When a reporter demanded to know why the summer camps along the Guadalupe River weren’t evacuated before its waters reached their deadly peak on July 4, Rob Kelly, the highest-ranking local official, had a simple answer: “No one knew this kind of flood was coming.”
Why not?
Kerr County, Texas, had lots of history to go on — as Judge Kelly went on to explain: “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.” The National Weather Service had even brought in extra staff that night. Most important, the service had issued three increasingly dire warnings early that morning — at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m. and 6:06 a.m.
What Kelly didn’t mention, but which has since become well known, is that the weather service employee whose job it was to make sure those warnings got traction — Paul Yura, the long-serving meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination” — had recently taken an unplanned early retirement amid cuts pushed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was not replaced.
To a Washington bean counter, his loss might have looked like one tiny but welcome subtraction in a giant spreadsheet, but not in a region so prone to these perilous events that it’s known as Flash Flood Alley. Hundreds of kids at summer camps slept in cabins along the river. The plan was for folks at the upstream camps to send word to the downstream camps if floodwaters got scary. But if even the highest official in the county wasn’t on high alert, how were the camp counselors supposed to understand the danger — or, in an area without reliable cellphone coverage, to act on it?
Chain saw
Few would dispute that the federal bureaucracy was, and still is, in need of reform. But instead of a targeted, smart and strategic intervention, DOGE brought a chain saw to vital government services, pushing large, indiscriminate cuts with little consideration for the expertise that longtime employees offered or the importance of the functions they performed. It’s not hard to understand why many experienced civil servants like Yura, especially those with private sector options, would leave under these conditions. In fact it’s remarkable any of them stayed. And of course what happened at the National Weather Service happened across a wide array of federal agencies.
Not all of the damage will be this obvious, at least not at first. Much of it will be a matter of death by a thousand cuts — systems and structures weakening and not being repaired, important but less visible jobs going undone, services that we all took for granted slowing down and even sputtering to a halt.
Disaster preparedness is among the trickiest public services.
Natural disasters happen regularly and everywhere, but they don’t happen predictably, which means being ready for them requires extra precautions: It requires a lot of people on duty even when nothing is going wrong, to ensure they will be able to act when something inevitably does. It requires expensive infrastructure that does fairly little during normal times.
That makes it a very good indicator of state capacity and wisdom. Will leaders have the foresight to prepare for outcomes that may not be top of voters’ minds? Or will preparedness fall victim to the political theater of cutting anything that can be portrayed as extravagant or redundant?
Shifting blame
Redundancy isn’t always the same as waste. That’s a lesson that Sahil Lavingia, a young digital creator, learned during his work with DOGE. He expected that as the government cleared out deadwood employees, he’d write the software to do their jobs more efficiently. To his surprise, Lavingia found himself surrounded by people who “love their jobs” and were motivated by a sense of mission.
“I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook — these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing,” he told National Public Radio. “And so I think, generally, I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was.” (After speaking with a reporter, he was promptly fired — another government employee heading back to the private sector, I guess.)
In a situation as extreme as the Kerr County flood, where the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, we can’t know for sure that things would have gone differently if Yura had still been on the job. But we do know that after the National Weather Service started sending out warnings, four hours passed before the city of Kerrville’s Police Department issued one, in a post on its Facebook page. That was 5:16 a.m. The Kerr County Sheriff’s Office posted at 5:32, again on Facebook. As late as 6:22, Kerrville City Hall was posting, also on Facebook, that “much needed rain” had swept through the region and might affect “today’s scheduled July 4th events.”
It was only at 7:32 the city posted, “If you live along the Guadalupe River, please move to higher ground immediately.” By that point, according to survivor accounts, many evacuation routes had been impassable for hours.
In the aftermath of the disaster, the Trump administration and local officials in Texas alternated between blaming the weather service and defending it. Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, credited the service with issuing early warnings, but Trump went with: “Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it. Very talented people in there and they didn’t see it.”
The head of the Texas Division of Emergency Management blamed the NWS, saying its forecasts “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.” The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, posted a detailed timeline of the agency’s actions, stating, “The National Weather Service provided over 12 hours of advance notice via the Flood Watch and over 3 hours of lead time for Flash Flood Warnings, with escalated alerts as the storm intensified.”
The problem is that complex systems are only as strong as their weakest point. The NWS was still managing to put out good forecasts. But forecasts don’t move people. Credible, timely warnings that they hear and believe do.
Resilience in critical infrastructure necessarily requires planning as well as painfully, slowly acquired knowledge, all of which can easily be made to look like waste and extravagance during regular times.
Multiple investigations show that for years, Kerr County officials hemmed and hawed about the need to create a better warning system employing radar, gauges and sirens as well as cellphone networks. They estimated it would cost about $1 million, and applied for funds from multiple state agencies. They were rejected multiple times, and “at that point we sort of dropped it,” William Rector, the head of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, recently told The Houston Chronicle.
Notification fatigue
Some residents who did get cellphone alerts reported dismissing them. Have you ever ignored an alarm on your phone for what turned out to be just rain? In Flash Flood Alley, notification fatigue is almost bound to set in at some point. This is a well-known problem in disaster management, and exactly where someone like Yura could have played a crucial role.
Warning coordinators are senior meteorologists with extensive experience assessing the local weather, including identifying when things quickly take a turn for the worse. They would have direct lines to emergency-management teams and local officials, local television and radio stations, civic institutions and leaders, all of whom could rally to make sure residents were all properly warned.
I’ve heard a lot of smart people say that given how many hundreds of kids were sleeping in summer camp bunks right by the river, and how incredibly fast the floodwaters rose, nothing could really have been done.
But at Camp Mystic, where at least 27 girls were washed away, the kids whose cabins were on just slightly higher ground all survived. Only those in the lower cabins were lost. Those lower cabins were less than a quarter of a mile away from the higher cabins.
Every moment would have counted.
Zeynep Tufekci is a New York Times columnist.