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Notes -
80+ dead and rising in Central Texas floods.
Kerr County is the Summer Camp capital of Texas. It's rugged hill country terrain and proximity to the Guadelupe River is perfect for exotic adventures outdoors, and it is close enough to major population centers to be convenient for parents to drop-off their children.
The downside is that low-lying cabins get completely wiped out in flood events. Camp Mystic for girls has double-digit casualties alone.
It is a common refrain to bemoan the fact that, "we don't let kids be kids anymore," and that may be true, but a big part of it is that we as a society simply don't consider the inherent risks acceptable anymore. I shudder to think about making 10-year-olds sit through a 30-minute site-specific emergency preparedness seminar, but that's where this is going, and given what's happened, I'm not entirely sure it would be a bad thing.
The CW angle is that Trump and Doge downsized the National Weather Service. This made sense ideologically -- meteorologists are basically climate researchers, and thus likely to be more worried about climate change than immigrants, plus college-educated pronoun-bearers. And I am sure that some of the NWS people were installed there by previous administrations for political reasons (which I happen to be sympathize with). But separating the wheat from the chaff would require a scalpel, not the chainsaw of doge.
Anyhow, in this case, the Guardian reports that NWS cuts did not contribute to the tragedy:
The NWS got the estimate of severity wrong for which they are being blamed by Texan GOP officials. Did the firings affect that estimate? Who can say. If there is blame to assign though, it should go to the elected officials of Kerr County who decided not to install rising water warning systems despite a similar tragedy occurring previously (and their neighboring counties having installed these systems) and who delayed any kind of emergency response that night until hours after the floods started despite having received those flood warnings from the NWS.
What I expect is for the GOP to blame nameless government functionaries despite being the reigning regime, the Dems to blame Trump who will attract ire (deserved and undeserved) like a lightning rod, and the idiotic good ole boy Republicans that actually dropped the ball and got people killed to escape scrutiny.
Is there any evidence that someone falsified the model output, decided to round 1.6mm/minute to 1mm/min or something like that?
If the complaint is simply that the model turned out not to match reality, that does not seem to be a remotely fair complaint. The job of the NWS to provide an estimate and an error bar. What is an appropriate response given a certain best estimate of a disaster probability is a political decision.
This feels like a bereft spouse yelling at a doctor "But you said there was an 85% chance he would survive the operation, so we thought it was safe. Why did you lie to us!"
I agree with the rest of your comment.
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