Roger, we have our green ribbon out, as many do around Houston and Texas for friends with kids who survived Camp Mystic and those who, along with everyone else among the 500 or so humans, didn't make it and remain missing. As days have passed and analysis (and recriminations) have emerged, some key points are getting left out.
In your post of 9/23/2023 you brought attention to the Aon report on casualty losses, https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/end-the-week-with-thb?utm_source=publication-search. That report remains one of the best out there. We all need to take it seriously. In this July 6 post you did not mention population growth, as you usually do when covering weather risks and hazards.
Population in TX has grown exponentially and along with that comes demand for recreational spaces. Our river basins have become extended, urbanized backyards of the major metro areas. They are almost exurban, especially with respect to San Antonio and Austin. Roads and development alter watersheds and affect flooding. Bad floods were bad enough when the Hill Country was thinly settled, but they are definitely worse given intense land use over the past 50 years. This is no different than what has happened in the metro areas themselves. In a geoscience household, when 4 feet of water from Harvey happens it nudges all manner of hindsight. A low-lying coastal spaghetti bowl with 30+ watersheds, faulting and subsidence, poorly maintained flood pool reservoirs, gazillions of tons of concrete surface, and a 10-fold increase in pop just within the city since 1930s is not one where flood events will be kind (especially if one moves a mere 7 feet lower than where one was before). Bad floods have and will become worse. DFW, same drill. In all of the metros, outlying areas are as bad if not worse given the kinds of land reclaimed for development. A great deal of what makes building sites attractive in TX comes with rolling, low lying creek bottoms, ravines, drainages, and so on. In the Hill Country, riverfront is premium. These are our viewsheds, our living forest areas, but they are complicated when it comes to flood management.
LBJ harnessed federal dollars to promote the network of FM roads in the Hill Country that led to vast population growth and development in a region that is lovely for its natural areas but ill-suited for the numbers of people who want to live and play there. Federal dollars for dams and power out West encouraged population growth in drought, fire, and earthquake prone areas that cannot support it. Federal dollars for development and flood management everywhere is a magnet for people in river basins and watersheds that always are trouble. Federal and state spending for infrastructure and flood management to support development in coastal locations creates hurricane moral hazards. And so on and on.
The weather attribution stuff is offensive and, to me, unethical given that it is contrived by the times and sheer lack of critical thinking. Nothing of what we face is new. Trees fall in forests - no people, no property, no one cares. Mythologizing on climate engineering is a farce. Public, taxpayer resources should be pulled from energy and other nonessential areas and corralled for thoughtful adaptation, to literally move people out of places where we shouldn't be to begin with, unless we are prepared to be self insured. I put my native S Louisiana in that camp - we can begin by wrestling with MS River control, how best to let the river channel follow its natural course west and rebuild wetlands, figuring out how to sustain an industrial shipping channel in the current waterway. A demonstration project. To me, the tragic TX floods were a symptom. We need to tackle the disease.
Thank you Dr. Pielke for the timely analysis. As a Texas resident, your article is especially informative. I have lived in Texas for 50 years without knowing about flash flood alley. I am embarrassed and dumbfounded at my lack of knowledge. I have taken my family camping several times in that area. We certainly have room for ample safety improvement. Let's get this corrected!
Well said Roger. The fact that an identical event occurred in 1987, with a higher crest even, makes the idea of placing 200 individuals in harms way, at a camp, without a warning system, nearly unconscionable.
Dear Mr. Sparks, Interesting that you find Bari Weiss to your left. She was pushed out of the New York Times because everybody there found her too far to the right. She started The Free Press so she could do real journalism, not echo the groupthink at the NYT. Which places the NYT staffers so far out in left field that they are no longer even in the stadium.
IIRC (not a given at my age!), she was pushed out for defending Free Speech. For, as you say, not being part of the GroupThink; the Cult. I'd guess Bari is a moderate Dem; maybe a wee bit left of that. But, really, I'm just guessing, so you could be right.
I'm more confident that she's a Classical Liberal (free speech, enlightenment values, etc); as am I. She just a little more left flavor of classical liberal (my guess), and I'm more of a (small "L") libertarian flavor. But, we're both still Classical Liberals, versus the CSJ Cultists.
I have lived in a pretty wealthy suburb of Chicago for decades. It has been sad to find out that so many of my Democrat friends who I long thought were Classical Liberals turned out to be fascist authoritarian types after all.
Roger, Can you help me understand the lack of evidence for an increase in extreme precipitation here and evidence for an increase in heavy precipitation in AR6 for Central North America? Metrics? Scales of space? Time? Both? Obviously out of my area but caught my attention! Thanks
Roger. You are right but off a bit and coming this soon, a bit insensitive.
We know people who know a mom in Austin who lost 8 YO daughter.
Texans are very familiar with flash flooding in arroyos in Central and West Texas; flood gauges on roads all through Hill Country and signs "Do not cross in high water"
The biggest problem is that EVEN IF warning sirens had occurred, no one knew the magnitude or the speed of the coming flood.
There was no warning from weather forecasters that "this time, a flood emergency means five times the flooding magnitude and five times faster than has ever been seen in the last 200 years"
Watch facebook video, link below. In 4 minutes, the Guadalupe is a torrent out of its banks and full of debris.
Many local people reported they have gotten 4 flood warnings this month.
(How were they to know "okay, this time" it is the really big one??)
I share and support your concern for better warning system.
But tell me the name the weather agency or forecaster who said, "This time, we mean the Guadalupe will but will get 30 feet of water in 15 minutes"
We need accurate insights and understanding in order to minimize or prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again. In short, we need "light", not "heat". Thank you for providing light!
I used to canoe down the Guadalupe River in the 70's. When it was low it was thrilling, but deadly, with tricky rapids and rocks that capsized the unwary. When it was in flood, it was a monster, bursting its banks and wrecking homes all along its length. We knew it was not to be trusted 50 years ago, and I am astonished that a church camp would bed down children on its banks.
I attended the University of Texas at Austin in the 1950s and we were fully aware of the dangers of flash floods. Before camping out, especially in the hill country, we always checked the weather forecast. If there was any doubt, we didn't camp.
Roger Pielke, Jr wrote on substack a few days ago that this phenomena has been known since at lease 1840. He wrote as follows: According to a contemporaneous 1846 account, cited in a fantastic 2006 PhD
dissertation on flooding in Texas by William Keith Guthrie, at the University of Kansas: The Guadalupe [River] would often rise fifteen feet above its normal stand after
these heavy rains, carrying with it in its swift torrent a number of large trees,
uprooted farther up the hills. Smaller brooks, ordinarily not containing flowing
water, became raging torrents which could be crossed only by swimming.
Pielke's wrote susbstack AFTER the flood. He gets on credit for "seeing" the problem.
Anyone can look at Camp Mystic. It has been there for 100 years. This is the first time houses were washed away. The 1997 flood had 10 deaths because the stupid bus driver drove through high water - which everyone should know - is an absolute wrong. Instead of having the kids walk up the hill, they loaded them onto a bus and it was driven across the crossing.
So even that event was not a flood/drowning event. It was a stupid "driving through water event". People drive through high water and die every year here in Houston. It is seriously stupid in a flood.
In fact, Texas leads the nation in flood drownings....
But the unstated facts is that most-all deaths are from stupid people driving through flood waters.
What happened on the Guad is tragic, and there are ways that things could have been better handled.
But right now, everyone is speaking as monday morning quarterback, and looking at this with 20-20 hindsight
There is not magic solution and it would be better to get the timeline and facts before people pontificate about "ya' shoulda's"
As I have noted, your friend Ryan Maue predicted this deluge days earlier (just like the LA winds in January) and no one did anything in either case.
Every story I read that day began with a variation of “flood prone area”.
If you are looking for theories how this happens I think so many people are simply beaten down by the endless drum of climate emergency that they have entered a sort of paralysis.
They seem to feel nothing can be done, we are all going to die shortly so why try?
I view this the same as what they are doing to the kids, trying to turn them all into little Gretas, slumped on the sidewalk covered in ash and boils, the wailing and lamentations constant.
Or consider Texas Feb 2021 almost grid catastrophe, why harden your gas system against cold when we KNOW that the planet is burning up and it will never be cold again?
We see this paralysis over and over again and when disaster strikes, “climate emergency” dun it, the get out of jail card, everyone is Bart Simpson saying “I didn’t do it”.
This is the DIRECT result of the narrative being allowed to proliferate and everyone who reinforces that narrative has a hand in this disaster.
Here's a radical idea – let's divert some of the [nearly useless] funding we spend on climate change modeling to improving our forecasting ability. Instead of focusing on hypothetical global phenomena fifty years from now, let's focus on getting better at predicting what's really going to happen at specific locations 2-3 days from now. A great type of convergence research for geologists, meteorologists, emergency managers and social scientists.
Let's also strongly nudge those counties without adequate warning systems to invest in them. And while we're dreaming, let's see if we can't extend the use and strengthen the enforcement of building codes. After 4 devastating tornadoes (EF- or F-4 or 5) in less than 15 years, Moore, OK, finally overcame its inertia and mandated stronger building codes. They found that the incremental added cost of construction was less than 2% of the total.
And where is today's Ernst Kiesling designing tomorrow's answer for residential flood safety?
Yup. I have complained to the Dean of the UT Jackson School that "You have 6 climate modelers. What do you need 6 for? Why do I need another research paper on "we are all going to die in hell for our hydrocarbon sins"??
These modelers need about 1/2 million per Prof per year for their computer modeling so they can tell you "you are all going to die."
That's Today's state of the art. I'd like Tomorrow's to be something like "There's a high probability that Johnson's Creek is going to experience flash flooding in three days. Secure your things and then get to a secure location."
And you're absolutely right about the money wasted on virtue signalling.
You stated “Similarly, there is little basis for claims that flooding has become more common or severe.” You used fatalities as a metric for flooding, which seems odd. The same IPCC AR6 report you quoted suggests substantial increases in heavy precipitation with less precise predictions for impact areas (as you correctly noted). Just want to understand the basis of why you think actual flooding is not a risk area.
Thanks very much for this rational and well documented explanation of this area. After living in Houston for 35 years, visiting the Guadalupe resorts often, and having many friends who sent their kids to Camp Mystic, most of us in this area are well aware of the dangerous place this area is.
I have spent the last 14 winters in FL. There are similar debates there about hurricanes. Outsiders decry the “stupidity” of locals not evacuating. I got to know a lot of intelligent locals who say the problem is that nearly all forecasts change over the time period you have to leave. Evacuating every time there’s a warning doesn’t make sense. The area most severely impacted is usually relatively small (area impacted by storm surge caused by CCW rotation), and even the last-minute forecasts, which seem to be very accurate, end up missing this surge area.
Same here. Are you going to wake up teenagers in the middle of the night to take them…where? I follow a YouTube geologist (who had some good videos on the NC floods), and he says there are only two places to build in this area: the valleys and the ridges. The sides are crumbly shale. So even building a bug out building up the slope is likely not possible.
It’s just not as simple as outsiders would like to believe.
Roger, we have our green ribbon out, as many do around Houston and Texas for friends with kids who survived Camp Mystic and those who, along with everyone else among the 500 or so humans, didn't make it and remain missing. As days have passed and analysis (and recriminations) have emerged, some key points are getting left out.
In your post of 9/23/2023 you brought attention to the Aon report on casualty losses, https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/end-the-week-with-thb?utm_source=publication-search. That report remains one of the best out there. We all need to take it seriously. In this July 6 post you did not mention population growth, as you usually do when covering weather risks and hazards.
Population in TX has grown exponentially and along with that comes demand for recreational spaces. Our river basins have become extended, urbanized backyards of the major metro areas. They are almost exurban, especially with respect to San Antonio and Austin. Roads and development alter watersheds and affect flooding. Bad floods were bad enough when the Hill Country was thinly settled, but they are definitely worse given intense land use over the past 50 years. This is no different than what has happened in the metro areas themselves. In a geoscience household, when 4 feet of water from Harvey happens it nudges all manner of hindsight. A low-lying coastal spaghetti bowl with 30+ watersheds, faulting and subsidence, poorly maintained flood pool reservoirs, gazillions of tons of concrete surface, and a 10-fold increase in pop just within the city since 1930s is not one where flood events will be kind (especially if one moves a mere 7 feet lower than where one was before). Bad floods have and will become worse. DFW, same drill. In all of the metros, outlying areas are as bad if not worse given the kinds of land reclaimed for development. A great deal of what makes building sites attractive in TX comes with rolling, low lying creek bottoms, ravines, drainages, and so on. In the Hill Country, riverfront is premium. These are our viewsheds, our living forest areas, but they are complicated when it comes to flood management.
LBJ harnessed federal dollars to promote the network of FM roads in the Hill Country that led to vast population growth and development in a region that is lovely for its natural areas but ill-suited for the numbers of people who want to live and play there. Federal dollars for dams and power out West encouraged population growth in drought, fire, and earthquake prone areas that cannot support it. Federal dollars for development and flood management everywhere is a magnet for people in river basins and watersheds that always are trouble. Federal and state spending for infrastructure and flood management to support development in coastal locations creates hurricane moral hazards. And so on and on.
The weather attribution stuff is offensive and, to me, unethical given that it is contrived by the times and sheer lack of critical thinking. Nothing of what we face is new. Trees fall in forests - no people, no property, no one cares. Mythologizing on climate engineering is a farce. Public, taxpayer resources should be pulled from energy and other nonessential areas and corralled for thoughtful adaptation, to literally move people out of places where we shouldn't be to begin with, unless we are prepared to be self insured. I put my native S Louisiana in that camp - we can begin by wrestling with MS River control, how best to let the river channel follow its natural course west and rebuild wetlands, figuring out how to sustain an industrial shipping channel in the current waterway. A demonstration project. To me, the tragic TX floods were a symptom. We need to tackle the disease.
Thank you Dr. Pielke for the timely analysis. As a Texas resident, your article is especially informative. I have lived in Texas for 50 years without knowing about flash flood alley. I am embarrassed and dumbfounded at my lack of knowledge. I have taken my family camping several times in that area. We certainly have room for ample safety improvement. Let's get this corrected!
Well said Roger. The fact that an identical event occurred in 1987, with a higher crest even, makes the idea of placing 200 individuals in harms way, at a camp, without a warning system, nearly unconscionable.
Roger,
You’re in Bari Weiss’ The Free Press this morning, with your “please don’t politicize this tragedy” message. Congratulations!
I subscribe to Bari because she is to my left. I only subscribe to people to my left, in an effort to avoid confirmation bias.
Dear Mr. Sparks, Interesting that you find Bari Weiss to your left. She was pushed out of the New York Times because everybody there found her too far to the right. She started The Free Press so she could do real journalism, not echo the groupthink at the NYT. Which places the NYT staffers so far out in left field that they are no longer even in the stadium.
IIRC (not a given at my age!), she was pushed out for defending Free Speech. For, as you say, not being part of the GroupThink; the Cult. I'd guess Bari is a moderate Dem; maybe a wee bit left of that. But, really, I'm just guessing, so you could be right.
I'm more confident that she's a Classical Liberal (free speech, enlightenment values, etc); as am I. She just a little more left flavor of classical liberal (my guess), and I'm more of a (small "L") libertarian flavor. But, we're both still Classical Liberals, versus the CSJ Cultists.
I have lived in a pretty wealthy suburb of Chicago for decades. It has been sad to find out that so many of my Democrat friends who I long thought were Classical Liberals turned out to be fascist authoritarian types after all.
Thank you for your feedback.
Roger, Can you help me understand the lack of evidence for an increase in extreme precipitation here and evidence for an increase in heavy precipitation in AR6 for Central North America? Metrics? Scales of space? Time? Both? Obviously out of my area but caught my attention! Thanks
Great Q
I will do a full post on this 👍
Roger. You are right but off a bit and coming this soon, a bit insensitive.
We know people who know a mom in Austin who lost 8 YO daughter.
Texans are very familiar with flash flooding in arroyos in Central and West Texas; flood gauges on roads all through Hill Country and signs "Do not cross in high water"
The biggest problem is that EVEN IF warning sirens had occurred, no one knew the magnitude or the speed of the coming flood.
There was no warning from weather forecasters that "this time, a flood emergency means five times the flooding magnitude and five times faster than has ever been seen in the last 200 years"
Watch facebook video, link below. In 4 minutes, the Guadalupe is a torrent out of its banks and full of debris.
Many local people reported they have gotten 4 flood warnings this month.
(How were they to know "okay, this time" it is the really big one??)
I share and support your concern for better warning system.
But tell me the name the weather agency or forecaster who said, "This time, we mean the Guadalupe will but will get 30 feet of water in 15 minutes"
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1082855037113071
The NWS, based on available data, should have issued one its rare "flash flood emergency" warnings. Details:https://www.mikesmithenterprisesblog.com/2025/07/we-didnt-know-this-flood-was-coming.html
Thanks Roger. Once again the voice of reason in a world of hyperbole.
We need accurate insights and understanding in order to minimize or prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again. In short, we need "light", not "heat". Thank you for providing light!
I used to canoe down the Guadalupe River in the 70's. When it was low it was thrilling, but deadly, with tricky rapids and rocks that capsized the unwary. When it was in flood, it was a monster, bursting its banks and wrecking homes all along its length. We knew it was not to be trusted 50 years ago, and I am astonished that a church camp would bed down children on its banks.
Thank you for such a level-headed and thoughtful post on the disaster.
I attended the University of Texas at Austin in the 1950s and we were fully aware of the dangers of flash floods. Before camping out, especially in the hill country, we always checked the weather forecast. If there was any doubt, we didn't camp.
I went to UT and everyone knows to treat dry river beds and arroyos with care and respect during rain and flood warnings.
But I have never heard of flooding like this one. And besides, the many times the Guad did flood, it did not leave it banks like this, this fast.
Watch the video.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1082855037113071
Roger Pielke, Jr wrote on substack a few days ago that this phenomena has been known since at lease 1840. He wrote as follows: According to a contemporaneous 1846 account, cited in a fantastic 2006 PhD
dissertation on flooding in Texas by William Keith Guthrie, at the University of Kansas: The Guadalupe [River] would often rise fifteen feet above its normal stand after
these heavy rains, carrying with it in its swift torrent a number of large trees,
uprooted farther up the hills. Smaller brooks, ordinarily not containing flowing
water, became raging torrents which could be crossed only by swimming.
Pielke's wrote susbstack AFTER the flood. He gets on credit for "seeing" the problem.
Anyone can look at Camp Mystic. It has been there for 100 years. This is the first time houses were washed away. The 1997 flood had 10 deaths because the stupid bus driver drove through high water - which everyone should know - is an absolute wrong. Instead of having the kids walk up the hill, they loaded them onto a bus and it was driven across the crossing.
So even that event was not a flood/drowning event. It was a stupid "driving through water event". People drive through high water and die every year here in Houston. It is seriously stupid in a flood.
In fact, Texas leads the nation in flood drownings....
But the unstated facts is that most-all deaths are from stupid people driving through flood waters.
What happened on the Guad is tragic, and there are ways that things could have been better handled.
But right now, everyone is speaking as monday morning quarterback, and looking at this with 20-20 hindsight
There is not magic solution and it would be better to get the timeline and facts before people pontificate about "ya' shoulda's"
I wrote this piece on Roger's Substack in March that explained how to prevent Camp Mystic and other future disasters of all types (tornado, tsunami, etc.). https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-texas-flash-floods
Great post Roger.
As I have noted, your friend Ryan Maue predicted this deluge days earlier (just like the LA winds in January) and no one did anything in either case.
Every story I read that day began with a variation of “flood prone area”.
If you are looking for theories how this happens I think so many people are simply beaten down by the endless drum of climate emergency that they have entered a sort of paralysis.
They seem to feel nothing can be done, we are all going to die shortly so why try?
I view this the same as what they are doing to the kids, trying to turn them all into little Gretas, slumped on the sidewalk covered in ash and boils, the wailing and lamentations constant.
Or consider Texas Feb 2021 almost grid catastrophe, why harden your gas system against cold when we KNOW that the planet is burning up and it will never be cold again?
We see this paralysis over and over again and when disaster strikes, “climate emergency” dun it, the get out of jail card, everyone is Bart Simpson saying “I didn’t do it”.
This is the DIRECT result of the narrative being allowed to proliferate and everyone who reinforces that narrative has a hand in this disaster.
All of this sickens me.
Excellent as [almost] always!
Here's a radical idea – let's divert some of the [nearly useless] funding we spend on climate change modeling to improving our forecasting ability. Instead of focusing on hypothetical global phenomena fifty years from now, let's focus on getting better at predicting what's really going to happen at specific locations 2-3 days from now. A great type of convergence research for geologists, meteorologists, emergency managers and social scientists.
Let's also strongly nudge those counties without adequate warning systems to invest in them. And while we're dreaming, let's see if we can't extend the use and strengthen the enforcement of building codes. After 4 devastating tornadoes (EF- or F-4 or 5) in less than 15 years, Moore, OK, finally overcame its inertia and mandated stronger building codes. They found that the incremental added cost of construction was less than 2% of the total.
And where is today's Ernst Kiesling designing tomorrow's answer for residential flood safety?
Yup. I have complained to the Dean of the UT Jackson School that "You have 6 climate modelers. What do you need 6 for? Why do I need another research paper on "we are all going to die in hell for our hydrocarbon sins"??
These modelers need about 1/2 million per Prof per year for their computer modeling so they can tell you "you are all going to die."
Ryan Maue on Weather Trader showed a big blob of rain hitting this area of Texas 3 days before.
Everything you want is already there. That isn’t the problem.
It’s the output of those worse than useless climate models paralyzing everyone, misalocating trillions on useless virtue signaling.
That's Today's state of the art. I'd like Tomorrow's to be something like "There's a high probability that Johnson's Creek is going to experience flash flooding in three days. Secure your things and then get to a secure location."
And you're absolutely right about the money wasted on virtue signalling.
And after the tenth warning that has no corresponding flood, everyone will ignore the warnings.
You stated “Similarly, there is little basis for claims that flooding has become more common or severe.” You used fatalities as a metric for flooding, which seems odd. The same IPCC AR6 report you quoted suggests substantial increases in heavy precipitation with less precise predictions for impact areas (as you correctly noted). Just want to understand the basis of why you think actual flooding is not a risk area.
Thanks very much for this rational and well documented explanation of this area. After living in Houston for 35 years, visiting the Guadalupe resorts often, and having many friends who sent their kids to Camp Mystic, most of us in this area are well aware of the dangerous place this area is.
I have spent the last 14 winters in FL. There are similar debates there about hurricanes. Outsiders decry the “stupidity” of locals not evacuating. I got to know a lot of intelligent locals who say the problem is that nearly all forecasts change over the time period you have to leave. Evacuating every time there’s a warning doesn’t make sense. The area most severely impacted is usually relatively small (area impacted by storm surge caused by CCW rotation), and even the last-minute forecasts, which seem to be very accurate, end up missing this surge area.
Same here. Are you going to wake up teenagers in the middle of the night to take them…where? I follow a YouTube geologist (who had some good videos on the NC floods), and he says there are only two places to build in this area: the valleys and the ridges. The sides are crumbly shale. So even building a bug out building up the slope is likely not possible.
It’s just not as simple as outsiders would like to believe.