Are we ready for the next disaster?
The river flood in Texas of July 4th still haunts me.
At last count 134 have died, many of them children and the worse aspect is that over 100 are still missing.
It’s hard to imagine the grief and agony of those who are dealing with this tragedy. I know we wrote about this last week but as the thoughts and prayers of the politicians fade, folks need to be assured of action not more thoughts and prayers. The Guadalupe River has had 15 of these flash flood incidents in the recent past and its action not thoughts that are needed. This river has been called “flash flood alley.”
How do you rebuild the destroyed homes and lives when the future is uncertain?
Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, still hasn’t indicated if he will allow debate on the state’s warning system. Texas is the most disaster prone state in the country as it faces hurricanes, heat, drought, deadly floods, rising sea levels, 360 miles of coastline and has experienced 190 extreme weather events since 1980, each costing more than a billion dollars.
The city of Houston has had three 500-year floods between 2015 and 2017 and a massive winter storm in 2021 left 5 million people across the state without heat and more than 200 dead. In 2008 Hurricane Ike battered the Texas coast but spared Houston. Plans were made to protect Houston from future storms, however the “Ike Dike” 17 years later remains on the drawing board awaiting a future storm.
Texas proposes the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency, supports reclassification of carbon dioxide as a “non-pollutant” and opposes what it calls climate change initiatives. An article in the Guardian reports that 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 sirens of the sort that were fatally lacking in the Hill Country, but the plan was killed in the state senate. Half of Texas’s 254 counties have no mitigation plan in place to lessen the impact of environmental disasters.
Wes Virdell, whose Texas house district covers much of the devastated flooded area, voted against HB 13 that would have set up an alarm system of outdoor sirens to warn those campers and save lives. Three days after the tragedy he told the Texas Tribune that his experience of such grief had shaken his confidence in his decision. “I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would be different.”
Part of the Texas image of disdain for government suggests that Texas will spend a lot of money recovering from each disaster but little to avoid preparing for the next one. Perhaps, if the legislature tried harder, so many would not have died.
Closer to home, on July 17, 1942, Smethport, Pa. in 24 hours saw an almost unbelievable 34.50 inches of rain in 24 hours, and the Flash Flood of May 31, 1889, in Johnstown ranks as one of the worst in our country with over 2,200 fatalities and much of the city destroyed.
It can happen just about anywhere and anytime.
Are we ready when disaster strikes?