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Notes -
When a statistic isn't just a statistic
Like many, I was saddened by the news of the Texas flooding and the girls who were in the path of the engorged river. Natural disasters happen, but they don't always victimize school aged girls at a summer retreat. Yet I mentally filed the disaster in the way I do most disasters: the optimal quantity of flooding deaths is not zero, the odds of something bad happening to somebody somewhere is quite high, children need to do things in the outdoors even if there is some risk. And this framing, while dispassionate, isn't incorrect.
Yesterday, one of the bodies was discovered and identified. She wasn't some no-name in a far-flung state. Her family lives three streets over from mine. Her brother and my oldest daughter were in the same class last year. These are neighbors, and in our close-knit community, something akin to extended family. Suddenly, this feels personal.
A number of years ago, I was teaching my oldest to ride a bike. She was a natural, balancing and peddling within minutes of first riding. Within an hour she was shifting gears, accelerating and decelerating, making turns with adroitness. After several hours of practice in a parking lot I decided she was ready for the hilly streets near our house. Unfortunately, there was one thing I had forgotten to teach her in the flat safety of the parking lot: how to brake. She went down the hill outside our house, increasing in speed and with no ability to stop herself. Finally, she hit the curb and somersaulted into the grass of a yard. Despite the relatively soft landing she was scraped and bleeding over most of her body.
So many things could have gone wrong. She could have hit a car. She could have landed in the street and been flayed by the asphalt.
Life is fragile and can be snuffed out at any moment. The day she crashed her bike I hugged her as tightly as her scrapes would allow. Not all parents are so lucky.
RIP to the child. No parent should have to see their child pass away before them.
From my experience, camping near riverbeds is universally discouraged. Given the region's 'flash Flood Alley' title, I'd have expected precautions that mitigate these sort of freak accidents.
Unlike levee breaks, hurricanes, or tsunamis, rainfall based flash floods should be human escapable no ?
The flooding happened quite late at night, when everyone was asleep: probably the first notice that anything was amiss was water intruding through the entrance and flooding the floor.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NpG9cJTPf7I&ab_channel=KSAT12
This man survived by swimming out and standing on an electric meter box on a telephone pole - that's how high the water got. If I had to guess, the majority of these casualties happened because the girls panicked without an adult around: and in the dark and lacking the strength to swim, drowned. My intuition is that you're much better off climbing up to the roof with something that can float: remaining in the dwelling you are in for as long as possible rather than searching for higher ground on foot. (Unless it is immediately obvious, of course.) If your dwelling is knocked over by the floodwater you probably didn't have a high chance of finding high ground in time, in any case.
Everything is scarier in the dark. Can imagine the panic felt by young girls in the middle of a once-a-century flood.
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