Friday, July 11, 2025

Kerr County Texas flooding: It appears that Coach Abbott and his bumbling sidekicks fumbled the ball

 
Headline and subhead:  New York Times, 7/10/2025

Christopher Flavelle, J. David Goodman, and Andrea Fuller report: 
The New York Times identified at least three occasions between 2017 and 2024 when local officials sought funding for a flood warning system but were rebuffed by the state. Those failed applications came even as the federal government made billions of additional dollars available for disaster-reduction projects — including $1.9 billion that has flowed to Texas over the past decade to be spent at the discretion of state officials, according to a Times analysis.

“Every football team makes mistakes.  The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who is to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say ‘Don’t worry about it, man. We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again and then we’re going to win this game. The way winners talk is not to point fingers. They talk about solutions.” 
The lede to the Times story illustrates why Coach Abbott is so tetchy.
The warning last fall was, in retrospect, achingly prescient. 
“It is likely” that Kerr County “will experience a flood event in the next year,” city and county officials concluded in a report for the Federal Emergency Management Agency released last October. Such floods, they added, could pose a particular danger to people in “substandard structures” and result in “increased damage, injuries, or loss of life.”

In fact, the solution had been proposed for years.  Coach Abbott and his team ignored it.


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