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My Family and the Flood

278 points by herbertl 1y ago

memonkey 1y ago
[flagged]
- masklinn 1y ago
  I’m sorry to report your friend is a complete dumbass. Being a democratic government does not mean you can’t be proactive and have emergency services. Does he think Switzerland has a public consultation every time there’s an avalanche? In the US the latter used to be FEMA’s job, and with respect to the former the feds allocated flood (and more generally disaster) mitigation funds, for the day decade or so Texas has systematically ignored those funds or tried to route them elsewhere, and in 2021 under ARPA the county was awarded millions which could have been used for flood alert and prevention but decided to not do any of that for political reasons, and send most of it to the PD instead.
  - gora_mohanty 1y ago
    After the 1999 super cyclone in Orissa, and the tsunami in 2004, the Indian government put together a comprehensive disaster management programme involving better weather satellites, forecasting, early warning systems, and disaster response plans including evacuation strategies with food and shelter for evacuees. The effort spans local, state, and central governments, as well as para-military forces that are deployed in an emergency. India also provides warnings to other nations, like Bangladesh, and the programme has been supported through major political changes. The results are plain to see, and in my opinion at least, put much more expensive US responses to shame. So much for a democratic government being unable to plan.
- conductr 1y ago
  I was hesitant to even comment on this, but I do have an opinion and some familiarity with this region and it’s flooding. I’m Texan and lived in the hill country for a handful of years. I once got trapped on a narrow ranch road at night and my vehicle was pushed into the ditch. I got stuck between two flooded low points then it rose even more, it wasn’t even raining when I embarked on my journey and the water only rose about 12”-18”, not even high enough to come into my stock height Chevy Silverado, but it was insane forceful. I was outside my vehicle and couldn’t stand upright once it was about 6”. I was a bit scared but it was obviously nothing compared to this. Anyways, I unfortunately believe most of the deceased likely perished within minutes of being swept away. I don’t know how any response time could beat that especially given the terrain and conditions at the time. I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system similar to tornado sirens we have up in Dallas. If people could have been woken up and moved to higher ground even with just 10 minutes notice, the death stats would be significantly lower. If I had property anywhere near this (there are other similar rivers in the region), I’d be installing something on my property right now.
  - kubb 1y ago
    What’s your opinion about letting developers build on floodplains?
    - conductr 1y ago
      I honestly think it’s a bit of a loaded question and I’m not going to opine here, my personal opinion doesn’t matter anyway
  - komali2 1y ago
    Texan as well here. > I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system similar to tornado sirens we have up in Dallas. I don't share your optimism. Where will the budget for this come from? We both know our state, and how it votes. https://apnews.com/article/texas-floods-camp-warning-system-not-funded-0845df62390b9623331ba4a030c5fc7d https://apnews.com/article/texas-floods-camp-warning-system-... We'll get the 1 million now of course, for this region, for this type of disaster, for now. In 8 years if another million is needed to upkeep the system, I don't think we'll get the funding again, unless some more kids died. Actually... maybe we won't even get the 1 million now. How many kids died at Uvalde, for example? My mom's a Texan teacher. The post Uvalde response: her principal asked her how she'd feel about carrying a handgun in school. My experience is if an issue is politicized, then Texas will make the wrong choice, every time. I have no hope for my state anymore. If you can maintain optimism, I admire you and hope you stick around, we'll need more people like you.
    - tzs 1y ago
      Here's an interesting article from a few days ago on Kerr county's efforts in recent years to address this [1]. They couldn't come up with the money on their own because apparently a lot of the residents are really into wanting to reduce property taxes and government spending: > An examination of transcripts since 2016 from Kerr County’s governing body, the commissioners court, offers a peek into a small Texas county paralyzed by two competing interests: to make one of the country’s most dangerous region for flash flooding safer and to heed to near constant calls from constituents to reduce property taxes and government waste. They did apply for a FEMA grant for this, but apparently there was an issue with the application: > By the next year, officials had sent off its application for a $731,413 grant to FEMA to help bring $976,000 worth of flood warning upgrades, including 10 high water detection systems without flashers, 20 gauges, possible outdoor sirens, and more. > “The purpose of this project is to provide Kerr County with a flood warning system,” the county wrote in its application. “The System will be utilized for mass notification to citizens about high water levels and flooding conditions throughout Kerr County.” > But the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which oversees billions of FEMA dollars designed to prevent disasters, denied the application because they didn’t have a current hazard mitigation plan. They resubmitted it, news outlets reported, but by then, priority was given to counties that had suffered damage from Hurricane Harvey. A great opportunity came in 2021 to deal with this but it was not taken: > In 2021, Kerr County was awarded a $10.2 million windfall from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, which Congress passed that same year to support local governments impacted by the pandemic. Cities and counties were given flexibility to use the money on a variety of expenses, including those related to storm-related infrastructure. Corpus Christi, for example, allocated $15 million of its ARPA funding to “rehabilitate and/or replace aging storm water infrastructure.” Waco’s McLennan County spent $868,000 on low water crossings. > Kerr County did not opt for ARPA to fund flood warning systems despite commissioners discussing such projects nearly two dozen times since 2016. In fact, a survey sent to residents about ARPA spending showed that 42% of the 180 responses wanted to reject the $10 million bonus altogether, largely on political grounds. > “I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money. > “We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.” [1] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-kerr-county-commissioners-flooding-warning/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-kerr-county-co...
- cesnja 1y ago
  A democratic government can set up an independent emergency response organization that doesn’t need government involvement to declare and respond to an emergency.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    For holders if a particular political ideology, inherent government incompetence is a deeply embedded meme that wont be undone by a single counterexample. Any example of competence has to be attached to cost to salve the cognitive dissonance.
- komali2 1y ago
  It's not just a strong central government in the PRC, technically the USA has that as well (just look at what ICE is allowed to do, and states may do nothing in return), it's also that the PRC is a single-party government, and more and more evolving into a Xi personality cult (to be fair, the General Secretary always had an extraordinary amount of influence, see Deng Xiaoping). Texas has been run by Republicans for all of living memory, and when it was given money for spending on this exact situation (flash flood warning system), it was given it by Democrats, and therefore politicized the money by spending it on police (the framing being that democrats don't want police to be funded, which is of course absurd). American bureaucracy is rendered nearly nonfunctional by overpoliticization such as this. I can't remember the last time a funding bill was being voted on that didn't result in a government shutdown or nearly so. Imagine a country's legislative body being so politicized it can't even fund the country's bureaucratic organs. Clownish behavior. Meanwhile the PRC, for all its flaws, suffers none of this oppositional politicizing. The downside is that corruption can run much deeper and essentially unchallenged so long as it serves the greater needs of the one party, among other things. The upside is that the majority of the government's power (which includes money) is spent with remarkably little waste and redirection, despite that corruption. However in the specific case of the floods it's almost certain that the CPC's propaganda arms worked overtime to make it seem like there was less death and damage from the flooding than there really was. There's a large class of "undocumented" poverty class people in the PRC that lose swaths of their populations in disasters like this and it's very easy to hide their deaths. If liberal democracies want to survive they need to be better at governing than something like the PRC or they're all going to be wiped out on the global marketplace as the PRC overcomes its historical issues and further solidifies and enriches its population and infrastructure.
a5seo 1y ago
Reading this account made me think of a paper I read in grad school about the Mann Gulch fire and how quickly one’s ability to make sense of the situation unravels. https://www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Letture%20TDPC/K.%20Weick%20-%20The%20collapse%20of%20sensemaking.pdf https://www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Letture%20TDPC/K.%20Weick%2...
- stogot 1y ago
  I think I read that in g school too. Where’d you go or what program?
markm248 1y ago
This is the most gripping thing I've ever read
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jihadjihad 1y ago
It’s a really tough read regardless, but if you’ve got young kids (or nieces/nephews), it’s downright brutal.
- lpa22 1y ago
  This was possibly the saddest piece I’ve ever read based on how it was written
Configure0251 1y ago
Absolutely devastating.
999900000999 1y ago
Reminds me a bit of A Marker on the Side of The Boat by Boa Ninh from Night, Again. There’s a bit of horrifying tension, and you hope everyone’s ok. No matter how unlikely.
PlunderBunny 1y ago
I wonder how frequently that river (and the rest of the world) will experience once-in-a-hundred-year weather events from now on.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  There are over 2000 watersheds in the US. It would be unusual if we didn’t see around 20 100-year floods every year.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    Extreme precipitation events are also getting more common.
  - tbrownaw 1y ago
    I would think they'd be correlated enough to mess up the numbers a little.
  - vikingerik 1y ago
    Right. It's the multiple-endpoints principle. The extreme events feel overly frequent because we cherry-pick and only notice them. We never notice the other 99/100 of places that don't have a hundred-year flood in a year.
- jkestner 1y ago
  At a (central Texas) city council hearing today on granting someone a variance to build tennis courts on a meadow next to a creek, a longtime resident said, “I think I’ve lived through five 500-year floods here.”
  - nocoiner 1y ago
    Where I live in Texas, we had three “500 year” events in three consecutive years, with the last one probably closer to a 1000 or 10000 year event - more rainfall in one spot than anywhere else ever measured. We’ll see how long that record holds (I’ll take the under on 1000 years).
Aeolun 1y ago
Well, that was no fun to read. I wonder if my house would survive a flood as well as it would an earthquake.
- K0balt 1y ago
  The only reliable way to survive a flood with strong currents is to not be in one. I will not live long term on land that has historically been subject to flooding, or where the site forms part of a constricted drainage. There are enough risks in life that cannot be realistically mitigated. No sense exposing your family to one day in and day out that is just a matter of choice. Unfortunately, humans are terrible about understanding probabilistic risks, and our short, brutal lives offer little opportunity to appreciate the nature of long-period risk. A “hundred year flood” means that there is a seventy percent chance that your house will be wiped away within your lifetime. It’s like choosing to be habitually reckless with fire in your home. We aren’t reckless with fire because the risk is very tangible and within our control. Long period risks are just as real and often just as much within our control, but we have to think in terms of math and not our “feeling” of security. Our instincts about safety and security are honed over millions of years to understand what is a safe Place to camp for the night. We are not intrinsically equipped to viscerally understand this kind of risk.
  - jonah 1y ago
    My parents property sits at the confluence of a creek and a river. They've built their house on a promontory that had signs of inhabitation by indigenous peoples. We had a "100-year flood" when I was growing up. It was quite impressive to wake up in the morning and see the water within six vertical feet of the house and 30 to 40 ft. of water the bottom field with entire trees floating Long.
gordon_freeman 1y ago
Reading this makes me so sad and reminded me of a book I read years ago: Hiroshima by John Hersey - about the first-person narrative account of survivors who witnessed the impact of atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima that morning.
- madaxe_again 1y ago
  Like the little boy with his skin melted off walking down the road crying for his mother… horrendous stuff.
  - Foreignborn 1y ago
    These stories always have me instantly sobbing, life can be tragically unfair.
    - whoisyc 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - christianqchung 1y ago
        What an insensitive, assumptive, stupid remark. You can't possibly know that the person you replied to behaves as you claim. It's 2025, the firebombing of Tokyo is widely recognized now, maybe not by most normies but certainly by any historical adjacent nerd.
      - madaxe_again 1y ago
        Oh, I see you don’t give a shit about Dresden?
      - theoreticalmal 1y ago
        Hey, this is kind of a rude response in an otherwise thoughtful and empathetic thread
- qingcharles 1y ago
gkanai 1y ago
I cant imagine writing this having experienced the loss the author has.
- dylan604 1y ago
  And just 10 days after the event to be released, so written earlier. Not sure of the exact date it was written as the article has an August 2025 date in the byline. Hopefully it was helpful in their grief, which with how the last half was written seems to be at least part of the intent.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
With all the debris and the water force, would it have even helped if the concrete pillars were 10 ft higher?
- nocoiner 1y ago
  Reasonable question. Yes, in that case, the house probably would have been fine. The lateral force on concrete pillars, even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily withstood.
  - brazzy 1y ago
    The very first thing in TFA is a photo of where one of the pillars was ripped from the foundation. If that happened because of the force of the water against the house on top of it, then it could also happen when a tree or other large piece of floating debris hits it.
  - KaiserPro 1y ago
    > even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily withstood. Physics is not on your side here. if it was just water, then perhaps, although I am sceptical given how much force is generated by 10foot of water moving at 18 mph, which is ~6metric tons of lateral force. (assuming 1m2 cross section.) Thats before any flotsam gets attached increasing the surface area. Sure you could build something to withstand that, but could you afford to build it?
    - acuozzo 1y ago
      > but could you afford to build it? And, if not, could you really afford to live there?
- madaxe_again 1y ago
  It would have helped if the columns were correctly tied down - those rebar stumps tell a story, which is that they did the foundation pour, left stubs, and then poured columns atop them with a cold joint. Fine if you’re doing a carport in a desert. Criminally negligent in a river floodway. For that kind of structure, you must tie the rebar in - best is to have the entire length of the rebar for the column splay at the base and be threaded through and tied into the rebar for the footing, pour the footing, and then pour the columns as soon as the footing is cured enough to support the mass, but before it’s totally hard. That way the footing and the columns form a continuous structure, without any point where they can just lift or shear off. I speak from experience, having built exactly this type of structure myself, and seeing it resist an enormous flood and a barrage of high-speed trees, unscathed. Absolute mess inside the timber structure atop, but anyone trapped within would have survived. Unfortunately what they had there was a disaster waiting to happen.
SoftTalker 1y ago
Terrible story. I've lived near a river, and never will again. And the worst I had was just 4 feet of water in the basement.
- rf15 1y ago
  I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades - largely because this area is full of rivers so any flooding is just spread thin. I feel this is mostly a drainage problem of areas where all water is channeled into a narrow area by the surrounding geography? "Narrow" being a relative term here of course, considering geological scale.
  - K0balt 1y ago
    Being fine for decades is not a useful metric, unfortunately. If you want to know, look into the last time it was flooded. If it has never flooded in the scope of human history, it’s possible that the danger of flooding is indeed not significant. If it has flooded, it will likely flood again. If it is a flood plain, it will probably flood again many, many times. Weather changes associated with climate change may exacerbate this. It would not be particularly surprising to see the variance in significant precipitation events to double, triple , or more. In any rate, climate change aside, it would not be particularly remarkable for a flood risk that aggregates to one in ten years to not flood for 50 years running, just as it would not be unexpected if some such areas flooded each year for 3 years straight. Both of those events would be consistent with patterns that would be expected to happen in the big picture. I know nothing of your situation, but if I were living within less than 100 feet of the altitude of a nearby river or sea, I would consider moving. Life is short, and in my tiny life I have been humanly connected to floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes within my direct circle of friends and family enough to internalize that these risks are not theoretical. When an existential risk can be categorically eliminated from your life, it is often worth doing.
  - peterbecich 1y ago
    A.f.a.i.k. this tragedy was preventable because the flood risk was already known: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/09/us/camp-mystic-texas-cabins.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/09/us/camp-mysti... Apparently this was disregarded.
cjcenizal 1y ago
Having children makes me feel vulnerable. They’re like extensions of myself — if they feel pain, I feel it too. To imagine one of them dying… this story broke my heart.
- disillusioned 1y ago
  My wife had been pushing me to try for kids for, well, a couple of years, and I was finally getting there. I always knew I wanted kids, or figured I did, but then reality comes: can we afford it, shouldn't we enjoy what we have a little bit longer, are we sure we want to do this, etc. Then, my friend messaged me one night and asked me to join him at the children's hospital to take a few photos as they were saying "goodbye." His 18 month old had been fighting cancer, and it was 1 in the morning and my melatonin-addled brain thought "oh, they must be taking him home." It wasn't until I walked into the room with my DSLR that I realized what he meant. In fairness, he had prefaced the request with, "do you mind if I ruin your night?" I am not even close to a professional photographer. But I tried to take as many pictures as respectfully as I could of the literal hardest moment any parents could ever hope not to have to go through. At a certain moment, it became time, and I found myself... stuck, in a sense. I was the only other one in the room aside from the parents, but I didn't feel like I could abandon them, and so I sat there as they disconnected the machines keeping their son alive. It was the most awful two minutes as the attending sat there with a stethoscope against this tiny chest. I waited until an opportune moment, and then hugged them, quietly took my leave, went home, edited the photos as quickly as possible, uploaded and sent them, and then bawled for an hour or so. Needless to say, this set back our efforts at even _trying_ for kids by about 2-3 years. Because I just was stuck by this all-encompassing thought: you can't lose what you don't have. You simply aren't open to that sort of vulnerability if you don't have children. It doesn't exist, until you form it into being. And that thought haunted me. Just like it haunts, well, every parent on some level. And to clarify: this didn't even _happen to me_. It happened to _them_, and their son. But it was a defining moment for me that made it really tough to overcome. Eventually, we did have two kids (after a miscarriage, of course, because isn't that how it goes), and they're sitting behind me watching a movie as I type this. But these sort of thoughts are always there in the background. And yeah, reading a story like this one about the flood just spears you in the soul.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Theres videos from different people as the flooding started live. It's WILD to watch what happens in a short span of time. We're talking under 30 minutes I think before it starts overtaking a bridge. The water will sweep you up and drag you around too, the random debris is what's fatal.
- anonymars 1y ago
  I watched the first couple minutes of this video (certainly wasn't going to watch 40 minutes) then skipped ahead in chunks, thinking it was clips from different locations. Then I scrubbed around and realized, no, it was the same place, which left me stunned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kYjiTEDqtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kYjiTEDqtw Make sure to watch the last 3-5 minutes or so for the cherry on top. Then I recommend skipping back to the beginning to really drive home how insane this was. I will never again be cavalier about flash flood warnings.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    That's the video! I didn't have the link, so thank you for that.
  - thedrexster 1y ago
    Jeeeeesus, thank you for that link and tip about the last few minutes; literally incredible, as in I cannot fathom.
komali2 1y ago
> Alissa would tell me, five days later, that Rosemary wanted to play “I spy” while they waited in the tree. I can't imagine a more grim version of this game as the floodwaters of the Guadalupe recede below you.
Theodores 1y ago
What astounds me is how quickly America moves on from environmental catastrophes. As an example, a huge part of Florida was pretty much devastated earlier this year but now you would never know. The electricity and other services were back up in days and all evidence of destroyed buildings gone as if the trash was just collected. If a similar extreme weather event hit the UK, that would be all you would hear about for months and there would be no instant clear up. The populace would be deeply traumatised and would not move on from the tragedy. America is different, resilient and it is rare for articles like this one to make the light of day.
- morsch 1y ago
  I'm not sure that a country being "resilient" in that manner is a good thing. It's callous towards the individuals involved, who may not be as quick to move on, emotionally or otherwise. And moving on quickly doesn't exactly encourage learning from tragedy, which really is its only upside.
- gkanai 1y ago
  Japan is similar in terms of moving on from environmental catastrophes. Due to it's geographic location, the number and severity of earthquakes and tsunamis not to mention the regular stuff like wildfires, flooding etc. there's just a lot of devastation and loss. Japan does memorialize the larger events of course and there's public memorials at annual schedules, etc.
  - bell-cot 1y ago
    Add Japan's volcanoes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#List_of_major_volcanic_eruptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#Lis... At least 3 of those are active calderas, with histories of producing VEI 7 eruptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#VEI-7_Volcanic_eruptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#VEI... A select quote: > Aira caldera is surrounded by the major city of Kagoshima which has a population of more than 900,000. Residents do not mind small eruptions because they have measures in place for protection. For example, school students are required to wear hard helmets for protection against falling debris.
MichaelRo 1y ago
Quite a few people live near riverbeds, if not all of them. I mean like, it was one of the basic requirements of a settlement to have some flowing water source nearby. And while not directly on the river bed, I've seen my share of swollen rivers in all places I lived. My grandparents had a house at the edge of the village, the river was some 200 meters from it and much lower but a few times with heavy raining, the garden was flooded and water nearly got to the house. I recall watching in awe from uphill the raging torrent and wondering how the funk could it have gotten so big from the original peaceful river. Right now, I live downstream of a 100 meters tall water dam holding 200 hectares (500 acres) of lake. If that dam breaks, it's lights out for many. You forget about it but shit happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  And sometimes shit is made to happen: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/russia-shells-flooded-ukrainian-city-hours-after-zelenskyy-visit https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/russia-shells-flooded-ukr...
- dylan604 1y ago
  Watch any movie with the settlers moving out west, and you’ll see them all right next to a river. It all makes sense as nobody likes carrying water far
NoProfession 1y ago
The mix of terrifying immediacy and raw loss is haunting, especially when you hear about people literally being swept away from shelters they trusted. It’s a stark reminder that robust early warning isn’t just technology, it’s life or death and the costs of underfunding those systems aren’t hypothetical.
phendrenad2 1y ago
One of the consequenes of our population growth, combined with our willingness to allow NIMBYs to dictate our housing policy, is that more and more new houses are built in areas that regularly experience major natural disasters. And if that isn't enough of a tragedy, these plots of land are treated as valuable when they really aren't, leading to people sinking big chunks of their net worth into what is objectively a liability.
- nop_slide 1y ago
  This was a vacation house. It had nothing to do with building/density/urbanism/policy. Its purpose was to be by the water. I am a fellow urbanist and while I see where you’re coming from this doesn’t apply at all to this situation. There’s a quote in the article talking about how the grandparents chose this house specifically for the summer memories.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Eh, there are two conflicting things here. The land is valuable as entertainment space. Such as temporary camping, hiking, fishing, and other outdoor activities. It is quite beautiful land. Conversely there are also plots of land that are not valuable along the water where there is little natural beauty which leads to lower land prices, hence people setting up things like mobile homes and RVs as places to live that are less expensive options.
maltris 1y ago
Being the parent of a child in the boys age, this was incredibly hard to read. I started yesterday, stopped half way through, could not sleep at first, woke up in the morning to finish the story. To me, as a non-native english speaker, the story is very well written to paint an extensive picture of the events unfolding as well of the environment, which made it much more frightening.

278 points by herbertl 1y ago

memonkey 1y ago

[flagged]

masklinn 1y ago
I’m sorry to report your friend is a complete dumbass. Being a democratic government does not mean you can’t be proactive and have emergency services. Does he think Switzerland has a public consultation every time there’s an avalanche? In the US the latter used to be FEMA’s job, and with respect to the former the feds allocated flood (and more generally disaster) mitigation funds, for the day decade or so Texas has systematically ignored those funds or tried to route them elsewhere, and in 2021 under ARPA the county was awarded millions which could have been used for flood alert and prevention but decided to not do any of that for political reasons, and send most of it to the PD instead.
- gora_mohanty 1y ago
  After the 1999 super cyclone in Orissa, and the tsunami in 2004, the Indian government put together a comprehensive disaster management programme involving better weather satellites, forecasting, early warning systems, and disaster response plans including evacuation strategies with food and shelter for evacuees. The effort spans local, state, and central governments, as well as para-military forces that are deployed in an emergency. India also provides warnings to other nations, like Bangladesh, and the programme has been supported through major political changes. The results are plain to see, and in my opinion at least, put much more expensive US responses to shame. So much for a democratic government being unable to plan.
conductr 1y ago
I was hesitant to even comment on this, but I do have an opinion and some familiarity with this region and it’s flooding. I’m Texan and lived in the hill country for a handful of years. I once got trapped on a narrow ranch road at night and my vehicle was pushed into the ditch. I got stuck between two flooded low points then it rose even more, it wasn’t even raining when I embarked on my journey and the water only rose about 12”-18”, not even high enough to come into my stock height Chevy Silverado, but it was insane forceful. I was outside my vehicle and couldn’t stand upright once it was about 6”. I was a bit scared but it was obviously nothing compared to this. Anyways, I unfortunately believe most of the deceased likely perished within minutes of being swept away. I don’t know how any response time could beat that especially given the terrain and conditions at the time. I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system similar to tornado sirens we have up in Dallas. If people could have been woken up and moved to higher ground even with just 10 minutes notice, the death stats would be significantly lower. If I had property anywhere near this (there are other similar rivers in the region), I’d be installing something on my property right now.
- kubb 1y ago
  What’s your opinion about letting developers build on floodplains?
  - conductr 1y ago
    I honestly think it’s a bit of a loaded question and I’m not going to opine here, my personal opinion doesn’t matter anyway
- komali2 1y ago
  Texan as well here. > I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system similar to tornado sirens we have up in Dallas. I don't share your optimism. Where will the budget for this come from? We both know our state, and how it votes. https://apnews.com/article/texas-floods-camp-warning-system-not-funded-0845df62390b9623331ba4a030c5fc7d https://apnews.com/article/texas-floods-camp-warning-system-... We'll get the 1 million now of course, for this region, for this type of disaster, for now. In 8 years if another million is needed to upkeep the system, I don't think we'll get the funding again, unless some more kids died. Actually... maybe we won't even get the 1 million now. How many kids died at Uvalde, for example? My mom's a Texan teacher. The post Uvalde response: her principal asked her how she'd feel about carrying a handgun in school. My experience is if an issue is politicized, then Texas will make the wrong choice, every time. I have no hope for my state anymore. If you can maintain optimism, I admire you and hope you stick around, we'll need more people like you.
  - tzs 1y ago
    Here's an interesting article from a few days ago on Kerr county's efforts in recent years to address this [1]. They couldn't come up with the money on their own because apparently a lot of the residents are really into wanting to reduce property taxes and government spending: > An examination of transcripts since 2016 from Kerr County’s governing body, the commissioners court, offers a peek into a small Texas county paralyzed by two competing interests: to make one of the country’s most dangerous region for flash flooding safer and to heed to near constant calls from constituents to reduce property taxes and government waste. They did apply for a FEMA grant for this, but apparently there was an issue with the application: > By the next year, officials had sent off its application for a $731,413 grant to FEMA to help bring $976,000 worth of flood warning upgrades, including 10 high water detection systems without flashers, 20 gauges, possible outdoor sirens, and more. > “The purpose of this project is to provide Kerr County with a flood warning system,” the county wrote in its application. “The System will be utilized for mass notification to citizens about high water levels and flooding conditions throughout Kerr County.” > But the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which oversees billions of FEMA dollars designed to prevent disasters, denied the application because they didn’t have a current hazard mitigation plan. They resubmitted it, news outlets reported, but by then, priority was given to counties that had suffered damage from Hurricane Harvey. A great opportunity came in 2021 to deal with this but it was not taken: > In 2021, Kerr County was awarded a $10.2 million windfall from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, which Congress passed that same year to support local governments impacted by the pandemic. Cities and counties were given flexibility to use the money on a variety of expenses, including those related to storm-related infrastructure. Corpus Christi, for example, allocated $15 million of its ARPA funding to “rehabilitate and/or replace aging storm water infrastructure.” Waco’s McLennan County spent $868,000 on low water crossings. > Kerr County did not opt for ARPA to fund flood warning systems despite commissioners discussing such projects nearly two dozen times since 2016. In fact, a survey sent to residents about ARPA spending showed that 42% of the 180 responses wanted to reject the $10 million bonus altogether, largely on political grounds. > “I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money. > “We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.” [1] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-kerr-county-commissioners-flooding-warning/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-kerr-county-co...
cesnja 1y ago
A democratic government can set up an independent emergency response organization that doesn’t need government involvement to declare and respond to an emergency.
- overfeed 1y ago
  For holders if a particular political ideology, inherent government incompetence is a deeply embedded meme that wont be undone by a single counterexample. Any example of competence has to be attached to cost to salve the cognitive dissonance.
komali2 1y ago
It's not just a strong central government in the PRC, technically the USA has that as well (just look at what ICE is allowed to do, and states may do nothing in return), it's also that the PRC is a single-party government, and more and more evolving into a Xi personality cult (to be fair, the General Secretary always had an extraordinary amount of influence, see Deng Xiaoping). Texas has been run by Republicans for all of living memory, and when it was given money for spending on this exact situation (flash flood warning system), it was given it by Democrats, and therefore politicized the money by spending it on police (the framing being that democrats don't want police to be funded, which is of course absurd). American bureaucracy is rendered nearly nonfunctional by overpoliticization such as this. I can't remember the last time a funding bill was being voted on that didn't result in a government shutdown or nearly so. Imagine a country's legislative body being so politicized it can't even fund the country's bureaucratic organs. Clownish behavior. Meanwhile the PRC, for all its flaws, suffers none of this oppositional politicizing. The downside is that corruption can run much deeper and essentially unchallenged so long as it serves the greater needs of the one party, among other things. The upside is that the majority of the government's power (which includes money) is spent with remarkably little waste and redirection, despite that corruption. However in the specific case of the floods it's almost certain that the CPC's propaganda arms worked overtime to make it seem like there was less death and damage from the flooding than there really was. There's a large class of "undocumented" poverty class people in the PRC that lose swaths of their populations in disasters like this and it's very easy to hide their deaths. If liberal democracies want to survive they need to be better at governing than something like the PRC or they're all going to be wiped out on the global marketplace as the PRC overcomes its historical issues and further solidifies and enriches its population and infrastructure.

a5seo 1y ago

Reading this account made me think of a paper I read in grad school about the Mann Gulch fire and how quickly one’s ability to make sense of the situation unravels. https://www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Letture%20TDPC/K.%20Weick%20-%20The%20collapse%20of%20sensemaking.pdf https://www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Letture%20TDPC/K.%20Weick%2...

stogot 1y ago
I think I read that in g school too. Where’d you go or what program?

markm248 1y ago

This is the most gripping thing I've ever read

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

jihadjihad 1y ago

It’s a really tough read regardless, but if you’ve got young kids (or nieces/nephews), it’s downright brutal.

lpa22 1y ago
This was possibly the saddest piece I’ve ever read based on how it was written

Configure0251 1y ago

Absolutely devastating.

999900000999 1y ago

Reminds me a bit of A Marker on the Side of The Boat by Boa Ninh from Night, Again. There’s a bit of horrifying tension, and you hope everyone’s ok. No matter how unlikely.

PlunderBunny 1y ago

I wonder how frequently that river (and the rest of the world) will experience once-in-a-hundred-year weather events from now on.

sokoloff 1y ago
There are over 2000 watersheds in the US. It would be unusual if we didn’t see around 20 100-year floods every year.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  Extreme precipitation events are also getting more common.
- tbrownaw 1y ago
  I would think they'd be correlated enough to mess up the numbers a little.
- vikingerik 1y ago
  Right. It's the multiple-endpoints principle. The extreme events feel overly frequent because we cherry-pick and only notice them. We never notice the other 99/100 of places that don't have a hundred-year flood in a year.
jkestner 1y ago
At a (central Texas) city council hearing today on granting someone a variance to build tennis courts on a meadow next to a creek, a longtime resident said, “I think I’ve lived through five 500-year floods here.”
- nocoiner 1y ago
  Where I live in Texas, we had three “500 year” events in three consecutive years, with the last one probably closer to a 1000 or 10000 year event - more rainfall in one spot than anywhere else ever measured. We’ll see how long that record holds (I’ll take the under on 1000 years).

Aeolun 1y ago

Well, that was no fun to read. I wonder if my house would survive a flood as well as it would an earthquake.

K0balt 1y ago
The only reliable way to survive a flood with strong currents is to not be in one. I will not live long term on land that has historically been subject to flooding, or where the site forms part of a constricted drainage. There are enough risks in life that cannot be realistically mitigated. No sense exposing your family to one day in and day out that is just a matter of choice. Unfortunately, humans are terrible about understanding probabilistic risks, and our short, brutal lives offer little opportunity to appreciate the nature of long-period risk. A “hundred year flood” means that there is a seventy percent chance that your house will be wiped away within your lifetime. It’s like choosing to be habitually reckless with fire in your home. We aren’t reckless with fire because the risk is very tangible and within our control. Long period risks are just as real and often just as much within our control, but we have to think in terms of math and not our “feeling” of security. Our instincts about safety and security are honed over millions of years to understand what is a safe Place to camp for the night. We are not intrinsically equipped to viscerally understand this kind of risk.
- jonah 1y ago
  My parents property sits at the confluence of a creek and a river. They've built their house on a promontory that had signs of inhabitation by indigenous peoples. We had a "100-year flood" when I was growing up. It was quite impressive to wake up in the morning and see the water within six vertical feet of the house and 30 to 40 ft. of water the bottom field with entire trees floating Long.

gordon_freeman 1y ago

Reading this makes me so sad and reminded me of a book I read years ago: Hiroshima by John Hersey - about the first-person narrative account of survivors who witnessed the impact of atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima that morning.

madaxe_again 1y ago
Like the little boy with his skin melted off walking down the road crying for his mother… horrendous stuff.
- Foreignborn 1y ago
  These stories always have me instantly sobbing, life can be tragically unfair.
  - whoisyc 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - christianqchung 1y ago
      What an insensitive, assumptive, stupid remark. You can't possibly know that the person you replied to behaves as you claim. It's 2025, the firebombing of Tokyo is widely recognized now, maybe not by most normies but certainly by any historical adjacent nerd.
    - madaxe_again 1y ago
      Oh, I see you don’t give a shit about Dresden?
    - theoreticalmal 1y ago
      Hey, this is kind of a rude response in an otherwise thoughtful and empathetic thread
qingcharles 1y ago

gkanai 1y ago

I cant imagine writing this having experienced the loss the author has.

dylan604 1y ago
And just 10 days after the event to be released, so written earlier. Not sure of the exact date it was written as the article has an August 2025 date in the byline. Hopefully it was helpful in their grief, which with how the last half was written seems to be at least part of the intent.

mensetmanusman 1y ago

With all the debris and the water force, would it have even helped if the concrete pillars were 10 ft higher?

nocoiner 1y ago
Reasonable question. Yes, in that case, the house probably would have been fine. The lateral force on concrete pillars, even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily withstood.
- brazzy 1y ago
  The very first thing in TFA is a photo of where one of the pillars was ripped from the foundation. If that happened because of the force of the water against the house on top of it, then it could also happen when a tree or other large piece of floating debris hits it.
- KaiserPro 1y ago
  > even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily withstood. Physics is not on your side here. if it was just water, then perhaps, although I am sceptical given how much force is generated by 10foot of water moving at 18 mph, which is ~6metric tons of lateral force. (assuming 1m2 cross section.) Thats before any flotsam gets attached increasing the surface area. Sure you could build something to withstand that, but could you afford to build it?
  - acuozzo 1y ago
    > but could you afford to build it? And, if not, could you really afford to live there?
madaxe_again 1y ago
It would have helped if the columns were correctly tied down - those rebar stumps tell a story, which is that they did the foundation pour, left stubs, and then poured columns atop them with a cold joint. Fine if you’re doing a carport in a desert. Criminally negligent in a river floodway. For that kind of structure, you must tie the rebar in - best is to have the entire length of the rebar for the column splay at the base and be threaded through and tied into the rebar for the footing, pour the footing, and then pour the columns as soon as the footing is cured enough to support the mass, but before it’s totally hard. That way the footing and the columns form a continuous structure, without any point where they can just lift or shear off. I speak from experience, having built exactly this type of structure myself, and seeing it resist an enormous flood and a barrage of high-speed trees, unscathed. Absolute mess inside the timber structure atop, but anyone trapped within would have survived. Unfortunately what they had there was a disaster waiting to happen.

SoftTalker 1y ago

Terrible story. I've lived near a river, and never will again. And the worst I had was just 4 feet of water in the basement.

rf15 1y ago
I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades - largely because this area is full of rivers so any flooding is just spread thin. I feel this is mostly a drainage problem of areas where all water is channeled into a narrow area by the surrounding geography? "Narrow" being a relative term here of course, considering geological scale.
- K0balt 1y ago
  Being fine for decades is not a useful metric, unfortunately. If you want to know, look into the last time it was flooded. If it has never flooded in the scope of human history, it’s possible that the danger of flooding is indeed not significant. If it has flooded, it will likely flood again. If it is a flood plain, it will probably flood again many, many times. Weather changes associated with climate change may exacerbate this. It would not be particularly surprising to see the variance in significant precipitation events to double, triple , or more. In any rate, climate change aside, it would not be particularly remarkable for a flood risk that aggregates to one in ten years to not flood for 50 years running, just as it would not be unexpected if some such areas flooded each year for 3 years straight. Both of those events would be consistent with patterns that would be expected to happen in the big picture. I know nothing of your situation, but if I were living within less than 100 feet of the altitude of a nearby river or sea, I would consider moving. Life is short, and in my tiny life I have been humanly connected to floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes within my direct circle of friends and family enough to internalize that these risks are not theoretical. When an existential risk can be categorically eliminated from your life, it is often worth doing.
- peterbecich 1y ago
  A.f.a.i.k. this tragedy was preventable because the flood risk was already known: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/09/us/camp-mystic-texas-cabins.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/09/us/camp-mysti... Apparently this was disregarded.

cjcenizal 1y ago

Having children makes me feel vulnerable. They’re like extensions of myself — if they feel pain, I feel it too. To imagine one of them dying… this story broke my heart.

disillusioned 1y ago
My wife had been pushing me to try for kids for, well, a couple of years, and I was finally getting there. I always knew I wanted kids, or figured I did, but then reality comes: can we afford it, shouldn't we enjoy what we have a little bit longer, are we sure we want to do this, etc. Then, my friend messaged me one night and asked me to join him at the children's hospital to take a few photos as they were saying "goodbye." His 18 month old had been fighting cancer, and it was 1 in the morning and my melatonin-addled brain thought "oh, they must be taking him home." It wasn't until I walked into the room with my DSLR that I realized what he meant. In fairness, he had prefaced the request with, "do you mind if I ruin your night?" I am not even close to a professional photographer. But I tried to take as many pictures as respectfully as I could of the literal hardest moment any parents could ever hope not to have to go through. At a certain moment, it became time, and I found myself... stuck, in a sense. I was the only other one in the room aside from the parents, but I didn't feel like I could abandon them, and so I sat there as they disconnected the machines keeping their son alive. It was the most awful two minutes as the attending sat there with a stethoscope against this tiny chest. I waited until an opportune moment, and then hugged them, quietly took my leave, went home, edited the photos as quickly as possible, uploaded and sent them, and then bawled for an hour or so. Needless to say, this set back our efforts at even _trying_ for kids by about 2-3 years. Because I just was stuck by this all-encompassing thought: you can't lose what you don't have. You simply aren't open to that sort of vulnerability if you don't have children. It doesn't exist, until you form it into being. And that thought haunted me. Just like it haunts, well, every parent on some level. And to clarify: this didn't even _happen to me_. It happened to _them_, and their son. But it was a defining moment for me that made it really tough to overcome. Eventually, we did have two kids (after a miscarriage, of course, because isn't that how it goes), and they're sitting behind me watching a movie as I type this. But these sort of thoughts are always there in the background. And yeah, reading a story like this one about the flood just spears you in the soul.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Theres videos from different people as the flooding started live. It's WILD to watch what happens in a short span of time. We're talking under 30 minutes I think before it starts overtaking a bridge. The water will sweep you up and drag you around too, the random debris is what's fatal.

anonymars 1y ago
I watched the first couple minutes of this video (certainly wasn't going to watch 40 minutes) then skipped ahead in chunks, thinking it was clips from different locations. Then I scrubbed around and realized, no, it was the same place, which left me stunned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kYjiTEDqtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kYjiTEDqtw Make sure to watch the last 3-5 minutes or so for the cherry on top. Then I recommend skipping back to the beginning to really drive home how insane this was. I will never again be cavalier about flash flood warnings.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  That's the video! I didn't have the link, so thank you for that.
- thedrexster 1y ago
  Jeeeeesus, thank you for that link and tip about the last few minutes; literally incredible, as in I cannot fathom.

komali2 1y ago

> Alissa would tell me, five days later, that Rosemary wanted to play “I spy” while they waited in the tree. I can't imagine a more grim version of this game as the floodwaters of the Guadalupe recede below you.

Theodores 1y ago

What astounds me is how quickly America moves on from environmental catastrophes. As an example, a huge part of Florida was pretty much devastated earlier this year but now you would never know. The electricity and other services were back up in days and all evidence of destroyed buildings gone as if the trash was just collected. If a similar extreme weather event hit the UK, that would be all you would hear about for months and there would be no instant clear up. The populace would be deeply traumatised and would not move on from the tragedy. America is different, resilient and it is rare for articles like this one to make the light of day.

morsch 1y ago
I'm not sure that a country being "resilient" in that manner is a good thing. It's callous towards the individuals involved, who may not be as quick to move on, emotionally or otherwise. And moving on quickly doesn't exactly encourage learning from tragedy, which really is its only upside.
gkanai 1y ago
Japan is similar in terms of moving on from environmental catastrophes. Due to it's geographic location, the number and severity of earthquakes and tsunamis not to mention the regular stuff like wildfires, flooding etc. there's just a lot of devastation and loss. Japan does memorialize the larger events of course and there's public memorials at annual schedules, etc.
- bell-cot 1y ago
  Add Japan's volcanoes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#List_of_major_volcanic_eruptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#Lis... At least 3 of those are active calderas, with histories of producing VEI 7 eruptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#VEI-7_Volcanic_eruptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#VEI... A select quote: > Aira caldera is surrounded by the major city of Kagoshima which has a population of more than 900,000. Residents do not mind small eruptions because they have measures in place for protection. For example, school students are required to wear hard helmets for protection against falling debris.

MichaelRo 1y ago

Quite a few people live near riverbeds, if not all of them. I mean like, it was one of the basic requirements of a settlement to have some flowing water source nearby. And while not directly on the river bed, I've seen my share of swollen rivers in all places I lived. My grandparents had a house at the edge of the village, the river was some 200 meters from it and much lower but a few times with heavy raining, the garden was flooded and water nearly got to the house. I recall watching in awe from uphill the raging torrent and wondering how the funk could it have gotten so big from the original peaceful river. Right now, I live downstream of a 100 meters tall water dam holding 200 hectares (500 acres) of lake. If that dam breaks, it's lights out for many. You forget about it but shit happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

actionfromafar 1y ago
And sometimes shit is made to happen: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/russia-shells-flooded-ukrainian-city-hours-after-zelenskyy-visit https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/russia-shells-flooded-ukr...
dylan604 1y ago
Watch any movie with the settlers moving out west, and you’ll see them all right next to a river. It all makes sense as nobody likes carrying water far

NoProfession 1y ago

The mix of terrifying immediacy and raw loss is haunting, especially when you hear about people literally being swept away from shelters they trusted. It’s a stark reminder that robust early warning isn’t just technology, it’s life or death and the costs of underfunding those systems aren’t hypothetical.

phendrenad2 1y ago

One of the consequenes of our population growth, combined with our willingness to allow NIMBYs to dictate our housing policy, is that more and more new houses are built in areas that regularly experience major natural disasters. And if that isn't enough of a tragedy, these plots of land are treated as valuable when they really aren't, leading to people sinking big chunks of their net worth into what is objectively a liability.

nop_slide 1y ago
This was a vacation house. It had nothing to do with building/density/urbanism/policy. Its purpose was to be by the water. I am a fellow urbanist and while I see where you’re coming from this doesn’t apply at all to this situation. There’s a quote in the article talking about how the grandparents chose this house specifically for the summer memories.
pixl97 1y ago
Eh, there are two conflicting things here. The land is valuable as entertainment space. Such as temporary camping, hiking, fishing, and other outdoor activities. It is quite beautiful land. Conversely there are also plots of land that are not valuable along the water where there is little natural beauty which leads to lower land prices, hence people setting up things like mobile homes and RVs as places to live that are less expensive options.

maltris 1y ago

Being the parent of a child in the boys age, this was incredibly hard to read. I started yesterday, stopped half way through, could not sleep at first, woke up in the morning to finish the story. To me, as a non-native english speaker, the story is very well written to paint an extensive picture of the events unfolding as well of the environment, which made it much more frightening.