US govt doesn't seem eager to discuss this floods fact

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.

- Zeynep Tufekci

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 (NWS) had even brought in extra staff that night.

Most important, the service had issued three increasingly dire warnings early that morning at 1.14am, 4.03am and 6.06am.

What Judge 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 (Doge). 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 children 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 counsellors supposed to understand the danger - or, in an area without reliable mobile phone coverage, to act on it?