Better emergency preparedness likely could have saved the people who died in the July 4th Texas Hill Country flash flood [View all]

At least eighty people are now known to have perished after a powerful rain bomb descended on the Texas Hill Country on Friday ahead of daybreak on Independence Day, turning the waters of the Guadalupe River into something of a raging inland tsunami that struck fast and with great ferocity.

Camp Mystic, a well-known summer camp for girls, is perhaps the best-known casualty of the disaster. “[A]t least five campers aged 8–9 died, alongside a dozen that remain missing,” the disaster’s Wikipedia entry currently notes. “The camp’s director / co-owner also died, reportedly while trying to save campers from floodwaters.”

Many people known to have been in the path of the floodwaters remain unaccounted for, and the death toll is likely to rise. Though search and rescue efforts remain underway, media outlets are starting to tackle a question that’s probably on a lot of folks’ minds — a question that often gets asked in the aftermath of a tragedy like this: Could these deaths have been prevented? Here, the answer appears to be a resounding Yes!

Let’s consider the basic facts of the matter:

The Texas Hill Country is an area of the United States that is prone to flash floods.
The climate crisis is making extreme weather more frequent and more intense, including rain bombs, which are also known as rain pumps.
Meteorologists, including at the NWS, had issued forecasts warning of the potential for flash flooding before the Guadalupe River began to rapidly swell.
Tragedies similar to this have happened before in the Texas Hill Country. For example, in 1987, ten children were killed when the Guadalupe River inundated the bridge their stalled church camp evacuation bus was trying to cross. Some escaped the floodwaters, but some did not. Sound familiar?

https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2025/07/better-emergency-preparedness-likely-could-have-saved-the-people-who-died-in-the-july-4th-texas-hill-country-flash-floods.html