The Texas Way: How Ideology and Big Oil Left State at Mercy of Nature

Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, has had plenty of consoling words to offer following the flash floods in the Hill Country that have killed more than 120 people, including 27 girls and staff at the stricken Camp Mystic.

- Ed Pilkington

"Our hearts grieve for this community and surrounding areas," he wrote on social media. "May God bring comfort to every family affected."

Amid such refrains, Abbott's response so far has been lacking in one regard: any assurance that Texas will tackle the problems that contributed to the calamity in Kerr County over the 4 July weekend, when the Guadalupe River rose by 8 meters (26ft) in 45 minutes.

Accosted by reporters, Abbott has indicated he will allow debate in the Texas legislature on the state's flood warning systems, but has given no guarantees on the outcome.

Texas lawmakers came painfully close to introducing a statewide initiative to improve emergency alerts just a few months ago. The bill, HB 13, would have set up a network of outdoor sirens of the sort that were fatally lacking in Hill Country, but the plan was canceled in the state senate, where members complained about its cost.

To observers of what might be called the "Texas way" - the singular devotion of its political leaders to rugged individualism and disdain for government action - there is a familiarity to this. Take the massive winter storm Uri that struck Texas in 2021, which brought the state's notoriously eccentric power grid to a standstill, leaving almost 5 million people without heat and more than 200 dead.

After that catastrophe, the state did make limited efforts to prepare power generators for further extreme weather, allowing Abbott to boast that "everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas." Yet four years later, the state's main grid operator, Ercot, is still warning that a repeat Uri would carry with it an 80% likelihood of rolling blackouts.