July 8, 2025 • 40 mins
In this week's episode, Matthew and Eleanor are joined by Matt Lanza, a meteorologist from Houston, to discuss the deadly Texas floods. How did they happen? Could people have been better warned? And what can keep this region safe in the future?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hello, and welcome to the Texas Tribune trip Cast for
July eighth, twenty twenty five. I am Matthew Watkins, Editor
in Chief of the Texas Tribune, joined as usual by
Eleanor Klebanoff, Law and Justice reporter, Law and courtse reporter
for the Texas Tribune. Hello, Eleanor, Hey mate. We are talking,
you know, in the aftermath of a tough weekend for Texas,
(00:31):
A tough holiday weekend, of course, everyone knows by now
the flooding in the Hill Country, hitting Kerr County particularly hard.
As we record this at eleven twenty on Tuesday morning,
more than one hundred deaths have been confirmed by state
and local officials, eighty seven of those in Kerr County,
(00:52):
of course, getting a lot of the attention worthy twenty
seven girls and counselors who disappeared from Camp Stick. I
think those are presumed lost at this time, five councilors
in one five campers and one councilor still unaccounted for.
But we are now, you know, several days past the flooding.
(01:15):
We are joined to talk about this with Matt Lanza,
a Houston based meteorologist from Space City Weather and the Eyewall. Matt,
thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, thanks for having me on tough, tough story. For sure.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Eleanor, you.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Were in Kerrville on Sunday and Monday, tell us a
little bit, just first and foremost about kind of what
you saw, what the scene is like there right now.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
I mean, it's hard to even like capture in words,
the devastation there.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
I've covered natural disasters.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
This seems like sort of on a level even above that,
particularly when you think about, like it was a flood,
you know, I think I've covered floods. You're used to
seeing people, you know, mucking out their houses and mud
up to their shins and all that. This was, you know,
looked more like a tornado. I mean, r V parks
just ripped through, not just trailers smashed into each other,
(02:10):
but the metal siding ripped off cars. You know. I
saw it on a bridge, a dumpster that was basically,
you know, one of those big metal dumpsters like folded
in half from the water.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
It's you know, and I keep saying this, but it's
really true.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
Like to hear talk to people who lost everything, lost
their homes, their businesses, their everything, they own, their pets,
and to hear them talk about like how incredibly lucky
they feel to be alive after that is really jarring.
It was different than you know, usually people are so
more focused on, you know, the physical things that they lost,
but with sort of these girls missing and the families
(02:48):
missing and the people who you know are are dead
sort of hanging over this, I think it's a really
it's a really emotional place right now.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, absolutely, and something being felt I think across the state.
I mean, one of the things and maybe we'll talk
about this a little bit more, is just that I
keep thinking about, is how terrible the timing of this
storm was. I mean, you really, you literally could not
have picked a worse hour for this flood to happen,
you know, of the whole year, right the night before
(03:19):
fourth or really the morning of fourth of July weekend
where there's people from all over the state coming in
to celebrate the holiday. Of course, these summer camps, Camp
Mystic and others as well, where generations of people have gone,
you know, kids from you know, Austin, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio,
everywhere in between. Really really tragic and terrible, and I
(03:45):
you know, it feels like at least for me, someone
who grew up here I knew, I'd you know, probably
more than a dozen kids who you know, my cohort
who went to Camp Mystic, people who have their kids there.
Now it's like you can and it. It feels like
a smaller state right now, and in the way that
(04:05):
even I've never really experienced in a tragedy like this,
where it just like everywhere you look you feel like
you know or hear about someone you know who's been
affected by this.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
I mean, I think part I mean to talk about,
like the July fourth of it all, Like part of
what has stuck with me from you know, being out
there and going to these press conferences out there and stuff,
is that we actually don't even know how many people
are missing because so many people were visiting the area
for the fourth of July. They were camping, they were
staying in RVs. I mean, horrifyingly, the county they've set
(04:37):
up a tip lined if you're missing someone you know,
they're dealing with prank calls or dealing with scam calls.
They're dealing with people who you know, don't know if
their loved one was there.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
It's like it's.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
Hard to imagine for that area, like a busier weekend
and a sort of more you know, a more difficult
weekend to try to like get an accounting of who
was there.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah. I think, you know, we will continue to learn
more about that, you know, in the days and weeks
to come, for sure. Matt, I want to ask you,
let's start just by talking about the storm, Like, what
explain to us just the weather phenomenon that happened here? Yeah?
What like yeah, really, like, how how did this happen?
(05:19):
Just from a meteor meteorological perspective.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, it is a tough one to talk about. You know,
it's interesting having gone through Harvey, even in Houston, and
then seeing this, this is just a whole other level
and it's it makes the scientific aspect of it just
it's hard to dissociate, right, So, but we have to
kind of talk about these things to understand why these
things happen. So, you know, Central Texas is not immune
(05:46):
to flooding. I mean, it's one of the most probe
places in America. There's a long, long history and oftentimes
what ends up happening is you get some sort of
remnant of some tropical system that ends up wandering its
way into Texas. And that's what happened in this particular
case with the remnants of tropical storm Berry. I mean,
(06:06):
Barry was a tropical storm for literally twelve hours. That is,
it made landfall in Mexico the weekend before the fourth
of July and just kind of took its time. He
entered up through Mexico and ended up in Texas, you know,
rate on Wednesday and into Thursday, and you had basically
first you know, that tropical remnant ends up being sort
(06:27):
of the focal point for allowing showers and thunderstorms to develop.
You've got all this moisture coming in off the Gulf,
so the atmosphere is completely saturated. You've got the terrain
that contributes to all this. This is why flash flood
Alley is called what it is because the Balcone's escarpment,
it basically forces the air up. Right. You need to
(06:49):
get to get thunderstorms, you need rising air. And what
you're doing is is winds come out of the South.
They're being forced up the terrain in hill country. And
what it does is that adds a little bit more
energy to the whole thing. And then on top of that,
we had a couple of disturbances. We had I think
what we call a mesoscale convectivete vorticy that was involved
(07:10):
in all this as well, and those act to kind
of further enhance the rainfall. And it was just kind
of like a horribly perfect combination of meteorological elements to
allow for heavy rainfall, and not over a tremendously wide area,
but very localized. Right, That's what ends up happening in
these situations. It's not it's not like a harvey where
(07:32):
so many places get you know, inundated. This is more
of a localized type phenomena where you know, you get
these smaller pockets of really high rainfall amounts interspersed with
something more manageable, like a one to four inch type rainfall,
and those are just notoriously very difficult to forecast.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah, I mean, that was gonna be my next question,
and we can get into the question of the National
Weather Service here in a little bit before we talk
about that. I just I wonder if you could help
me understand whether this came as a surprise, right, Like
I feel like just from my own experience, we knew
it was probably going to rain on fourth of July.
But at least I maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention,
(08:11):
was not expecting this right even in Austin, you know,
one hundred miles away or whatever. It rained basically constantly.
Did we see this level of precipitation, this type of
storm coming ahead of time?
Speaker 2 (08:30):
So the answer is yes and no. We did know
that it was going to rain over that time period.
You know, if you go back and look at the
forecast discussions and you look at the modeling in the
days kind of leading up to the fourth of July,
there was definitely a signal that there were going to
be showers and thunderstorms. You know, initially it didn't look
necessarily like anything abnormal, you know, what we typically would
expect in Texas in summertime. As we got into Wednesday
(08:52):
and Thursday and we got into what we call these
higher resolution models. So you've got these global models that
you always hear about, the American model, europe model, things
like that. Those help us to kind of plan ahead
of time. But then when you get kind of into
the nitty gritty of a weather event, you start to
transition to these higher resolution what we call convection allowing models.
They can forecast thunderstorms, and so as we went into
(09:13):
Wednesday night and Thursday, those models actually started to escalate
the rainfall totals a little more. So you started to
see maybe instead of you know, two to four inches
or a little bit more, maybe you saw five or
six inches in a morning run, and then by afternoon
that was up to like six or ten inches, and
then by evening that had escalated to like ten to
fifteen inches. And it wasn't over a wide area again,
(09:34):
it was just kind of an isolated spot. So the
answer to the question is we didn't have a ton
of lead time, but you had to be paying attention
on Thursday to understand what was going on. And that's
what we saw kind of the National Weather Service catching
up with were these models. They started to expand flood watches,
they started to escalate messaging, and we saw more and
more of that throughout the day on Thursday and especially
(09:56):
into the evening. You know, the challenge is with a
system like this is that you have, like when it
comes like a Harvey, you've got a very defined system, right,
You've got you know, there's a remnant rate there. It's
so well defined, it's going to dump rain over a
large area. In these situations, you have a signal that says,
everybody's gonna get rain. It's going to be heavy. We
(10:18):
get heavy rain all the time in Texas, right, so
you don't necessarily think much of it. But then as
we got into Wednesday and Thursday and some of these
higher resolution models started to up the ante a little bit,
it started to be like, Okay, well, there's going to
be heavy rain, but there might be some pockets that
see some really heavy rain that you know, cause problems.
But the problem is we're not The science is not
(10:39):
there yet to tell you exactly where and exactly how
much it's going to fall. And we got a long
way to go before we get there as a field
of science. And that's really where the challenge is is
messaging that to people to say, like, over a you know,
two hundred square mile area, there could be a pocket
that sees ten to fifteen inches of rainfall. Is that
(11:00):
a helpful forecast? I don't know, but at least we
should hopefully get people paying attention.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
I was just guys, like, how much of this is
dependent on other factors, like the fact that we've been
in a drought for so long. I mean, are there
things going even going into this summer. Let's say you
could have said, like if we did get a lot
of rain, it's going to be really bad.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Yeah. The phrase that we say is droughts and in floods, right,
and you know, there's been such a long term drought
across Central Texas and West Texas, you know, and for
parts of West tests It. You know, it kind of continues.
It's it's never a given though, right, you know, we've
been in drought for so long to continue going into
(11:41):
the summer and into the fall and into next year
for all we know, you know. So there's really not
a whole lot that you can say, but I will
say that I'm sure that the drier ground, you know,
probably acted to speed up the runoff a little bit
and and kind of force more of that water into
the into the river with a little bit more speed,
and that probably contributed to why it rose so quickly.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Just to add on to what Eleanor was asking, is
how extraordinary of a weather event was this? I mean,
we we all know, we've all heard about how this
region is very prone to flooding. Is this a circumstance
where something you know, once in a hundred or you know,
whatever years happened, or is this a fairly you know,
(12:25):
I mean, I know it's an extraordinary flood, but how
extraordinary was it?
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Yeah? In the grand scheme of things, it fits. It
fits the climate, right, you know, you expect to see
this sort of flood on these rivers, you know, every
so often. You know, we talk about the return periods.
It could be you know, one hundred years, five hundred years,
one thousand years, whatever that is, you know, and that
all that's doing is saying that in any given year,
this is a percent chance that you have of seeing
(12:51):
a flood of one hundred year flood of be you
have a one percent chance in any given year of
seeing that. So that doesn't mean that you're only going
to get one every one hundred years. You could get
five in a row. Right, It's just it becomes kind
of the law of averages at that point. But I
mean that, you know, I've read a book called Flash
Floods in Texas and it basically summarizes a lot of
the historical floods that have occurred across the state, but
(13:14):
in particular in hill country in central Texas. So there's
there's a long, long history of it there. I think
what probably makes this well, what makes this a little
unique obviously as the human toll, right, I mean, there's
just no kind of getting around that that that this
was just an extraordinary event from that magnitude. You don't
expect this to be happening in twenty twenty five. You know,
(13:35):
we've got a lot of good forecasting at this point.
Nothing really you know, a lot of things don't surprise
us like they used to one hundred hundred and fifty
years ago. But you know, obviously we still do have
issues with forecasting. So you know, the human toll about
was was certainly a you know, a unique factor of
all this, but you know, it fits the bill. But
(13:57):
it was also worse than what I think is tipic.
This is definitely a you know, at top tier flood
historically for Texas, just in and of itself, if you
even take the human toll out of it. You know,
we set some flooding records on parts of the rivers there.
You know, it was also a multi day flood, you know,
obviously getting less attention with some of the other flooding,
(14:18):
some of the other flooding that occurred elsewhere in Central Texas,
so you know, the subsequent day and things like that.
So overall, this was a pretty high end rainfall event,
one that we really haven't seen in a while in
this part of this part of the state.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
So let's let's go into the National Weather Service question.
Of course, you mentioned the forecast sort of evolved over time.
It was a hard thing to predict. There were a
lot of questions immediately after this happened about whether the
budget cuts that the National Weather Service face had an
impact on this. We got some data on the on
(14:54):
the Saturday after the flooding, basically saying that in San
Angelo there were four vacant in that office out of
twenty three positions. San Antonio had six vacancies out of
twenty six. But the people in and who used to
work at the National Weather Service seemed to suggest that
that was enough to do what they needed to do.
(15:14):
That day, you wrote on the eyewall, we have seen
absolutely nothing to suggest current staffing or budget issues within
NAA and the NWS played any role at all in
this event. Tell us a little bit about what led
you to that conclusion.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, there were a couple of things. Number One, I
think if you look back at the timeliness of the
warnings that were issued by the forecast Office, particularly in
San Antonio, it was within what I would have expected
to see for a flooding about of this magnitude they
were issued. He had discussions that were issued throughout the
(15:51):
evening from the Weather Prediction Center in Washington, d C.
That had talked about escalating rainfall risk and the potential
for very high in totals. You know, basically the playbook
played out what we've seen historically from from National Weather
Service offices and these sorts of events, you know, and
(16:11):
then looking at the staffing levels, you know, as you noted,
it's not that abnormal. You know, certainly there's there's a
few vacant positions, but there's always been a few vacant positions.
If you come down the road to a place like Houston,
that certainly made the news lately, you know that office
has a number of additional vacancies relative to the San
Antonio and San Angelo offices, so compared to some of
(16:33):
the other local offices across the agency, they were actually
pretty well off all things considered in terms of staffing,
and they did bring in extra staffing as they would
for for a higher end weather event ahead of time.
So to me, it sounds everything sounds as if they
were equipped with adequate numbers of people, The warnings were timely,
(16:54):
whether they were received or not as a whole their discussion,
but when they produced them, from the meteorological side of
things and from the procedural side of things, based on
what I know from the National Weather Service and knowing
a lot of people that work at these various different offices,
from there, it seemed totally normal, which is I think
(17:16):
a frustrating answer for a lot of people, but I
think it's the reality of it all, and I think
we just have to kind of be honest about that
in this situation.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Yeah, our story on Saturday had the timeline of the alerts,
and I'm just going to run through it really quickly
because I think it is fairly instructive for a few
different reasons. So, there was a floodwatch issued on Wednesday
at one eighteen pm. At one fourteen am Thursday, so
about twelve hours later, that was upgraded to a warning.
There was a flash flooding emergency issue, which I understand
(17:47):
is sort of like the highest level of emergency warning
at four h three am on Thursday morning, the river,
according to the gauges, really started to rise at around
five am. At five am it was one point eight
feet deep. By six am it was twenty feet. By
(18:08):
six forty five it was up to thirty four point
twenty nine feet. So you're talking about just a massive
rise in a very short period of time. Twenty feet
by the way, I believe it's like sort of the
flood stage major flood. So yeah, major flood stage, and
so a very fast increase. But you know from the
emergency warning to that major flood stage you're talking about
(18:30):
like you know, over an hour, maybe even in the
two hour range, right.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
I mean I think also, and I've seen a lot
of discussion about this, and I think it's like.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
It's it's not partisan, it's not political.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
It's a piece of this that's like these warnings are
often very hard to They're not written in plain language,
they're hard to understand, They're hard to know, like what's
the one we are supposed to activate on even here
in Austin, like on Saturday, so after like we're hearing
this horror, you know, like the horrible flooding that.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Has had happened.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
We were getting these alerts, and it was like, how
seriously do we have to take that?
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Right?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Is this really like get off the road.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
But then when I was in Kerrville, they started sitting
out there was a point on Sunday evening where the
water the rains, the rain came back and they were
preparing for the water to rise again, and they sent
like a very very plain language alert that was like
flooding expected, get to high ground now. And I was
so I'm curious to see going forward from this, like
is are we going to see more plain language arguably
(19:29):
more useful push alerts?
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah? I mean, and then the other obvious thing about here,
you know you talk about that, and I think it's
a really good point, right the I think there might
be a little bit of a like alert fatigueta two.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
Since alerts, we've all.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Been in that situation where at like three am in
the morning, our phone goes off and we like look
and it's like an amber alert and Amarillo like eight
hundred miles away or whatever, and it's like I can't
believe you, like go.
Speaker 4 (19:53):
To my window and look for a white Chevy or whatever,
like that's not right.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
It's new sense.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Alerts and and in a dai that I think there
are a lot of people, again, like we said, who
were not from that area and might not be as
familiar of like what flooding means in that area and
what to do when the time comes. And also it
was the middle of the night and people might have
been asleep, and I think all those things sort of
come together to create a problem. I think the question
(20:20):
is particularly around the summer camps or some of these
areas where you know, you know, the thing that kind
of sticks with me, that has I kind of keep
going back to is the county Judge Paul Kerr saying
on Saturday morning, this is the most dangerous river valley
in the United States. We get these floods all the time, right.
(20:42):
I think the question that a lot of people are
asking is like, if we get these floods all the time,
if we know that this danger is there, it's not
the National Weather Services job to evacuate people, right, It's
the National Weather Services job to give people the information
they need. Why weren't the systems in place to keep
(21:03):
people safe from this, you know, somewhat inevitable type of emergency?
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Right?
Speaker 4 (21:10):
And we talk a lot about and correctly, there's a
lot of talk right now about sirens and warning systems
and all that, but it's also not the National Weather
Service job to say, like don't build so close to
the river.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
Don't you know? Like where should where? Should you have
these limits?
Speaker 4 (21:22):
Like I'm not a scientist, I don't know, but it
does raise all these questions.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Matt.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
I'm curious from your perspective, where you see the let's
say room, where you see the room for change from
all of this, what do you think the pivot point
should be.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, this is an opportunity to talk about a lot
of different things. So, first of all, from the National
Weather Service side of things, I think that the warnings
do need to be improved in terms of the language
that is used. Right there's a standard format. It's been
improved over the years, but it's not perfect. Obviously. One
of the interesting things is the National Weather Services, an
agency in the last you know, ten to fifteen years,
has an invested hea in doing a lot of social
(22:02):
science research and bringing in social scientists to help them
craft messaging that is more useful to end users. It's
something that they recognized. I think a lot of This
came in the wake of you know, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy,
the twenty eleven tornado outbreak in the Southeast. All these
things kind of led to a real watershed moment and like,
(22:24):
how can we do this better? What are we missing?
And so they've invested heavily in that. They're doing a
lot of work and there's a lot of research on
the pipeline on that as well, which kind of I
think we could pivot into a conversation about proposed budget
cuts and things like that, but you know, I'll save
that for now. That that's definitely a topic of concern,
but it's important. You know, we always say as meteorologists
(22:46):
that no forecast has any value whatsoever unless you give
that value to an end user. So no warning has
any value unless the person receiving it knows what to
do about it. I do think that, you know, living
in Texas, we do deal with flash flooding a lot.
We get a lot of flash flood warnings every year,
you know, we here in Houston. Happens all the time
(23:07):
because we get a lot of street flooding, we get
a lot of nuisance floodings. Flooding that says, hey, you know,
maybe don't go out, Maybe don't go to your doctor's
appointment right now and reschedule it or or something like that.
Don't go to the grocery store. So I think the
question that maybe we need to ask ourselves is do
we need to kind of raise that threshold a little
bit to say, like, Okay, if you're going to issue
a flash flood warning, maybe we do it when it's
(23:29):
something a little more significant. I think the flash flood
emergency is the right way to go. Clearly that was
issued in a very timely manner, but clearly that didn't
necessarily matter. You know. I know as a meteorologists, when
a flash flood emergency is issued for any location, that's
a big deal. They don't issue those lightly. Those are
not handed out like candy. You know. Flash flood warning,
(23:51):
severe thunderstorm warnings, even to some extent tornado warnings, there's
a little bit of more pad that's built into them
to be like, okay, well maybe this could you know,
do something. You know, and there's there's definitely a little
bit of a false alarm rate, but when you get
to the emergency level that there's no questioning that whatsoever.
That's a big deal, and those are only reserved for
(24:11):
the highest end cases. So I guess the questions I
would ask, are you know, do end users know that?
You know? Obviously does the public know that? I don't
know that the public does. But at the same time
as the public's responsibility to know that is that more
on the emergency managers in the location. But then you
have a location that's a little more rural and doesn't
(24:32):
necessarily have the resources that you know, a Houston or
an Austin or a Dallas has, you know, can they
do that? You know, the National Weather Service does a
ton of outreach and a ton of work with emergency managers,
but you know, is it enough? Do we need to
be doing more? So I think there are all reasonable
questions to ask kind of in the wake of this,
and there's obviously room for improvement. But ultimately, in the end,
(24:56):
it's it's a horrific tragedy that you know, hit in
the middle of night. Like you said, the top the
worst possible time. I mean, this is like the worst
nightmare for any forecast or seeing something like this, obviously,
you know, impacting families, It's the worst possible nightmare you
can think of. So you know, I think there's an
element of that that's at play here too. It's just,
(25:18):
you know, some of it is unavoidable, but some of
it certainly is avoidable. And I think that that that's
a conversation that needs to happen.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the Oregon coast.
My wife has family up there. We go and we
visit Seaside, Oregon, and there it is well known up
there that there is a fault line, you know, out
in the ocean where there is going to be a
major earthquake sometime in the next hundred years, and that
major earthquake is going to create a tsunami that is
(25:45):
going to wash over Seaside Oregon, and it's extremely dangerous.
There's a New Yorker article that you should read about it.
It's terrifying crazy. But if you go, if you visit Seaside,
Oregon or any of the towns along the coast, every airbnb,
every hotel, there's a posting on the door that says,
(26:06):
this is going to happen, and this is what you
need to do when it does happen. Here's the evacuation
route to get to higher ground. Here's where there's like
food stored on this hill and like all these different
types of things, right, and like I'm thinking about like again,
like all these people on the Guadaloupe who are from
Dallas and Houston and might not even have heard the
term flash flood alley, you know, if they had, if
(26:30):
there had been some kind of requirement, some kind of
like posting there's signs everywhere in this rural Oregon town
of like evacuation route, et cetera, et cetera, like it
might have helped people understand what to what to kind
of make of these alerts and these warnings and not
just kind of wonder like should I get in my car?
Is it safe to get in my car? Like all
(26:51):
those different types of things.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
I think like this is a big part of it
is just like you know, I think a lot of
people were there not knowing s flash flood alley. They
come in from Houston, where they get a flash flood alert.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
All the time.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
Meaning some part of this giant county is like maybe
gonna get you know that that has poor drainage is
gonna you know, deal with flooded out overpasses. Like I'm
one of those, Like I mean, people keep saying like,
I can't believe people don't know what these alerts mean.
I don't know which one is tornado watch, which one's
tornado warning.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
I just like, uh, assume either way. I'm sort of cooked.
But like this is I think there's maybe on the.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
Part of you know, the experts writ large, whoever, you know,
even like the people who are creating these alerts, people
who are results for implementing this, like a little bit
of a lack of awareness about like how much people
don't know and certainly like what they're sort of walking into.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
And yeah, and then I think like you would hope
that there would be an awareness of the most vulnerable areas, right,
like like a summer camp where you know the it's
going to take a herculean effort at any point to
evacuate that whole group, right, And like what kind of
plans and things are you going to have in motion
(28:05):
when a place like that is endangered? And I think
we're still trying to get some answers from folks about
what exactly, if anything was done, but a lot of
the answers from the local officials so far have been
sort of like, you know, that's not what we do
or used to do. And I think there's going to
be a lot of questions about whether that needs to change.
Speaker 4 (28:26):
Right if you think about the last time there was
a flood of this, I mean not even of this scale,
but a flood like this was nineteen eighty seven, Like
most people were not.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
You know, many people were not alive.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Then.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
I shouldn't say most, feel many people were not alive
then they were not, like you know, sort of maybe
aware of this. They're not making plans based on like
the memory of that, and for what it's worth in
this situation, like a big takeaway from nineteen eighty seven
flood was that the people who died were those who
were on buses evacuating. And so it's sort of a
you know, I understand the paralysis you might face of
(28:59):
do we evacuate or do we stay put? Of Like
that's a really really difficult decision. A lot of questions now,
I mean, obviously still about how early they knew, should
are there things they could done earlier?
Speaker 3 (29:11):
Of course, but Matt, you know.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Go ahead, Yeah, I was just gonna say, I mean,
think about also how many people have moved to Texas
in recent years, and particularly in Austin area, in the
San Antonio area, in the Houston area, they don't They
don't necessarily know anything about hurricanes. They don't know anything
about flash flooding. They may have moved from a dry
part of the country to come to Texas, and so
there's there's there's a learning curve in the state that
(29:35):
you know. I don't know that anybody when you move
to Texas. There's no welcome guide waiting for you to explain.
These are your risks, this is your concern. I'll never forget.
I was attending a talk from Jim Blackburn down at
Rice University, and and he was saying how once upon
a time they had wanted to put markers up near
the near the Bay in the Houston area to show
(29:57):
how high the water could get during a storm sturge
during a certain category level storm. But a lot of
real estate folks and development folks didn't really like that
because you see that and you're like, oh, that's not good,
and so they stopped doing it. Right, So I think
there really needs to be we got to be honest
with ourselves after this about where we live. Fine, that
(30:19):
we live somewhere that is extremely vulnerable, but we have
to be honest about the risks and understanding those risks,
and really, you know, as Texans, particularly those that have
been here for a while, helping newcomers to understand those
risks as well.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
Right, I mean I just briefly, like when I was
in Kirk County, Like I first of all, to your
point about people moving here. Our editors were like, ask
people what they remember the nineteen eighty seven flood, and
I didn't meet one person who lived in Kirk County
during the nineteen eighty seven flood. But also when I
was leaving, you know, it was the rain had stopped it,
the flood waters had receded, but I missed a turn
onto the highway leaving the county or leaving Kerville, and
(30:56):
Google Map just automatically rerouted me on like a real
back road that was through all these counties that had
gotten flooded.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
And then no point was like also.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
By the way, like these are low roads, you're going
to be driving through it, like there was nowhere to
turn around. I was kind of like if I had
had to evacuate Kirk County in a hurry and I
missed the one turn onto the highway that I needed
to be on I would have been driving directly into
you know, into a disaster. And so I think we're
we leave a lot to the individual to sort of
figure out. And I mean, I don't know what a
scaled solution to that looks like, but it's just a reality.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Yeah, And I mean I think there is a big
question that state and local leaders and I you know,
national leaders as well, are going to need to face about,
like what kind of investment do we have in our
emergency management resources. I think one thing that's like slightly
frustrating to me is we in the media and just
as society as a whole, we all sort of something
(31:49):
terrible happens and we talk about like what they should
have known about that terrible thing, and like why invests
in all that? And then the next terrible thing happens
and we haven't talked at all about that one. You know,
what kind of effort, you know, in a state where
there's been a lot of extra money lately, there's an
awareness that climate change might be making these things worse.
(32:11):
What kind of investment do we need to make as
a state to really look at individual communities and what
their risks are in order to prevent You know, bad
things are going to happen, but how can we minimize
the damage of those bad things to the extent that's
that's reasonable?
Speaker 3 (32:27):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
One thing I would ask you, Matt, is that you
know this Governor Abbot has indicated that this will be
something that they will talk about during the special session
on starting July twenty first, there's been some conversation in
the Senate about, you know, investing some money in sirens
in rural areas that are prone to flooding. What would
(32:49):
you tell the legislature to invest in and think about
in this moment.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
I think that there's always after a disaster, there is
a a tendency or a desire that we have to
do something. We have to do something, and we have
to show that we're doing something. And that's that right.
It's not always the best solution. It's it's kind of like, hey,
we look, we did something. After the fact, we can
pat ourselves on the back that you know, hey, we
(33:15):
did something. I think that this is a discussion that
is nuanced. Everything is nuanced, right. We we live in
a society and in a time of society where nuanced
doesn't necessarily get the time of day that it should.
But this is a very nuanced discussion that has to
happen because every part of Texas is different. The needs
(33:35):
in Houston are far different than the needs in Krek County,
than the needs of the Panhandle, you know, and on
and on. So I think it's important for the legislature
to act, but to do so deliberately, and if that
takes a little extra time, I think that's okay. And
you know, I think that you know, just based on
(33:57):
how you know, we interact with people, just ourselves as
meteorologists and forecasters. What one thing that people really like
about the way we do is we talk to them
very plainly, like we're not trying to pretend like we're
above them, like we're one of them, right, And I
think that too often when you get into these political issues,
like a lot of times this ends up being it
(34:18):
just ends up being a political issue and it goes
through the political process, and to some extent, yeah, that
has to happen. But at the same time, I think
that more people in the state would be appreciative if
this is a well thought out plan, so we're not
just throwing resources of the problem to say, we're throwing
resources the problem, right. I know there was the build
that was proposed in the main session that was talking about,
(34:40):
you know, upgrades to emergency management, emergency communication and things
like that. I think it was the representative from Canadian
that had proposed that in the wake of the smoke
house fire out there. And these are great ideas. We
just need to make sure that they work for the
people that live in these places and the people that
visit these places, right, And that requires a lot of
(35:01):
community input, and I think it requires really a united
effort at the state, local, and federal level to some extent.
You know. However, that's possible now to do that, to
implement that, and to come forth with a solution that
is vetted and works, because there's no one answer to
this problem. It's not like you install sirens. If you
(35:22):
would installed sirens five years ago, there's no guarantee that
you wouldn't have had a catastrophic death hole this time.
It probably would have lowered it, It probably would have
helped a lot, but it may not be the magic
bullet that everyone's looking for. Right, So we really do
need to think about these things in a depth that
sometimes the political process doesn't have.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Time for I have a question which you might not
know the answer to, and so if you don't apologize,
But we talk about this idea that the Hill country,
this area is the most dangerous area for flash flanding
in the country. How much of that is because of
the specific terrain and way there, and how much of
(36:01):
it is is it due to other factors? Right? Like
I think about like the fact that you know, in
unincorporated areas of Texas you can build wherever you want to,
and and some of those things like is Texas Is
this part of Texas uniquely situated geographically to be prone
to flash floods or is there something else going on
(36:24):
that's making it more dangerous for for people?
Speaker 2 (36:28):
No, it is. It is a geographic and geological and
meteorological combination of factors. That's that's why the term flash
flown alley has been around for a long time. It's
it's you know, you just it is hits in a
spot that is uniquely situated to kind of have the
wrong combination of elements come together in very relatively frequent,
(36:50):
you know, time periods. It happens a lot over history. It's,
you know, not something that's going to happen every year,
but every few years you're going to have something that
that that happens there. And the thing that kind of
unnerves me a little bit is, you know, that's not changing,
and if anything, as we talk about with climate change,
you know, the rate, the rate of the rain that
falls is going to increase more. Right. We saw rainfall
(37:12):
rates during these storms of like five or six inches
an hour. That's what we had during Harvey and Houston.
So I mean, you know, this was just an incredible
rainfall event. And what unnerves me is that we've got
a lot of people moving to this place. So not
only was the risk already there and people already vulnerable,
(37:33):
now a whole lot more people are vulnerable. And a
lot of what we've done in terms of infrastructure and
building is based on what the world was like in
the nineteen fifties to the nineteen eighties, right, and in
the same world that it was then today by any
stretch of the imagination. So I think that going back
(37:54):
to the whole idea of being nuanced about what we
need to do, I think that plays a big role
in it, because so much has changed, and I think
that there's there's a backlog of things that probably need
to be addressed. I don't know what those are, but
it's a lot. It's a big, big issue, and you know,
I see it as it's an insurance policy on ourselves.
That's really what we're talking about here, and to keep
(38:16):
Texas thriving and moving forward, you need to invest in
that insurance policy.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, it just feels like in the coastal areas you
have this sort of whole infrastructure set up to be
prepared for hurricanes, and it doesn't prevent everything bad that
could come from a hurricane, but it feels like maybe
there's a conversation we need to have in this region
about building up a similar type of infrastructure around floods
(38:41):
as well.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
It does seem like these floods and like for an
area called flash flood Alley, like you know, like you said,
like we've built up like evacuation routes and infrastructure on
the coast a little bit more for hurricanes in tornado
prone areas, we have tornado sirens.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
You know.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
I think.
Speaker 4 (38:57):
This hopefully, you know what will spark a conversation about
like what what can be different to your point, Matt, like,
is it do we rush in and do something and
solve this little problem and install sirens, and then you know,
it turns out the you know, we sort of missed
that the bigger point, the bigger issue that I wouldn't
accuse the text legislature of doing that, but you know,
(39:17):
it is a thing a legislative body could do in
the you know, excitement of trying to do something.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
And really it's just human nature, right. It's human nature
to number one, want to blame something or someone, right,
and it's number two to come up with a solution
to say, hey, we did something so we can pat
ourselves on the back and feel good that we addressed
whatever the issue was that that happened in the first place.
So that's why I you know, I really do think
I really hope that this is a conversation that is
(39:43):
very bipartisan in nature, because it should be. This affects
all Texans, blue, red, and purple, and you know, I
think that it's just it's an opportunity for Texas to
show itself off as a leader in Hey, look, we
had something horrible happen. We understand our risks. Now we're
working to address them and make our state even stronger
(40:03):
than it was before.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Well, our hearts go out to everyone affected. It's just
a terrible thing that's happened in our state.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
You know.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Encourage folks listening. If you want to contribute, google the
Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country. They have a
complicated website, so I think googling that Google again is
the best way to find the flood relief fun Community
Foundation of the Texas Hill Country. Hopefully we don't go
through anything like this for a long time. Matt, thank
(40:35):
you so much for taking the time to walk us through.
This has been very enlightening. Thank you to our producers,
Rob and Chris. We will talk to you all next week.
Hello, and welcome to the Texas Tribune trip Cast for
July eighth, twenty twenty five. I am Matthew Watkins, Editor
in Chief of the Texas Tribune, joined as usual by
Eleanor Klebanoff, Law and Justice reporter, Law and courtse reporter
for the Texas Tribune. Hello, Eleanor, Hey mate. We are talking,
you know, in the aftermath of a tough weekend for Texas,
(00:31):
A tough holiday weekend, of course, everyone knows by now
the flooding in the Hill Country, hitting Kerr County particularly hard.
As we record this at eleven twenty on Tuesday morning,
more than one hundred deaths have been confirmed by state
and local officials, eighty seven of those in Kerr County,
(00:52):
of course, getting a lot of the attention worthy twenty
seven girls and counselors who disappeared from Camp Stick. I
think those are presumed lost at this time, five councilors
in one five campers and one councilor still unaccounted for.
But we are now, you know, several days past the flooding.
(01:15):
We are joined to talk about this with Matt Lanza,
a Houston based meteorologist from Space City Weather and the Eyewall. Matt,
thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, thanks for having me on tough, tough story. For sure.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Eleanor, you.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Were in Kerrville on Sunday and Monday, tell us a
little bit, just first and foremost about kind of what
you saw, what the scene is like there right now.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
I mean, it's hard to even like capture in words,
the devastation there.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
I've covered natural disasters.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
This seems like sort of on a level even above that,
particularly when you think about, like it was a flood,
you know, I think I've covered floods. You're used to
seeing people, you know, mucking out their houses and mud
up to their shins and all that. This was, you know,
looked more like a tornado. I mean, r V parks
just ripped through, not just trailers smashed into each other,
(02:10):
but the metal siding ripped off cars. You know. I
saw it on a bridge, a dumpster that was basically,
you know, one of those big metal dumpsters like folded
in half from the water.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
It's you know, and I keep saying this, but it's
really true.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
Like to hear talk to people who lost everything, lost
their homes, their businesses, their everything, they own, their pets,
and to hear them talk about like how incredibly lucky
they feel to be alive after that is really jarring.
It was different than you know, usually people are so
more focused on, you know, the physical things that they lost,
but with sort of these girls missing and the families
(02:48):
missing and the people who you know are are dead
sort of hanging over this, I think it's a really
it's a really emotional place right now.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, absolutely, and something being felt I think across the state.
I mean, one of the things and maybe we'll talk
about this a little bit more, is just that I
keep thinking about, is how terrible the timing of this
storm was. I mean, you really, you literally could not
have picked a worse hour for this flood to happen,
you know, of the whole year, right the night before
(03:19):
fourth or really the morning of fourth of July weekend
where there's people from all over the state coming in
to celebrate the holiday. Of course, these summer camps, Camp
Mystic and others as well, where generations of people have gone,
you know, kids from you know, Austin, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio,
everywhere in between. Really really tragic and terrible, and I
(03:45):
you know, it feels like at least for me, someone
who grew up here I knew, I'd you know, probably
more than a dozen kids who you know, my cohort
who went to Camp Mystic, people who have their kids there.
Now it's like you can and it. It feels like
a smaller state right now, and in the way that
(04:05):
even I've never really experienced in a tragedy like this,
where it just like everywhere you look you feel like
you know or hear about someone you know who's been
affected by this.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
I mean, I think part I mean to talk about,
like the July fourth of it all, Like part of
what has stuck with me from you know, being out
there and going to these press conferences out there and stuff,
is that we actually don't even know how many people
are missing because so many people were visiting the area
for the fourth of July. They were camping, they were
staying in RVs. I mean, horrifyingly, the county they've set
(04:37):
up a tip lined if you're missing someone you know,
they're dealing with prank calls or dealing with scam calls.
They're dealing with people who you know, don't know if
their loved one was there.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
It's like it's.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
Hard to imagine for that area, like a busier weekend
and a sort of more you know, a more difficult
weekend to try to like get an accounting of who
was there.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah. I think, you know, we will continue to learn
more about that, you know, in the days and weeks
to come, for sure. Matt, I want to ask you,
let's start just by talking about the storm, Like, what
explain to us just the weather phenomenon that happened here? Yeah?
What like yeah, really, like, how how did this happen?
(05:19):
Just from a meteor meteorological perspective.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, it is a tough one to talk about. You know,
it's interesting having gone through Harvey, even in Houston, and
then seeing this, this is just a whole other level
and it's it makes the scientific aspect of it just
it's hard to dissociate, right, So, but we have to
kind of talk about these things to understand why these
things happen. So, you know, Central Texas is not immune
(05:46):
to flooding. I mean, it's one of the most probe
places in America. There's a long, long history and oftentimes
what ends up happening is you get some sort of
remnant of some tropical system that ends up wandering its
way into Texas. And that's what happened in this particular
case with the remnants of tropical storm Berry. I mean,
(06:06):
Barry was a tropical storm for literally twelve hours. That is,
it made landfall in Mexico the weekend before the fourth
of July and just kind of took its time. He
entered up through Mexico and ended up in Texas, you know,
rate on Wednesday and into Thursday, and you had basically
first you know, that tropical remnant ends up being sort
(06:27):
of the focal point for allowing showers and thunderstorms to develop.
You've got all this moisture coming in off the Gulf,
so the atmosphere is completely saturated. You've got the terrain
that contributes to all this. This is why flash flood
Alley is called what it is because the Balcone's escarpment,
it basically forces the air up. Right. You need to
(06:49):
get to get thunderstorms, you need rising air. And what
you're doing is is winds come out of the South.
They're being forced up the terrain in hill country. And
what it does is that adds a little bit more
energy to the whole thing. And then on top of that,
we had a couple of disturbances. We had I think
what we call a mesoscale convectivete vorticy that was involved
(07:10):
in all this as well, and those act to kind
of further enhance the rainfall. And it was just kind
of like a horribly perfect combination of meteorological elements to
allow for heavy rainfall, and not over a tremendously wide area,
but very localized. Right, That's what ends up happening in
these situations. It's not it's not like a harvey where
(07:32):
so many places get you know, inundated. This is more
of a localized type phenomena where you know, you get
these smaller pockets of really high rainfall amounts interspersed with
something more manageable, like a one to four inch type rainfall,
and those are just notoriously very difficult to forecast.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah, I mean, that was gonna be my next question,
and we can get into the question of the National
Weather Service here in a little bit before we talk
about that. I just I wonder if you could help
me understand whether this came as a surprise, right, Like
I feel like just from my own experience, we knew
it was probably going to rain on fourth of July.
But at least I maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention,
(08:11):
was not expecting this right even in Austin, you know,
one hundred miles away or whatever. It rained basically constantly.
Did we see this level of precipitation, this type of
storm coming ahead of time?
Speaker 2 (08:30):
So the answer is yes and no. We did know
that it was going to rain over that time period.
You know, if you go back and look at the
forecast discussions and you look at the modeling in the
days kind of leading up to the fourth of July,
there was definitely a signal that there were going to
be showers and thunderstorms. You know, initially it didn't look
necessarily like anything abnormal, you know, what we typically would
expect in Texas in summertime. As we got into Wednesday
(08:52):
and Thursday and we got into what we call these
higher resolution models. So you've got these global models that
you always hear about, the American model, europe model, things
like that. Those help us to kind of plan ahead
of time. But then when you get kind of into
the nitty gritty of a weather event, you start to
transition to these higher resolution what we call convection allowing models.
They can forecast thunderstorms, and so as we went into
(09:13):
Wednesday night and Thursday, those models actually started to escalate
the rainfall totals a little more. So you started to
see maybe instead of you know, two to four inches
or a little bit more, maybe you saw five or
six inches in a morning run, and then by afternoon
that was up to like six or ten inches, and
then by evening that had escalated to like ten to
fifteen inches. And it wasn't over a wide area again,
(09:34):
it was just kind of an isolated spot. So the
answer to the question is we didn't have a ton
of lead time, but you had to be paying attention
on Thursday to understand what was going on. And that's
what we saw kind of the National Weather Service catching
up with were these models. They started to expand flood watches,
they started to escalate messaging, and we saw more and
more of that throughout the day on Thursday and especially
(09:56):
into the evening. You know, the challenge is with a
system like this is that you have, like when it
comes like a Harvey, you've got a very defined system, right,
You've got you know, there's a remnant rate there. It's
so well defined, it's going to dump rain over a
large area. In these situations, you have a signal that says,
everybody's gonna get rain. It's going to be heavy. We
(10:18):
get heavy rain all the time in Texas, right, so
you don't necessarily think much of it. But then as
we got into Wednesday and Thursday and some of these
higher resolution models started to up the ante a little bit,
it started to be like, Okay, well, there's going to
be heavy rain, but there might be some pockets that
see some really heavy rain that you know, cause problems.
But the problem is we're not The science is not
(10:39):
there yet to tell you exactly where and exactly how
much it's going to fall. And we got a long
way to go before we get there as a field
of science. And that's really where the challenge is is
messaging that to people to say, like, over a you know,
two hundred square mile area, there could be a pocket
that sees ten to fifteen inches of rainfall. Is that
(11:00):
a helpful forecast? I don't know, but at least we
should hopefully get people paying attention.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
I was just guys, like, how much of this is
dependent on other factors, like the fact that we've been
in a drought for so long. I mean, are there
things going even going into this summer. Let's say you
could have said, like if we did get a lot
of rain, it's going to be really bad.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Yeah. The phrase that we say is droughts and in floods, right,
and you know, there's been such a long term drought
across Central Texas and West Texas, you know, and for
parts of West tests It. You know, it kind of continues.
It's it's never a given though, right, you know, we've
been in drought for so long to continue going into
(11:41):
the summer and into the fall and into next year
for all we know, you know. So there's really not
a whole lot that you can say, but I will
say that I'm sure that the drier ground, you know,
probably acted to speed up the runoff a little bit
and and kind of force more of that water into
the into the river with a little bit more speed,
and that probably contributed to why it rose so quickly.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Just to add on to what Eleanor was asking, is
how extraordinary of a weather event was this? I mean,
we we all know, we've all heard about how this
region is very prone to flooding. Is this a circumstance
where something you know, once in a hundred or you know,
whatever years happened, or is this a fairly you know,
(12:25):
I mean, I know it's an extraordinary flood, but how
extraordinary was it?
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Yeah? In the grand scheme of things, it fits. It
fits the climate, right, you know, you expect to see
this sort of flood on these rivers, you know, every
so often. You know, we talk about the return periods.
It could be you know, one hundred years, five hundred years,
one thousand years, whatever that is, you know, and that
all that's doing is saying that in any given year,
this is a percent chance that you have of seeing
(12:51):
a flood of one hundred year flood of be you
have a one percent chance in any given year of
seeing that. So that doesn't mean that you're only going
to get one every one hundred years. You could get
five in a row. Right, It's just it becomes kind
of the law of averages at that point. But I
mean that, you know, I've read a book called Flash
Floods in Texas and it basically summarizes a lot of
the historical floods that have occurred across the state, but
(13:14):
in particular in hill country in central Texas. So there's
there's a long, long history of it there. I think
what probably makes this well, what makes this a little
unique obviously as the human toll, right, I mean, there's
just no kind of getting around that that that this
was just an extraordinary event from that magnitude. You don't
expect this to be happening in twenty twenty five. You know,
(13:35):
we've got a lot of good forecasting at this point.
Nothing really you know, a lot of things don't surprise
us like they used to one hundred hundred and fifty
years ago. But you know, obviously we still do have
issues with forecasting. So you know, the human toll about
was was certainly a you know, a unique factor of
all this, but you know, it fits the bill. But
(13:57):
it was also worse than what I think is tipic.
This is definitely a you know, at top tier flood
historically for Texas, just in and of itself, if you
even take the human toll out of it. You know,
we set some flooding records on parts of the rivers there.
You know, it was also a multi day flood, you know,
obviously getting less attention with some of the other flooding,
(14:18):
some of the other flooding that occurred elsewhere in Central Texas,
so you know, the subsequent day and things like that.
So overall, this was a pretty high end rainfall event,
one that we really haven't seen in a while in
this part of this part of the state.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
So let's let's go into the National Weather Service question.
Of course, you mentioned the forecast sort of evolved over time.
It was a hard thing to predict. There were a
lot of questions immediately after this happened about whether the
budget cuts that the National Weather Service face had an
impact on this. We got some data on the on
(14:54):
the Saturday after the flooding, basically saying that in San
Angelo there were four vacant in that office out of
twenty three positions. San Antonio had six vacancies out of
twenty six. But the people in and who used to
work at the National Weather Service seemed to suggest that
that was enough to do what they needed to do.
(15:14):
That day, you wrote on the eyewall, we have seen
absolutely nothing to suggest current staffing or budget issues within
NAA and the NWS played any role at all in
this event. Tell us a little bit about what led
you to that conclusion.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, there were a couple of things. Number One, I
think if you look back at the timeliness of the
warnings that were issued by the forecast Office, particularly in
San Antonio, it was within what I would have expected
to see for a flooding about of this magnitude they
were issued. He had discussions that were issued throughout the
(15:51):
evening from the Weather Prediction Center in Washington, d C.
That had talked about escalating rainfall risk and the potential
for very high in totals. You know, basically the playbook
played out what we've seen historically from from National Weather
Service offices and these sorts of events, you know, and
(16:11):
then looking at the staffing levels, you know, as you noted,
it's not that abnormal. You know, certainly there's there's a
few vacant positions, but there's always been a few vacant positions.
If you come down the road to a place like Houston,
that certainly made the news lately, you know that office
has a number of additional vacancies relative to the San
Antonio and San Angelo offices, so compared to some of
(16:33):
the other local offices across the agency, they were actually
pretty well off all things considered in terms of staffing,
and they did bring in extra staffing as they would
for for a higher end weather event ahead of time.
So to me, it sounds everything sounds as if they
were equipped with adequate numbers of people, The warnings were timely,
(16:54):
whether they were received or not as a whole their discussion,
but when they produced them, from the meteorological side of
things and from the procedural side of things, based on
what I know from the National Weather Service and knowing
a lot of people that work at these various different offices,
from there, it seemed totally normal, which is I think
(17:16):
a frustrating answer for a lot of people, but I
think it's the reality of it all, and I think
we just have to kind of be honest about that
in this situation.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Yeah, our story on Saturday had the timeline of the alerts,
and I'm just going to run through it really quickly
because I think it is fairly instructive for a few
different reasons. So, there was a floodwatch issued on Wednesday
at one eighteen pm. At one fourteen am Thursday, so
about twelve hours later, that was upgraded to a warning.
There was a flash flooding emergency issue, which I understand
(17:47):
is sort of like the highest level of emergency warning
at four h three am on Thursday morning, the river,
according to the gauges, really started to rise at around
five am. At five am it was one point eight
feet deep. By six am it was twenty feet. By
(18:08):
six forty five it was up to thirty four point
twenty nine feet. So you're talking about just a massive
rise in a very short period of time. Twenty feet
by the way, I believe it's like sort of the
flood stage major flood. So yeah, major flood stage, and
so a very fast increase. But you know from the
emergency warning to that major flood stage you're talking about
(18:30):
like you know, over an hour, maybe even in the
two hour range, right.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
I mean I think also, and I've seen a lot
of discussion about this, and I think it's like.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
It's it's not partisan, it's not political.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
It's a piece of this that's like these warnings are
often very hard to They're not written in plain language,
they're hard to understand, They're hard to know, like what's
the one we are supposed to activate on even here
in Austin, like on Saturday, so after like we're hearing
this horror, you know, like the horrible flooding that.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Has had happened.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
We were getting these alerts, and it was like, how
seriously do we have to take that?
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Right?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Is this really like get off the road.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
But then when I was in Kerrville, they started sitting
out there was a point on Sunday evening where the
water the rains, the rain came back and they were
preparing for the water to rise again, and they sent
like a very very plain language alert that was like
flooding expected, get to high ground now. And I was
so I'm curious to see going forward from this, like
is are we going to see more plain language arguably
(19:29):
more useful push alerts?
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah? I mean, and then the other obvious thing about here,
you know you talk about that, and I think it's
a really good point, right the I think there might
be a little bit of a like alert fatigueta two.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
Since alerts, we've all.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Been in that situation where at like three am in
the morning, our phone goes off and we like look
and it's like an amber alert and Amarillo like eight
hundred miles away or whatever, and it's like I can't
believe you, like go.
Speaker 4 (19:53):
To my window and look for a white Chevy or whatever,
like that's not right.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
It's new sense.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Alerts and and in a dai that I think there
are a lot of people, again, like we said, who
were not from that area and might not be as
familiar of like what flooding means in that area and
what to do when the time comes. And also it
was the middle of the night and people might have
been asleep, and I think all those things sort of
come together to create a problem. I think the question
(20:20):
is particularly around the summer camps or some of these
areas where you know, you know, the thing that kind
of sticks with me, that has I kind of keep
going back to is the county Judge Paul Kerr saying
on Saturday morning, this is the most dangerous river valley
in the United States. We get these floods all the time, right.
(20:42):
I think the question that a lot of people are
asking is like, if we get these floods all the time,
if we know that this danger is there, it's not
the National Weather Services job to evacuate people, right, It's
the National Weather Services job to give people the information
they need. Why weren't the systems in place to keep
(21:03):
people safe from this, you know, somewhat inevitable type of emergency?
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Right?
Speaker 4 (21:10):
And we talk a lot about and correctly, there's a
lot of talk right now about sirens and warning systems
and all that, but it's also not the National Weather
Service job to say, like don't build so close to
the river.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
Don't you know? Like where should where? Should you have
these limits?
Speaker 4 (21:22):
Like I'm not a scientist, I don't know, but it
does raise all these questions.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Matt.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
I'm curious from your perspective, where you see the let's
say room, where you see the room for change from
all of this, what do you think the pivot point
should be.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, this is an opportunity to talk about a lot
of different things. So, first of all, from the National
Weather Service side of things, I think that the warnings
do need to be improved in terms of the language
that is used. Right there's a standard format. It's been
improved over the years, but it's not perfect. Obviously. One
of the interesting things is the National Weather Services, an
agency in the last you know, ten to fifteen years,
has an invested hea in doing a lot of social
(22:02):
science research and bringing in social scientists to help them
craft messaging that is more useful to end users. It's
something that they recognized. I think a lot of This
came in the wake of you know, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy,
the twenty eleven tornado outbreak in the Southeast. All these
things kind of led to a real watershed moment and like,
(22:24):
how can we do this better? What are we missing?
And so they've invested heavily in that. They're doing a
lot of work and there's a lot of research on
the pipeline on that as well, which kind of I
think we could pivot into a conversation about proposed budget
cuts and things like that, but you know, I'll save
that for now. That that's definitely a topic of concern,
but it's important. You know, we always say as meteorologists
(22:46):
that no forecast has any value whatsoever unless you give
that value to an end user. So no warning has
any value unless the person receiving it knows what to
do about it. I do think that, you know, living
in Texas, we do deal with flash flooding a lot.
We get a lot of flash flood warnings every year,
you know, we here in Houston. Happens all the time
(23:07):
because we get a lot of street flooding, we get
a lot of nuisance floodings. Flooding that says, hey, you know,
maybe don't go out, Maybe don't go to your doctor's
appointment right now and reschedule it or or something like that.
Don't go to the grocery store. So I think the
question that maybe we need to ask ourselves is do
we need to kind of raise that threshold a little
bit to say, like, Okay, if you're going to issue
a flash flood warning, maybe we do it when it's
(23:29):
something a little more significant. I think the flash flood
emergency is the right way to go. Clearly that was
issued in a very timely manner, but clearly that didn't
necessarily matter. You know. I know as a meteorologists, when
a flash flood emergency is issued for any location, that's
a big deal. They don't issue those lightly. Those are
not handed out like candy. You know. Flash flood warning,
(23:51):
severe thunderstorm warnings, even to some extent tornado warnings, there's
a little bit of more pad that's built into them
to be like, okay, well maybe this could you know,
do something. You know, and there's there's definitely a little
bit of a false alarm rate, but when you get
to the emergency level that there's no questioning that whatsoever.
That's a big deal, and those are only reserved for
(24:11):
the highest end cases. So I guess the questions I
would ask, are you know, do end users know that?
You know? Obviously does the public know that? I don't
know that the public does. But at the same time
as the public's responsibility to know that is that more
on the emergency managers in the location. But then you
have a location that's a little more rural and doesn't
(24:32):
necessarily have the resources that you know, a Houston or
an Austin or a Dallas has, you know, can they
do that? You know, the National Weather Service does a
ton of outreach and a ton of work with emergency managers,
but you know, is it enough? Do we need to
be doing more? So I think there are all reasonable
questions to ask kind of in the wake of this,
and there's obviously room for improvement. But ultimately, in the end,
(24:56):
it's it's a horrific tragedy that you know, hit in
the middle of night. Like you said, the top the
worst possible time. I mean, this is like the worst
nightmare for any forecast or seeing something like this, obviously,
you know, impacting families, It's the worst possible nightmare you
can think of. So you know, I think there's an
element of that that's at play here too. It's just,
(25:18):
you know, some of it is unavoidable, but some of
it certainly is avoidable. And I think that that that's
a conversation that needs to happen.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the Oregon coast.
My wife has family up there. We go and we
visit Seaside, Oregon, and there it is well known up
there that there is a fault line, you know, out
in the ocean where there is going to be a
major earthquake sometime in the next hundred years, and that
major earthquake is going to create a tsunami that is
(25:45):
going to wash over Seaside Oregon, and it's extremely dangerous.
There's a New Yorker article that you should read about it.
It's terrifying crazy. But if you go, if you visit Seaside,
Oregon or any of the towns along the coast, every airbnb,
every hotel, there's a posting on the door that says,
(26:06):
this is going to happen, and this is what you
need to do when it does happen. Here's the evacuation
route to get to higher ground. Here's where there's like
food stored on this hill and like all these different
types of things, right, and like I'm thinking about like again,
like all these people on the Guadaloupe who are from
Dallas and Houston and might not even have heard the
term flash flood alley, you know, if they had, if
(26:30):
there had been some kind of requirement, some kind of
like posting there's signs everywhere in this rural Oregon town
of like evacuation route, et cetera, et cetera, like it
might have helped people understand what to what to kind
of make of these alerts and these warnings and not
just kind of wonder like should I get in my car?
Is it safe to get in my car? Like all
(26:51):
those different types of things.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
I think like this is a big part of it
is just like you know, I think a lot of
people were there not knowing s flash flood alley. They
come in from Houston, where they get a flash flood alert.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
All the time.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
Meaning some part of this giant county is like maybe
gonna get you know that that has poor drainage is
gonna you know, deal with flooded out overpasses. Like I'm
one of those, Like I mean, people keep saying like,
I can't believe people don't know what these alerts mean.
I don't know which one is tornado watch, which one's
tornado warning.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
I just like, uh, assume either way. I'm sort of cooked.
But like this is I think there's maybe on the.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
Part of you know, the experts writ large, whoever, you know,
even like the people who are creating these alerts, people
who are results for implementing this, like a little bit
of a lack of awareness about like how much people
don't know and certainly like what they're sort of walking into.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
And yeah, and then I think like you would hope
that there would be an awareness of the most vulnerable areas, right,
like like a summer camp where you know the it's
going to take a herculean effort at any point to
evacuate that whole group, right, And like what kind of
plans and things are you going to have in motion
(28:05):
when a place like that is endangered? And I think
we're still trying to get some answers from folks about
what exactly, if anything was done, but a lot of
the answers from the local officials so far have been
sort of like, you know, that's not what we do
or used to do. And I think there's going to
be a lot of questions about whether that needs to change.
Speaker 4 (28:26):
Right if you think about the last time there was
a flood of this, I mean not even of this scale,
but a flood like this was nineteen eighty seven, Like
most people were not.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
You know, many people were not alive.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Then.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
I shouldn't say most, feel many people were not alive
then they were not, like you know, sort of maybe
aware of this. They're not making plans based on like
the memory of that, and for what it's worth in
this situation, like a big takeaway from nineteen eighty seven
flood was that the people who died were those who
were on buses evacuating. And so it's sort of a
you know, I understand the paralysis you might face of
(28:59):
do we evacuate or do we stay put? Of Like
that's a really really difficult decision. A lot of questions now,
I mean, obviously still about how early they knew, should
are there things they could done earlier?
Speaker 3 (29:11):
Of course, but Matt, you know.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Go ahead, Yeah, I was just gonna say, I mean,
think about also how many people have moved to Texas
in recent years, and particularly in Austin area, in the
San Antonio area, in the Houston area, they don't They
don't necessarily know anything about hurricanes. They don't know anything
about flash flooding. They may have moved from a dry
part of the country to come to Texas, and so
there's there's there's a learning curve in the state that
(29:35):
you know. I don't know that anybody when you move
to Texas. There's no welcome guide waiting for you to explain.
These are your risks, this is your concern. I'll never forget.
I was attending a talk from Jim Blackburn down at
Rice University, and and he was saying how once upon
a time they had wanted to put markers up near
the near the Bay in the Houston area to show
(29:57):
how high the water could get during a storm sturge
during a certain category level storm. But a lot of
real estate folks and development folks didn't really like that
because you see that and you're like, oh, that's not good,
and so they stopped doing it. Right, So I think
there really needs to be we got to be honest
with ourselves after this about where we live. Fine, that
(30:19):
we live somewhere that is extremely vulnerable, but we have
to be honest about the risks and understanding those risks,
and really, you know, as Texans, particularly those that have
been here for a while, helping newcomers to understand those
risks as well.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
Right, I mean I just briefly, like when I was
in Kirk County, Like I first of all, to your
point about people moving here. Our editors were like, ask
people what they remember the nineteen eighty seven flood, and
I didn't meet one person who lived in Kirk County
during the nineteen eighty seven flood. But also when I
was leaving, you know, it was the rain had stopped it,
the flood waters had receded, but I missed a turn
onto the highway leaving the county or leaving Kerville, and
(30:56):
Google Map just automatically rerouted me on like a real
back road that was through all these counties that had
gotten flooded.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
And then no point was like also.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
By the way, like these are low roads, you're going
to be driving through it, like there was nowhere to
turn around. I was kind of like if I had
had to evacuate Kirk County in a hurry and I
missed the one turn onto the highway that I needed
to be on I would have been driving directly into
you know, into a disaster. And so I think we're
we leave a lot to the individual to sort of
figure out. And I mean, I don't know what a
scaled solution to that looks like, but it's just a reality.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Yeah, And I mean I think there is a big
question that state and local leaders and I you know,
national leaders as well, are going to need to face about,
like what kind of investment do we have in our
emergency management resources. I think one thing that's like slightly
frustrating to me is we in the media and just
as society as a whole, we all sort of something
(31:49):
terrible happens and we talk about like what they should
have known about that terrible thing, and like why invests
in all that? And then the next terrible thing happens
and we haven't talked at all about that one. You know,
what kind of effort, you know, in a state where
there's been a lot of extra money lately, there's an
awareness that climate change might be making these things worse.
(32:11):
What kind of investment do we need to make as
a state to really look at individual communities and what
their risks are in order to prevent You know, bad
things are going to happen, but how can we minimize
the damage of those bad things to the extent that's
that's reasonable?
Speaker 3 (32:27):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
One thing I would ask you, Matt, is that you
know this Governor Abbot has indicated that this will be
something that they will talk about during the special session
on starting July twenty first, there's been some conversation in
the Senate about, you know, investing some money in sirens
in rural areas that are prone to flooding. What would
(32:49):
you tell the legislature to invest in and think about
in this moment.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
I think that there's always after a disaster, there is
a a tendency or a desire that we have to
do something. We have to do something, and we have
to show that we're doing something. And that's that right.
It's not always the best solution. It's it's kind of like, hey,
we look, we did something. After the fact, we can
pat ourselves on the back that you know, hey, we
(33:15):
did something. I think that this is a discussion that
is nuanced. Everything is nuanced, right. We we live in
a society and in a time of society where nuanced
doesn't necessarily get the time of day that it should.
But this is a very nuanced discussion that has to
happen because every part of Texas is different. The needs
(33:35):
in Houston are far different than the needs in Krek County,
than the needs of the Panhandle, you know, and on
and on. So I think it's important for the legislature
to act, but to do so deliberately, and if that
takes a little extra time, I think that's okay. And
you know, I think that you know, just based on
(33:57):
how you know, we interact with people, just ourselves as
meteorologists and forecasters. What one thing that people really like
about the way we do is we talk to them
very plainly, like we're not trying to pretend like we're
above them, like we're one of them, right, And I
think that too often when you get into these political issues,
like a lot of times this ends up being it
(34:18):
just ends up being a political issue and it goes
through the political process, and to some extent, yeah, that
has to happen. But at the same time, I think
that more people in the state would be appreciative if
this is a well thought out plan, so we're not
just throwing resources of the problem to say, we're throwing
resources the problem, right. I know there was the build
that was proposed in the main session that was talking about,
(34:40):
you know, upgrades to emergency management, emergency communication and things
like that. I think it was the representative from Canadian
that had proposed that in the wake of the smoke
house fire out there. And these are great ideas. We
just need to make sure that they work for the
people that live in these places and the people that
visit these places, right, And that requires a lot of
(35:01):
community input, and I think it requires really a united
effort at the state, local, and federal level to some extent.
You know. However, that's possible now to do that, to
implement that, and to come forth with a solution that
is vetted and works, because there's no one answer to
this problem. It's not like you install sirens. If you
(35:22):
would installed sirens five years ago, there's no guarantee that
you wouldn't have had a catastrophic death hole this time.
It probably would have lowered it, It probably would have
helped a lot, but it may not be the magic
bullet that everyone's looking for. Right, So we really do
need to think about these things in a depth that
sometimes the political process doesn't have.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Time for I have a question which you might not
know the answer to, and so if you don't apologize,
But we talk about this idea that the Hill country,
this area is the most dangerous area for flash flanding
in the country. How much of that is because of
the specific terrain and way there, and how much of
(36:01):
it is is it due to other factors? Right? Like
I think about like the fact that you know, in
unincorporated areas of Texas you can build wherever you want to,
and and some of those things like is Texas Is
this part of Texas uniquely situated geographically to be prone
to flash floods or is there something else going on
(36:24):
that's making it more dangerous for for people?
Speaker 2 (36:28):
No, it is. It is a geographic and geological and
meteorological combination of factors. That's that's why the term flash
flown alley has been around for a long time. It's
it's you know, you just it is hits in a
spot that is uniquely situated to kind of have the
wrong combination of elements come together in very relatively frequent,
(36:50):
you know, time periods. It happens a lot over history. It's,
you know, not something that's going to happen every year,
but every few years you're going to have something that
that that happens there. And the thing that kind of
unnerves me a little bit is, you know, that's not changing,
and if anything, as we talk about with climate change,
you know, the rate, the rate of the rain that
falls is going to increase more. Right. We saw rainfall
(37:12):
rates during these storms of like five or six inches
an hour. That's what we had during Harvey and Houston.
So I mean, you know, this was just an incredible
rainfall event. And what unnerves me is that we've got
a lot of people moving to this place. So not
only was the risk already there and people already vulnerable,
(37:33):
now a whole lot more people are vulnerable. And a
lot of what we've done in terms of infrastructure and
building is based on what the world was like in
the nineteen fifties to the nineteen eighties, right, and in
the same world that it was then today by any
stretch of the imagination. So I think that going back
(37:54):
to the whole idea of being nuanced about what we
need to do, I think that plays a big role
in it, because so much has changed, and I think
that there's there's a backlog of things that probably need
to be addressed. I don't know what those are, but
it's a lot. It's a big, big issue, and you know,
I see it as it's an insurance policy on ourselves.
That's really what we're talking about here, and to keep
(38:16):
Texas thriving and moving forward, you need to invest in
that insurance policy.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, it just feels like in the coastal areas you
have this sort of whole infrastructure set up to be
prepared for hurricanes, and it doesn't prevent everything bad that
could come from a hurricane, but it feels like maybe
there's a conversation we need to have in this region
about building up a similar type of infrastructure around floods
(38:41):
as well.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
It does seem like these floods and like for an
area called flash flood Alley, like you know, like you said,
like we've built up like evacuation routes and infrastructure on
the coast a little bit more for hurricanes in tornado
prone areas, we have tornado sirens.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
You know.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
I think.
Speaker 4 (38:57):
This hopefully, you know what will spark a conversation about
like what what can be different to your point, Matt, like,
is it do we rush in and do something and
solve this little problem and install sirens, and then you know,
it turns out the you know, we sort of missed
that the bigger point, the bigger issue that I wouldn't
accuse the text legislature of doing that, but you know,
(39:17):
it is a thing a legislative body could do in
the you know, excitement of trying to do something.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
And really it's just human nature, right. It's human nature
to number one, want to blame something or someone, right,
and it's number two to come up with a solution
to say, hey, we did something so we can pat
ourselves on the back and feel good that we addressed
whatever the issue was that that happened in the first place.
So that's why I you know, I really do think
I really hope that this is a conversation that is
(39:43):
very bipartisan in nature, because it should be. This affects
all Texans, blue, red, and purple, and you know, I
think that it's just it's an opportunity for Texas to
show itself off as a leader in Hey, look, we
had something horrible happen. We understand our risks. Now we're
working to address them and make our state even stronger
(40:03):
than it was before.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Well, our hearts go out to everyone affected. It's just
a terrible thing that's happened in our state.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
You know.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Encourage folks listening. If you want to contribute, google the
Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country. They have a
complicated website, so I think googling that Google again is
the best way to find the flood relief fun Community
Foundation of the Texas Hill Country. Hopefully we don't go
through anything like this for a long time. Matt, thank
(40:35):
you so much for taking the time to walk us through.
This has been very enlightening. Thank you to our producers,
Rob and Chris. We will talk to you all next week.
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