July 11, 2025 • 19 mins
On today’s Big Take podcast, we examine what the disaster in Kerr County, Texas reveals about the growing risk of flooding across the country as the climate changes — and the difficult economic choices facing communities grappling with these new risks.
Read more: No Alerts Heard in Deadly Texas Flash Flood as 161 Still Missing
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I was out in Kerrville in Kerr County.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
That's our reporter Kara Carlson, who's based in Texas. She's
been speaking with people who survived the flooding in Texas
on July fourth, and one story in particular has stayed
with her.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I have this thing.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
About watching storms interactive maps.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
It really struck me. She was actually up, you know,
watching the storm, watching a lot of the alerts and
was still really caught off guard in a lot of ways.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
I was really watching where the lightning was striking because
it was intense.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It was scary.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
It was like.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Really close. So I went outside and I noticed the
water in the driveway was like out of foot high,
and I thought, Oh, that's weird.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You'd seen that before.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Rina Bailey lives in Hunt, a small community by the
side of the Guadalupe River in Texas's Hill Country. She
lives in a house that was built in nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
It's better floods many other floods.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Hunt is mostly a rural area with hills and farmland
and wineries, a place Kara says many Texans visit as
a summer getaway.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
That's a little bit of climate in the summer than
a lot of other areas in Texas. It's kind of
an idyllic area on the river generally.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
But some of the things that make this part of
Hill Country so idyllic also make it risky. They call
this area of Texas Flash flood Alley because the steep terrain,
shallow soil, and intense storms make it exceptionally prone to
flash floods.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I think what most people are thinking of when they
hear flash flooding is maybe stay off the roads, you know,
stay out of certain areas. They aren't necessarily expecting it
to come to them.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Rena was used to floods, but she was shocked to
see the floodwater in her driveway in the early morning
hours of July fourth. And then the water kept rising.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
All of a sudden, it jumped up, and I saw
the Hunt stores and heard the start to de centigrade.
I saw the post office start to dicentigrade, the office
next to it, and then.
Speaker 5 (02:19):
This wall of bar.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
She saw the water sweep their truck away. Her husband
was still asleep and woken up, and my.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Knees saw it. It was coming up the steps like
there it was, and he said.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
You have to get out of here.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Rina wears a back race and she says she sometimes
has trouble walking, so her husband helped her out through
a window and across their yard towards a narrow gap
in the fence.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
There's a seven.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
Foot concrete wall and there's a metal fence a gap
that line.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
That gap had and liten there with The.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Official death toll has risen to over one hundred people,
including dozens of children, most of whom were at Camp Mystic.
Over one hundred people from Kerr County are still missing.
The Baileys made it to higher ground. They climbed the
hill behind their house and headed for a log cabin
on their property where they could take shelter and wait
(03:22):
out the storm. In the wake of the floods, dozens
of stories like Rena's are emerging, stories of families barely
managing to evade danger, who were woken up in the
middle of the night by thunder, or by their dogs barking,
or by their neighbors, but not by an official warning system.
These accounts are raising questions about why Kerr County residents
(03:44):
were caught so off guard and what, if anything, could
have been done to save more lives.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Should there have been a slightly different alert, Should the
campgrounds maybe have been evacuated sooner? You know, there's a
lot of unanswered questions that are still being looked.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Into, questions that have repercussions far beyond Kirk County as
storms become more intense, more deadly, and more frequent due
to climate change. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the
big take from Bloomberg News today on the show What
the Floods in Texas reveal about the growing risk of
(04:17):
flash floods as the climate changes, and the difficult economic
choices facing communities that are grappling with these new risks.
Speaker 6 (04:27):
Flooding is the most expensive natural disaster we face.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Joshua Sachs is the director of the Adaptation program at
the Georgetown Climate Center.
Speaker 6 (04:37):
And it can destroy communities. It not only impacts loss
of life, but someone's home traditionally is their majority of
their wealth.
Speaker 7 (04:48):
As we have warmer temperatures, the atmosphere can hold more water,
more moisture, and so then when you have these storms,
they are able to dump more rain.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Zara here g covers climate for Bloomberg and there's a
lot of time thinking about how our understanding of risk
is currently evolving in a warming world.
Speaker 7 (05:06):
So Texas is actually a state that has a ton
of resources. It has one of the best emergency response
kind of offices and teams and capabilities in the country.
Most states are not like Texas.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Zara says, Texas is the gold standard when it comes
to its emergency response capabilities, but it also faces a
wide variety of disaster risks, from hurricanes to extreme heat,
and even if it has a lot of money to
spend on disaster response, it faces difficult choices about how
to spend it, and on the ground, localities face their
(05:39):
own budgetary trade offs. We know, for example, that Kirk
County considered installing a warning system that could have involved
sirens in high risk areas, but it didn't.
Speaker 7 (05:50):
We have heard from officials in Texas that one of
the reasons why they had not built a flood detection
warning system in this area, saying care ca where some
of the worst fooding was, is because of the cost.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
Right.
Speaker 7 (06:04):
So it was Care County Judge Rob Kelly who told
The New York Times that local residents whose taxes wound
up to fund such a system bocked at it.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
How much does it cost to develop a really effective
early warning system for these emergencies.
Speaker 7 (06:21):
I think it depends on the community and the type
of warning and the type of area that you're trying
to cover. But obviously it's an expense, and every local
government and state government has a lot of things on
their plate, and I'll say mitigation often falls to the
bottom of that.
Speaker 6 (06:39):
There are traditionally federal grant programs that communities or individuals can.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Apply for Joshua sax Agon, like.
Speaker 6 (06:46):
Putting their homes higher up or elevating their homes, or
elevating air conditioners, water heaters, things like that. Sometimes there
are state grants, but for the most part, people and
community are having to ask the government for money, and
there isn't nearly enough money to go around to solve
all the problems we're.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Facing, Zara says. At this point, federal government funding has
become more and more integral to emergency management efforts.
Speaker 7 (07:14):
And it really speaks to what's at stake if the
Trump administration kind of pulls back on this funding. Earlier
this year, there are a couple of times when the
Trump administration paused a huge number of federal grants specifically FEMA,
and these are grants that are tied to this mitigation,
this resiliency, this prep.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
All of this worsening storms. The challenges and costs of
investing in better infrastructure has also made the predictive data
we get from the National Weather Service even more critical.
The service is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
They're the ones that track environmental disasters and put out
weather advisories and warnings.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
NOAH has our responsibility, especially through the National Weather Service,
to put out a series of, one would say, progressively
more action oriented messages.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Rick Spinrad served as the head of NOAH until January
of this year. He says those action oriented messages include
the watches and warnings you get on your phone or
in weather apps. A floodwatch did go out for Kerrville
for the Guadalupe River at one eighteen pm local time
on July third, and a flash flood warning signaling that
(08:30):
the hazardous weather event is imminent or already happening went
out about twelve hours later. It was tagged considerable, meaning
it automatically triggered wireless emergency alerts on mobile devices.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
That particular warning included phrases that this was going to
be a considerable and catastrophic event. That is the queue
to emergency managers to start getting people to evacuate, to
start preposition materials and personnel and equipment needed to protect
(09:05):
people from the event. The most perfect forecast is only
as good as how it is implemented by the ones
who need to use it.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
To make sure these forecasts reach the local officials in
charge of making public safety decisions, there are warning coordination
Meteorologists or wcns.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
At WCN doesn't wait for the phone to ring, but
actually gets out there and begins the discussion and ensures
that all of the sheriff's offices and rescue companies and
emergency managers are online with him or her. They know
the nature of the alert that went out, and they
are there to tell them what they think is going
(09:48):
to happen with respect to the river levels increased precipitation.
When that kind of thing, it's.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Too early to know exactly what might have made a
difference for the flood victims. There are still questions about
how local officials responded, and reporting is ongoing, but there
was no WCM in the forecast office for the area
that flooded. He left his position in April. He took
an early retirement offered by the Trump administration as it
(10:14):
moved to cut Noah's staff and its budget.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
It's disturbing to know that in the San Antonio Austin WFO,
the WCM position is vacant because that person left the
agency as a result of the cuts, and I would
say coerced retirements that the administration put on the Weather Service.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
The legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization,
Tom Faye, told NBC News that while the San Antonio
Weather Forecasting Office did have vacancies in two of its
top positions, it was down a WCM and a permanent
science officer. The offices in the area had quote adequate
staffing and resources to respond to this event.
Speaker 7 (11:00):
Happened in Texas. Is that happened in the middle of
the night, and it happened in an area that doesn't
have great or extensive cell coverage.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
My colleague Zara Kirgee.
Speaker 7 (11:09):
Again, so even if warnings had gone out and alert
had gone out to people's phones, maybe they didn't get
it and they didn't hear it. And you can imagine
if there was a siren that went off. That is
something that someone who is camping would have noticed, verses
a buzz on their phone if that buzz ever happened.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
At a press conference on Tuesday, four days after the disaster,
as rescue and recovery efforts were underway, Governor Greg Abbott
wasn't inclined to discuss what, if anything, he believes went
wrong in preparing Kirk County for this flood.
Speaker 8 (11:44):
Who's to blame?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Know this?
Speaker 8 (11:47):
That's the word choice of losers. Let me explain one
thing about Texas, and that is Texas. Every sport entered
our state cares about football. It could be a hunt Texas, Huntsville, Texas, Houston, Texas,
any size community, they care about football and know this.
Every football team makes mistakes. The losing teams are the
(12:11):
ones that try to point out who's to blame. The
championship teams are the ones to say, don't worry about it, man,
we got this. We're going to make sure that we
go score again, that we're going to win this game.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Texas officials say. The state legislature is planning a special
session later this month to discuss flood warning systems, flood
emergency communications, and natural disaster preparedness. They'll also consider relief
funding for the Hill country. So what communities are most
vulnerable to flooding in the US and what can they
(12:43):
do to protect themselves that's after the break. One of
the main tools that communities in the US have to
understand their flood risk are maps made by FEMA, the
Federal Emergency Management Agency. In twenty nineteen, FEMA estimated that
(13:05):
over eight million properties are at risk for severe flooding
from what's known as a once and one hundred flooding event.
My colleagues Area here Ge says those maps are used
for everything from emergency planning to calculating flood insurance premiums
for millions of people all across the country, but calculating
the true level of risk out there is complicated.
Speaker 7 (13:27):
One of the things that's changing with klindate change is
places that haven't even flooded historically, like places in Kentucky,
have experienced flooding that they never even thought was possible,
And so you know, you're having more places effectively become
like Carre County.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Updating these maps to match our evolving climate is possible,
but it takes investment in technology and research. Some private
companies like First Treet, which does climate risk financial modeling,
have more up to date flood maps. In twenty twenty,
First Street released a report identifying nearly six million additional
properties nationwide that we're at the level of risk that
(14:04):
FEMA considers severe, a total of fourteen point six million.
Speaker 6 (14:10):
It is rarely a surprise when a flood hits a place.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
That's Joshua Sachs from the Georgetown Climate Center.
Speaker 6 (14:16):
Again, the issue is simply, when are we going to
start as a country to act on these things. When
are we going to take this knowledge and build it
into public policy to address these climate impacts. To make
ourselves safer is going to cost an inordinate amount of
money and require some levels of personal sacrifice. Some people
(14:37):
who may not want to move are going to have
to move. Some road segments that flood regularly might have
to be abandoned, and these are not popular choices.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
That's because those individual sacrifices can also have consequences for
the whole community.
Speaker 6 (14:53):
A locality cares about its property value. If they encourage
people to move out of beachfront proper, they might be
hurting their own revenue. Or there are other people who
live in flood prone areas who simply can't afford to
go somewhere else. Their home is their only asset, and
until the government or someone decides to step in and
(15:16):
help them, they're stuck. Every time you see communities try
to adopt new flood maps and higher flood standards, there
is always at least a part of the community that
fights against it.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
If a vulnerable community does acknowledge its risk and encourages
people to relocate en mass, that can drive down housing
prices and risk your areas and drive up demand and
safer ones. And for those who stay, it can become
more costly and more difficult to get insurance.
Speaker 6 (15:45):
We can see this if we look at places like
the outer banks in the Carolinas and how homes are
falling into the ocean. We can see this if we
look into what people call the insurance crisis of how
insurers are pulling out of homeowner insurance because they're finding
the risk is too severe to cover.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
This has put pressure on the federal government itself to
offer flood insurance. That's the program Zara was talking about earlier.
Speaker 7 (16:12):
Congress created the Federal Food Insurance Program in nineteen sixty eight.
Basically because the private insurance for flooded risk failed and
private insurance pulled out of that hazard. They said we're
not going to cover this anymore because they didn't feel
like they could price policies affordably enough for most of
(16:33):
the homeowners who are in that area of risk. And
we've seen federal food insurance rates go up because turns
out the risk is really high. And one of the
problems is there've been so much flooding and so they've
had to make so many payouts that they've run out
of money and they keep having to go to Congress
and say we need more money. So it's not a
(16:56):
sustainable program, and you could sort of understand how and
why the insurance market got out of it.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
There are ways to reduce those risks, which brings us
back to mitigation. Zara says. Research shows spending more upfront
money on mitigation turns out to be significantly cheaper in
the long run.
Speaker 7 (17:15):
In twenty nineteen, there was a report that was partially
funded by FEMA and the federal government looking specifically at mitigation.
It's called the Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves twenty nineteen Report.
Speaker 5 (17:27):
And it had found that every one dollar in federal
grant money spent on hazard mitigation saves six dollars in
disaster damages in the future.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
The cost of cleaning up a disaster like the flooding
in central Texas can be staggering. A preliminary estimate from
acieather Ink puts the total damage and economic loss from
the floods in Texas in a range of eighteen billion
dollars to twenty two billion dollars, and.
Speaker 7 (17:55):
More than that, the return on investment is even higher
for federal grant spending on riverine flooding mitigation. So I'm
talking about the mitigation that would specifically go towards helping
or preventing the type of event we saw in Texas.
And so in that case, by granting eleven point five
billion dollars to help states build up river defenses between
(18:16):
nineteen ninety three to twenty sixteen, the federal government and
society at large avoided eighty two billion in losses from
deaths from likely flooded damage from business disruptions associated with
the flood. So is the study author. One of the
study authors of that report told me mitigation or preparedness
(18:38):
saves lives, and he didn't say this, but what's clear
is it also very much saves money.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
The show is hosted by Me, David Gura, Wanha and
Salam Mosen. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox,
Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patti Hirsch, Rachel Lewis, Krisky, Naomi Julia Press,
Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, alex Ugia, Julia Weaver, Yang Yong,
(19:11):
and Taka Yasuzawa. To get more from the Big Take
and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe
today at Bloomberg dot com Slash Podcast Offer. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back on Monday.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I was out in Kerrville in Kerr County.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
That's our reporter Kara Carlson, who's based in Texas. She's
been speaking with people who survived the flooding in Texas
on July fourth, and one story in particular has stayed
with her.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I have this thing.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
About watching storms interactive maps.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
It really struck me. She was actually up, you know,
watching the storm, watching a lot of the alerts and
was still really caught off guard in a lot of ways.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
I was really watching where the lightning was striking because
it was intense.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It was scary.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
It was like.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Really close. So I went outside and I noticed the
water in the driveway was like out of foot high,
and I thought, Oh, that's weird.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You'd seen that before.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Rina Bailey lives in Hunt, a small community by the
side of the Guadalupe River in Texas's Hill Country. She
lives in a house that was built in nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
It's better floods many other floods.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Hunt is mostly a rural area with hills and farmland
and wineries, a place Kara says many Texans visit as
a summer getaway.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
That's a little bit of climate in the summer than
a lot of other areas in Texas. It's kind of
an idyllic area on the river generally.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
But some of the things that make this part of
Hill Country so idyllic also make it risky. They call
this area of Texas Flash flood Alley because the steep terrain,
shallow soil, and intense storms make it exceptionally prone to
flash floods.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I think what most people are thinking of when they
hear flash flooding is maybe stay off the roads, you know,
stay out of certain areas. They aren't necessarily expecting it
to come to them.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Rena was used to floods, but she was shocked to
see the floodwater in her driveway in the early morning
hours of July fourth. And then the water kept rising.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
All of a sudden, it jumped up, and I saw
the Hunt stores and heard the start to de centigrade.
I saw the post office start to dicentigrade, the office
next to it, and then.
Speaker 5 (02:19):
This wall of bar.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
She saw the water sweep their truck away. Her husband
was still asleep and woken up, and my.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Knees saw it. It was coming up the steps like
there it was, and he said.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
You have to get out of here.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Rina wears a back race and she says she sometimes
has trouble walking, so her husband helped her out through
a window and across their yard towards a narrow gap
in the fence.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
There's a seven.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
Foot concrete wall and there's a metal fence a gap
that line.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
That gap had and liten there with The.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Official death toll has risen to over one hundred people,
including dozens of children, most of whom were at Camp Mystic.
Over one hundred people from Kerr County are still missing.
The Baileys made it to higher ground. They climbed the
hill behind their house and headed for a log cabin
on their property where they could take shelter and wait
(03:22):
out the storm. In the wake of the floods, dozens
of stories like Rena's are emerging, stories of families barely
managing to evade danger, who were woken up in the
middle of the night by thunder, or by their dogs barking,
or by their neighbors, but not by an official warning system.
These accounts are raising questions about why Kerr County residents
(03:44):
were caught so off guard and what, if anything, could
have been done to save more lives.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Should there have been a slightly different alert, Should the
campgrounds maybe have been evacuated sooner? You know, there's a
lot of unanswered questions that are still being looked.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Into, questions that have repercussions far beyond Kirk County as
storms become more intense, more deadly, and more frequent due
to climate change. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the
big take from Bloomberg News today on the show What
the Floods in Texas reveal about the growing risk of
(04:17):
flash floods as the climate changes, and the difficult economic
choices facing communities that are grappling with these new risks.
Speaker 6 (04:27):
Flooding is the most expensive natural disaster we face.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Joshua Sachs is the director of the Adaptation program at
the Georgetown Climate Center.
Speaker 6 (04:37):
And it can destroy communities. It not only impacts loss
of life, but someone's home traditionally is their majority of
their wealth.
Speaker 7 (04:48):
As we have warmer temperatures, the atmosphere can hold more water,
more moisture, and so then when you have these storms,
they are able to dump more rain.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Zara here g covers climate for Bloomberg and there's a
lot of time thinking about how our understanding of risk
is currently evolving in a warming world.
Speaker 7 (05:06):
So Texas is actually a state that has a ton
of resources. It has one of the best emergency response
kind of offices and teams and capabilities in the country.
Most states are not like Texas.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Zara says, Texas is the gold standard when it comes
to its emergency response capabilities, but it also faces a
wide variety of disaster risks, from hurricanes to extreme heat,
and even if it has a lot of money to
spend on disaster response, it faces difficult choices about how
to spend it, and on the ground, localities face their
(05:39):
own budgetary trade offs. We know, for example, that Kirk
County considered installing a warning system that could have involved
sirens in high risk areas, but it didn't.
Speaker 7 (05:50):
We have heard from officials in Texas that one of
the reasons why they had not built a flood detection
warning system in this area, saying care ca where some
of the worst fooding was, is because of the cost.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
Right.
Speaker 7 (06:04):
So it was Care County Judge Rob Kelly who told
The New York Times that local residents whose taxes wound
up to fund such a system bocked at it.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
How much does it cost to develop a really effective
early warning system for these emergencies.
Speaker 7 (06:21):
I think it depends on the community and the type
of warning and the type of area that you're trying
to cover. But obviously it's an expense, and every local
government and state government has a lot of things on
their plate, and I'll say mitigation often falls to the
bottom of that.
Speaker 6 (06:39):
There are traditionally federal grant programs that communities or individuals can.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Apply for Joshua sax Agon, like.
Speaker 6 (06:46):
Putting their homes higher up or elevating their homes, or
elevating air conditioners, water heaters, things like that. Sometimes there
are state grants, but for the most part, people and
community are having to ask the government for money, and
there isn't nearly enough money to go around to solve
all the problems we're.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Facing, Zara says. At this point, federal government funding has
become more and more integral to emergency management efforts.
Speaker 7 (07:14):
And it really speaks to what's at stake if the
Trump administration kind of pulls back on this funding. Earlier
this year, there are a couple of times when the
Trump administration paused a huge number of federal grants specifically FEMA,
and these are grants that are tied to this mitigation,
this resiliency, this prep.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
All of this worsening storms. The challenges and costs of
investing in better infrastructure has also made the predictive data
we get from the National Weather Service even more critical.
The service is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
They're the ones that track environmental disasters and put out
weather advisories and warnings.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
NOAH has our responsibility, especially through the National Weather Service,
to put out a series of, one would say, progressively
more action oriented messages.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Rick Spinrad served as the head of NOAH until January
of this year. He says those action oriented messages include
the watches and warnings you get on your phone or
in weather apps. A floodwatch did go out for Kerrville
for the Guadalupe River at one eighteen pm local time
on July third, and a flash flood warning signaling that
(08:30):
the hazardous weather event is imminent or already happening went
out about twelve hours later. It was tagged considerable, meaning
it automatically triggered wireless emergency alerts on mobile devices.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
That particular warning included phrases that this was going to
be a considerable and catastrophic event. That is the queue
to emergency managers to start getting people to evacuate, to
start preposition materials and personnel and equipment needed to protect
(09:05):
people from the event. The most perfect forecast is only
as good as how it is implemented by the ones
who need to use it.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
To make sure these forecasts reach the local officials in
charge of making public safety decisions, there are warning coordination
Meteorologists or wcns.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
At WCN doesn't wait for the phone to ring, but
actually gets out there and begins the discussion and ensures
that all of the sheriff's offices and rescue companies and
emergency managers are online with him or her. They know
the nature of the alert that went out, and they
are there to tell them what they think is going
(09:48):
to happen with respect to the river levels increased precipitation.
When that kind of thing, it's.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Too early to know exactly what might have made a
difference for the flood victims. There are still questions about
how local officials responded, and reporting is ongoing, but there
was no WCM in the forecast office for the area
that flooded. He left his position in April. He took
an early retirement offered by the Trump administration as it
(10:14):
moved to cut Noah's staff and its budget.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
It's disturbing to know that in the San Antonio Austin WFO,
the WCM position is vacant because that person left the
agency as a result of the cuts, and I would
say coerced retirements that the administration put on the Weather Service.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
The legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization,
Tom Faye, told NBC News that while the San Antonio
Weather Forecasting Office did have vacancies in two of its
top positions, it was down a WCM and a permanent
science officer. The offices in the area had quote adequate
staffing and resources to respond to this event.
Speaker 7 (11:00):
Happened in Texas. Is that happened in the middle of
the night, and it happened in an area that doesn't
have great or extensive cell coverage.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
My colleague Zara Kirgee.
Speaker 7 (11:09):
Again, so even if warnings had gone out and alert
had gone out to people's phones, maybe they didn't get
it and they didn't hear it. And you can imagine
if there was a siren that went off. That is
something that someone who is camping would have noticed, verses
a buzz on their phone if that buzz ever happened.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
At a press conference on Tuesday, four days after the disaster,
as rescue and recovery efforts were underway, Governor Greg Abbott
wasn't inclined to discuss what, if anything, he believes went
wrong in preparing Kirk County for this flood.
Speaker 8 (11:44):
Who's to blame?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Know this?
Speaker 8 (11:47):
That's the word choice of losers. Let me explain one
thing about Texas, and that is Texas. Every sport entered
our state cares about football. It could be a hunt Texas, Huntsville, Texas, Houston, Texas,
any size community, they care about football and know this.
Every football team makes mistakes. The losing teams are the
(12:11):
ones that try to point out who's to blame. The
championship teams are the ones to say, don't worry about it, man,
we got this. We're going to make sure that we
go score again, that we're going to win this game.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Texas officials say. The state legislature is planning a special
session later this month to discuss flood warning systems, flood
emergency communications, and natural disaster preparedness. They'll also consider relief
funding for the Hill country. So what communities are most
vulnerable to flooding in the US and what can they
(12:43):
do to protect themselves that's after the break. One of
the main tools that communities in the US have to
understand their flood risk are maps made by FEMA, the
Federal Emergency Management Agency. In twenty nineteen, FEMA estimated that
(13:05):
over eight million properties are at risk for severe flooding
from what's known as a once and one hundred flooding event.
My colleagues Area here Ge says those maps are used
for everything from emergency planning to calculating flood insurance premiums
for millions of people all across the country, but calculating
the true level of risk out there is complicated.
Speaker 7 (13:27):
One of the things that's changing with klindate change is
places that haven't even flooded historically, like places in Kentucky,
have experienced flooding that they never even thought was possible,
And so you know, you're having more places effectively become
like Carre County.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Updating these maps to match our evolving climate is possible,
but it takes investment in technology and research. Some private
companies like First Treet, which does climate risk financial modeling,
have more up to date flood maps. In twenty twenty,
First Street released a report identifying nearly six million additional
properties nationwide that we're at the level of risk that
(14:04):
FEMA considers severe, a total of fourteen point six million.
Speaker 6 (14:10):
It is rarely a surprise when a flood hits a place.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
That's Joshua Sachs from the Georgetown Climate Center.
Speaker 6 (14:16):
Again, the issue is simply, when are we going to
start as a country to act on these things. When
are we going to take this knowledge and build it
into public policy to address these climate impacts. To make
ourselves safer is going to cost an inordinate amount of
money and require some levels of personal sacrifice. Some people
(14:37):
who may not want to move are going to have
to move. Some road segments that flood regularly might have
to be abandoned, and these are not popular choices.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
That's because those individual sacrifices can also have consequences for
the whole community.
Speaker 6 (14:53):
A locality cares about its property value. If they encourage
people to move out of beachfront proper, they might be
hurting their own revenue. Or there are other people who
live in flood prone areas who simply can't afford to
go somewhere else. Their home is their only asset, and
until the government or someone decides to step in and
(15:16):
help them, they're stuck. Every time you see communities try
to adopt new flood maps and higher flood standards, there
is always at least a part of the community that
fights against it.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
If a vulnerable community does acknowledge its risk and encourages
people to relocate en mass, that can drive down housing
prices and risk your areas and drive up demand and
safer ones. And for those who stay, it can become
more costly and more difficult to get insurance.
Speaker 6 (15:45):
We can see this if we look at places like
the outer banks in the Carolinas and how homes are
falling into the ocean. We can see this if we
look into what people call the insurance crisis of how
insurers are pulling out of homeowner insurance because they're finding
the risk is too severe to cover.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
This has put pressure on the federal government itself to
offer flood insurance. That's the program Zara was talking about earlier.
Speaker 7 (16:12):
Congress created the Federal Food Insurance Program in nineteen sixty eight.
Basically because the private insurance for flooded risk failed and
private insurance pulled out of that hazard. They said we're
not going to cover this anymore because they didn't feel
like they could price policies affordably enough for most of
(16:33):
the homeowners who are in that area of risk. And
we've seen federal food insurance rates go up because turns
out the risk is really high. And one of the
problems is there've been so much flooding and so they've
had to make so many payouts that they've run out
of money and they keep having to go to Congress
and say we need more money. So it's not a
(16:56):
sustainable program, and you could sort of understand how and
why the insurance market got out of it.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
There are ways to reduce those risks, which brings us
back to mitigation. Zara says. Research shows spending more upfront
money on mitigation turns out to be significantly cheaper in
the long run.
Speaker 7 (17:15):
In twenty nineteen, there was a report that was partially
funded by FEMA and the federal government looking specifically at mitigation.
It's called the Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves twenty nineteen Report.
Speaker 5 (17:27):
And it had found that every one dollar in federal
grant money spent on hazard mitigation saves six dollars in
disaster damages in the future.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
The cost of cleaning up a disaster like the flooding
in central Texas can be staggering. A preliminary estimate from
acieather Ink puts the total damage and economic loss from
the floods in Texas in a range of eighteen billion
dollars to twenty two billion dollars, and.
Speaker 7 (17:55):
More than that, the return on investment is even higher
for federal grant spending on riverine flooding mitigation. So I'm
talking about the mitigation that would specifically go towards helping
or preventing the type of event we saw in Texas.
And so in that case, by granting eleven point five
billion dollars to help states build up river defenses between
(18:16):
nineteen ninety three to twenty sixteen, the federal government and
society at large avoided eighty two billion in losses from
deaths from likely flooded damage from business disruptions associated with
the flood. So is the study author. One of the
study authors of that report told me mitigation or preparedness
(18:38):
saves lives, and he didn't say this, but what's clear
is it also very much saves money.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
The show is hosted by Me, David Gura, Wanha and
Salam Mosen. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox,
Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patti Hirsch, Rachel Lewis, Krisky, Naomi Julia Press,
Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, alex Ugia, Julia Weaver, Yang Yong,
(19:11):
and Taka Yasuzawa. To get more from the Big Take
and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe
today at Bloomberg dot com Slash Podcast Offer. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back on Monday.
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.