"Flash Flood Alley" is how the locals and weather forecasters refer to the region in Texas where more than 100 people died in fast-rising waters of the Guadalupe River in the middle of the night.
According to AccuWeather, Flash Flood Alley is "a geographic region that tracks through many of Texas’s major metropolitan areas, including San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and Waco."
Meteorologists say it's a matter of topography. The Balcones Escarpment, an inactive fault zone, forms a gentle, sloping rise in the Texas Hill Country that proves deadly when sudden storms dump one or two inches of rain in minutes.
Pete Rose, a meteorologist with the Lower Colorado River Authority, told AccuWeather, “Along with that, you have a lot of your hills and valleys that go along with that type of topography, and these hills don’t contain a lot of soil; they have very thin soil. So when rain does hit them, not much of it gets absorbed,” Rose said, adding that "water will rush down the valleys and pile into creeks and streams."
Flash Flood Alley got its nickname for a reason: Tragedies like last weekend's flooding strike the region regularly but unpredictably.
A flash flooding event occurred in 1846, which, despite the meager population of Texas at the time, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of German immigrants who had settled in New Braunfels, Texas. Contemporary accounts spoke of the Guadalupe River rising "15 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."
The tragedy was not preventable, no matter what the left is saying. Typical of the kinds of attacks by Democrats was this tweet by California state Senator Scott Wiener.
The facts are far different. "We had adequate staffing. We had adequate technology," Greg Waller, service coordination hydrologist with the National Weather Service (NWS) West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth, told The Texas Tribune.
The timeline of NWS actions makes a liar out of Wiener.
The agency issued a flood watch on Thursday afternoon, a flash flood warning by 1 a.m. on Friday (about an hour after rains started), and a flash flood emergency urging evacuations at around 4 a.m.—about an hour before the most serious flooding occurred.
There did appear to be some delays when those NWS warnings were transmitted to the public via social media by local officials.
Lanza says that the weekend's tragic deaths from the flood resulted not from inadequate advance warning, but seemingly rather from people on the ground not responding fast enough to the warnings they were receiving.
"I think we need to focus our attention on how people in these types of locations receive warnings. This seems to be where the breakdown occurred," he writes on his Substack.
The warning system had serious gaps, as there was no formal means of warning the campers on the Guadalupe River. Considering the area's history of flash flooding, the lack of a formal warning system was inexplicable.
But it's a system that existed long before Elon Musk and Donald Trump came to power. If there is to be fault given, local officials should be forced to answer some tough questions.
That's not going to happen. The narrative that DOGE cuts and Donald Trump were to blame for the tragedy is well on its way to being set.
Reason's Christian Britschgi writes, "Advance weather warnings, better local responsiveness, and more weather sirens can all reduce the death and destruction from flash floods. They can only do so much in the face of a 1,000-year flood that causes a river to rise 30 feet in a few hours in the middle of the night during the prime recreation season."
And for those looking to climb aboard the climate change bandwagon to "explain" the Texas floods, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the oracle of oracles, whose word is taken as gospel by most climate change fanatics, threw some cold water on the heated rhetoric of the greens.
"There is limited evidence and low agreement on observed climate change influences for river floods in North America."
Noted climate change skeptic Roger Pielke Jr. says the evidence is overwhelming that there is nothing unusual about the flooding.
Based on the peer-reviewed literature and observational records, there is little empirical basis to claim that extreme precipitation has increased in Flash Flood Alley (or indeed, most of North America). Similarly, there is little basis for claims that flooding has become more common or severe.
Pielke notes that while the storms that cause flash flooding are no more severe or numerous than in the past, more can be done to mitigate the death toll by creating better warning systems and finding ways to better coordinate between local and national weather service officials.
The facts of what actually occurred with the flash flooding that cost so many lives will be ignored to score political points. As a result, little will be done to improve the chances for survival of people caught in the next flash flood.
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