Failure to Adapt

As communities devastated by the July Fourth floods begin the long road to recovery, Texas needs to deal systemically and holistically with the increase in extreme weather

The July Fourth floods in Texas had the nation’s highest death toll in nearly a half-century for a non-hurricane flooding event: more than 100 dead, including 27 children.

My heart — everyone’s hearts — are broken for the parents and families who are grieving. We need to do everything in our power to make sure something like this never happens again. That’s getting increasingly difficult as extreme weather events become more frequent and more dangerous.

We need to prepare for them like our children’s lives depend on it, because they do.

The Lucretius Problem

The Hill Country has a long, well-documented history of flash flooding — it’s often referred to as “Flash Flood Alley.”

But the frequency and intensity of past floods are not good predictors of what’s coming. We saw that last week, as the river’s height and flow broke the all-time records in several places.

These tragedies are so increasingly deadly, in part, due to our collective failure to imagine that they could be so much worse than what we’ve seen in the past.

In 2016, a massive wildfire hit Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada. It happened so fast that there were no evacuation orders given until a few hours before entire neighborhoods were consumed. Firefighters there — near the fire-prone boreal forest — had seen intense fires before, but nothing like this.

In his book about that fire, John Vaillant wrote:

This kind of failure, baffling, as it may be, is not unique to Fort McMurray; it is as old as human judgment. Nassim Taleb, a statistician, risk analyst, and author of Black Swan, calls it the Lucretius Problem. Named for Titus Lucretius Carus, a Roman poet and philosopher, it refers to a bug in human perception observed by Lucretius in the first century BCE … In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience.

Hundredth-percentile fire weather conditions during the hottest, driest May in recorded history, following a two-year drought … is something no Canadian firefighter or emergency manager had experienced. But this is the nature of [the] 21st century. … Authorities in California, Australia, Greece, Spain, Russia, and elsewhere have found themselves in the same situation — basing their responses on outdated concepts, on what they've already seen, instead of what … weather is capable of now. The data was there but the interpretation wasn't… (emphasis added)

Add Texas to that list. Leaders didn’t imagine that the Guadalupe River could rise so high that even sensors would stop working. Or that the state could face a freeze as cold as 2021’s Winter Storm Uri. Or that a hurricane could drop as much water as Harvey did in 2017. Or that our summers can keep getting hotter and hotter and hotter.

Yet the weather warnings are clear — they have been for years. Scientists have been telling us over and over these events will be more frequent and intense.

What are we going to do about it?

Here’s the Data

Andrew Dessler, Director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University, showed in a post this week that heavy rain “tail events” are happening with increasing frequency. This is an empirical fact: arguing against this is very much like arguing against gravity.

Tail events — from 2021’s Winter Storm Uri in 2021 to last year’s Smokehouse Creek Fire in the Texas Panhandle to last week’s floods — are 99th percentile events, the most extreme. And they’re happening more often now.

For flooding, we can see it clearly in the graph below:

It’s the tail events that matter the most. They’re the ones that take lives if we’re not prepared.

And we clearly were — and are — not prepared.

That’s partly because leaders are misinterpreting, ignoring, or — worst of all — arguing against the data.

A common refrain over the last few days (and after just about every major disaster) has been that there were big floods 100 years ago, too, so why is this different?

Science has an emphatic answer: empirically, our time is different because it’s hotter. As Dessler pointed out:

Warmer air can hold more water vapor — about 7% more for every degree Celsius increase in temperature. Consequently, the air converging into a storm system in a warmer climate carries more water vapor. Since most of the water vapor entering the storm’s updraft will fall out as rain, everything else the same, more water in the air flowing into the storm will lead to more intense rainfall. That’s it. Not terribly complicated.

Even as the intensity of these tail events is increasing, so too is frequency. Scientists studying this exact question determined that “if historical trends continue, the most intense precipitation events observed today are likely to almost double in occurrence…”

We’ve loaded the dice: the risk of intense and deadly extreme weather events is higher now than in the past. We will have more intense and more frequent flooding. And heat waves. And wildfires. And hurricanes.

Acceptance of these facts could lead to better planning and preparedness — and save lives.

Start with Infrastructure

Kerr County is the site of Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors died in the floods. The County Judge (the chief executive of the county) said the county had considered investing in an early warning system but ultimately decided against it: “Taxpayers won’t pay for it.”

Asked if voters would support such a system now, after an event that killed 89 people in his county alone, he said: “I don’t know.”

On Saturday, a state representative tweeted, “We must not allow this great tragedy to be used to grow government.” At that very moment, public agencies and government employees — including Coast Guard swimmer Scott Ruskan, who rescued 165 people during the floods — were busy saving lives.

As these events become more frequent, Texas is going to need a lot more public servants like Scott Ruskan.

The National Weather Service, which issued warnings that saved lives and might have been able to help more people but for recent layoffs, is funded by our tax dollars. So is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has also faced major cuts. So is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is already helping Texans whose lives were upended by the floods; President Trump has talked about ending FEMA altogether.

These resources — and the government employees who work there — save lives. We’re going to need more of them.

That doesn’t mean throwing money around recklessly. But it does mean understanding what the risks are — openly acknowledging once and for all that extreme weather is happening more frequently and with greater intensity, and that the risks are changing as our world is changing — and figuring out the most efficient and effective ways to prepare for those changes.

We’ve got to overcome the Lucretius Problem. And then we need to leverage both public and private sector resources to protect human lives.

The girls at Camp Mystic should not have died.

Let’s honor their memories by ensuring this never happens again.

Thank you for reading. Please consider making a donation to the Community Foundation of the Hill Country, Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid (they need both funds and volunteer attorneys), or other community-based organizations working to help people and communities recover. If you know of a charity doing exceptional work in the aftermath of the floods, please let me know in the comments. Thanks again.