God Bless those poor Souls in Texas ,

[David - WI]

David all they had to do is climb the hill at Mystic, no need to drive anywhere just walk a few hundred feet in most cases,

It looks like 1,000+ feet (horizontal) to any sort of "hill" on Google maps; but it really depends how deep & fast the water was by the time they rounded everybody up. "Knee deep" on a 7 year-old isn't very deep.

A strong current (greater than walking pace) in ankle deep water may be acceptable, but the same current at waist depth will be too dangerous. A depth above knee height of the shortest member is dangerous in anything other than a gentle current.

[Greg G]

Because it happened at night and everyone was asleep they would never have been able to climb up that hill in time. We went through a tiny version of this when Sandy hit and it was an eye opener. I still can't wrap my head around how fast the water rise was in Texas. By the time you woke out of your sleep it was probably already waste high.

[David - WI]

Yeah, it wasn't a camp full of Navy SEALS. Try to round up a bunch of sleepy little kids in an emergency. The whole thing is heartbreaking.

[CUDA]

When a reporter demanded to know why the summer camps along the Guadalupe River weren’t evacuated before its waters reached their deadly peak on July 4, Rob Kelly, the highest-ranking local official, had a simple answer: “No one knew this kind of flood was coming.”

Why not? Kerr County, Texas, had lots of history to go on — as Kelly went on to explain: “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.” The National Weather Service had even brought in extra staff that night. Most important, the service had issued three increasingly dire warnings early that morning — at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m. and 6:06 a.m.

What Kelly didn’t mention, but which has since become well known, is that the Weather Service employee whose job it was to make sure those warnings got traction — Paul Yura, the long-serving meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination” — had recently taken an unplanned early retirement amid cuts pushed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was not replaced.

To a Washington bean counter, his loss might have looked like one tiny but welcome subtraction in a giant spreadsheet, but not in a region so prone to these perilous events that it’s known as Flash Flood Alley. Hundreds of kids at summer camps slept in cabins along the river. The plan was for folks at the upstream camps to send word to the downstream camps if floodwaters got scary. But if even the highest official in the county wasn’t on high alert, how were the camp counselors supposed to understand the danger — or, in an area without reliable cellphone coverage, to act on it?

Few would dispute that the federal bureaucracy was, and still is, in need of reform. But instead of a targeted, smart and strategic intervention, DOGE brought a chain saw to vital government services, pushing large, indiscriminate cuts with little consideration for the expertise that longtime employees offered or the importance of the functions they performed. It’s not hard to understand why many experienced civil servants like Yura, especially those with private sector options, would leave under these conditions. In fact it’s remarkable any of them stayed. And of course what happened at the National Weather Service happened across a wide array of federal agencies.
.
Not all of the damage will be this obvious, at least not at first. Much of it will be a matter of death by a thousand cuts — systems and structures weakening and not being repaired, important but less visible jobs going undone, services that we all took for granted slowing down and even sputtering to a halt.

Disaster preparedness is among the trickiest public services. Natural disasters happen regularly and everywhere, but they don’t happen predictably, which means being ready for them requires extra precautions: It requires a lot of people on duty even when nothing is going wrong, to ensure they will be able to act when something inevitably does. It requires expensive infrastructure that does fairly little during normal times. That makes it a very good indicator of state capacity and wisdom. Will leaders have the foresight to prepare for outcomes that may not be at the top of voters’ minds? Or will preparedness fall victim to the political theater of cutting anything that can be portrayed as extravagant or redundant?

Redundancy isn’t always the same as waste. That’s a lesson that Sahil Lavingia, a young digital creator, learned during his work with DOGE. He expected that as the government cleared out deadwood employees, he’d write the software to do their jobs more efficiently. To his surprise, Lavingia found himself surrounded by people who “love their jobs” and were motivated by a sense of mission.

“I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook — these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing,” he told NPR. “And so I think, generally, I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was.” (After speaking with a reporter, he was promptly fired — another government employee heading to the private sector, I guess.)

[Greg G]

The lack of staff, never mind lack of staff with "local knowledge" (no different than waters we boat in) was NO DOUBT a deathly contributor.

[XstreamVking]

You would think that the LOCAL weather forecasters on the TV would have the knowledge to warn people that a significant rain event was coming and gave a warning. Especially with the known history of this area. Here in FLA they are about 1-2 days ahead of any big rain event coming our way and give a notice for flood prone areas. Seems like a failure by the "ones in the know" to forecast this, and was obviously a major contributing factor to this calamity. No federal cuts should be blamed in this disaster IMO.

[Greg G]

I agree to a degree Stream. Having been out in the open ocean and having **** stir up out of nowhere when NOAA had been calling for a small event, not sure 11 o'clock news types would have realized the intensity and more surreal the speed. No doubt those TV station films will be looked at again and again by grieving family members as the tragedy claims even more souls in the days to come.

I'm still looking for someone to explain to me how THAT MUCH water hits that FAST

[XstreamVking]

There's a site called monkey worx. He's an aircraft monitor kind of guy. What planes, where they go, kind of thing. He displayed a couple of weeks ago that a series of cloud seeding flights had been running in that area preceding the event. Now most will call this a conspiriacy kind of thing, but watching him for years he has been proven to be a good predictor of events involving aircraft travel routes, activities, and destinations. I have mentioned geo warfare, and weather manipulation in the past and been ridiculed for it. IDC Look for yourself and decide.

[rock]

I also heard they were seeding. So many innocent lives lost is heart breaking. Praying for the families.

Rock

[David - WI]

So far "cloud seeding" hasn't been very effective.
Apparently there were two separate weather systems full of moisture that basically "stalled out" over that part of Texas. If you "seed" saturated clouds that were about to release a massive downpour anyway... did the cloud seeding work?

Experts told CBS News that cloud seeding, a process that involves dispersing substances like silver iodide into clouds to encourage rainfall, is not powerful enough to have caused or contributed to the flooding. The deluge resulted from heavy rainfall when storms converged with the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry.

[CUDA]

There's a site called monkey worx. He's an aircraft monitor kind of guy. What planes, where they go, kind of thing. He displayed a couple of weeks ago that a series of cloud seeding flights had been running in that area preceding the event. Now most will call this a conspiriacy kind of thing, but watching him for years he has been proven to be a good predictor of events involving aircraft travel routes, activities, and destinations. I have mentioned geo warfare, and weather manipulation in the past and been ridiculed for it. IDC Look for yourself and decide.

Xstream is the head of conspiracy theories
yes it's spelled conspiracy


https://apnews.com/article/fact-chec...4c57008ed2db44

As authorities search for victims of the flash floods in Texas that killed more than 100 people over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, social media users are spreading false claims that the devastation was caused by weather modification.

Many pointed to one process in particular, blaming cloud seeding performed on July 2 by a California-based company for the tragedy.

But officials say there is no evidence that the floods are the result of cloud seeding and experts agree that cloud seeding would not result in precipitation of this magnitude.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: A July 2 cloud seeding operation by Rainmaker Technology Corporation caused flash floods in the Texas Hill Country over the Fourth of July holiday weekend.

THE FACTS: This is false. It is not possible that cloud seeding generated the floods, according to experts, as the process can only produce limited precipitation using clouds that already exist. Forecasts predicted rain for that weekend prior to July 2 in an area that was already prone to flooding.

“The claim that cloud seeding played a role in this tragic event is complete nonsense,” said Andrew Dessler, director of Texas A&M University’s Texas Center for Extreme Weather.

[XstreamVking]

Yeah, we all know how much we can trust the "experts". Remember the experts spouting bs during the wu-flu?

[XstreamVking]

Oh no, he spell checked me! I will never recover from this insult from the copy/paste parrot..... I knew you would come along and fill us all in on the official version. This is why you have no friends bud... Yer a dik.

[David - WI]

Yeah, we all know how much we can trust the "experts". Remember the experts spouting bs during the wu-flu?

Honestly, cloud seeding has failed to produce any significant rain in 80 years of trying... If anybody came up with a successful process it would have been international headline news.

Mostly it's the same fringe lunatics who think aircraft contrails are "ChemTrails"... Ignoring the fact that nearly all commercial jets switched to more efficient "high bypass ratio" engines that condense a lot more water vapor into the exhaust stream.

If you look hard enough you can find a conspiracy theory to explain everything.

Suppose an event has two possible explanations. Occam's razor says that the explanation with the fewest assumptions is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that, the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation.

[XstreamVking]

OK, if you say so.... But why are there still big co's that do it? I know, I know, it's all a silly consphereicy.....