A slow-moving storm that dumped more than a foot of rain in the Texas Hill Country has killed 27 people, with dozens more missing, and officials are saying they weren’t prepared because the National Weather Service got the forecast wrong.
Wonder if Donald Trump and Elon Musk laying off 600 National Weather Service staffers earlier this year could have had anything to do with that?
“Listen, everybody got the forecast from the National Weather Service. You all got it. You’re all in media. You got that forecast. It did not predict the amount of rain that we saw,” Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd told reporters at a press conference discussing the ongoing rescue operations late Friday night.
The National Weather Service had forecast 4-8 inches of rain in the Hill Country region from the storm, and NWS and AccuWeather had both issued flash-flood watches on Thursday and upgraded from watches to warnings on Friday.
The Hill Country is a popular spot for tourists because of its rivers, hiking trails and caverns, but the hills that the Hill Country is named for are steep, and the semi-arid soils of the region don’t soak up much water.
Deadly flash floods are, unfortunately, not uncommon – 10 teens at a summer camp died during a flash-flood event from a storm that dumped 11 inches of rain in Kerrville in 1987, and 13 people died in flooding from a six-inch rainstorm in San Antonio just three weeks ago.
Which is to say, there’s a reason Texas Hill Country is also known as Flash Flood Alley.
You’d think both the emergency-management folks and the meteorologists would have their antenna up with a storm expected to dump a lot of rain in a short period of time, given the history.
Even the 4-8 inches of rain that had been forecast could have been problematic, which is on the emergency-management people.
On the meteorologists, the National Weather Service isn’t talking, but you do have to wonder how much the mass layoffs ordered by DOGE, in line with the Project 2025 plan to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has eroded the ability of the NWS to keep on top of things.
The bulk of the staffers let go were specialized climate scientists and weather forecasters, and an internal document obtained by The New York Times warned that the agency was on the verge of offering “degraded” forecasting services because it was facing “severe shortages” of meteorologists.
In May, five past directors of the National Weather Service issued a letter warning that Trump’s cuts “leave the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit, just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes.”
“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life,” the directors wrote in that letter.
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Chris Graham
