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn’t put crews in place ahead of the storm, or respond immediately. Noem didn’t sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Cohen and Williams that Noem did not authorize FEMA deployment because DHS used other search and rescue teams. “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”
“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens,” McLaughlin said. Noem has called for the elimination of FEMA.
Meanwhile, FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been nowhere to be found, making no public appearances, statements, or postings on social media since the disaster, and not visiting the site. Former FEMA officials told Thomas Frank of Politico that Richardson’s absence suggests Noem is controlling the FEMA response. Trump appointed Richardson after his team fired his first appointee, Cameron Hamilton, for telling Congress he did not think FEMA should be scrapped.
The day after he took office in May, Richardson, who has no experience with emergency management, told staff: “Don’t get in my way…because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president’s intent…. I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA,” he said.
Even as rescuers were still at work today in Texas, DHS cancelled a $3 million grant that had been awarded in New York to make sure the NWS can communicate effectively with local officials.
John A:
If states want better meteorology, they can fund it themselves. Ever heard of federalism or state sovereignty? This applies to all the other federally funded programs. Again, I look at windy.com every day, I can tell you this, I could see Texas plain as day prior to and during the flooding. It wasn’t some mystery. We are so conditioned to rely on the federal government so much that whenever there is a problem, they’re the first one people like you blame. You give Trump way too much credit, lol. He doesn’t control the weather hahaha. Perhaps if you are so concerned about a federal agency, you can just return your social security check to them for their budget. How can you on one hand, disparage the federal government, but on the other hand received benefits from it? What’s it going to be?
Our country might devolve into civil war. Our economy is collapsing and money that should be used for the social spending that holds many of us together is being withdrawn so the rich can at least loot one last dime before it all blows up. The lines are be being drawn. Unlike your side, I stand with actual Americans and American values. The only question that remains is whose side will you stand on when the balloon goes up.
Trump has been in office for 6 months. Nothing he has done has impacted the warning systems. None of the budget for this has been affected as the Federal and the state budgets were done before he took office. Even stopping funding on inauguration day would not have stopped having the systems in place prior to July 3.
Tony:
Exactly.