The Texas Floods

By the time the waters receded, at least 82 lives had been lost to the flash floods that tore through Texas last week. A figure at once astonishing and—given the geography, the season, and the increasingly erratic climate—utterly unsurprising.

As the search for the missing continues, the torrent of commentary, unbidden and unrestrained, poured forth online with even greater velocity than the stormwaters themselves.

In our age of instantaneous certainty and curated outrage, culpability was assigned before the first casualty had been confirmed.

The usual suspects were quickly summoned: a beleaguered National Weather Service, its budget recently slashed with bureaucratic indifference; a failed 2019 bill in the Texas legislature, now reanimated by hindsight, that might have strengthened the state’s emergency alert system.

Both grievances found traction and share a certain relevance in the wider discussion, although in this particular case neither delay nor dysfunction had played a decisive role.

Indeed, meteorologists had sounded the alarm with clarity and speed. The alerts were not merely issued—they were underscored, repeated, and unambiguous. Some heard them; others chose, inexplicably, not to.

Climate change played a role, at once making extreme weather more frequent and less predictable.

A disaster does not occur simply because nature wills it; the disaster for humans is in the failure in planning or response to it.

Attention turned, inevitably, to the county sheriff’s office, which had declined to mandate or coordinate evacuations. But whether such a measure would have saved those already impervious to voluntary warnings is unclear. In the calculus of disaster, human behavior is as volatile a variable as any weather pattern.

The national narrative, however, found its emotional center in the story of one particular Christian youth camp nestled along the banks of a swollen river, where the children of financiers and CEOs and oil tycoons had gathered in the comforting illusion of pastoral innocence.

Here, tragedy acquired a familiar, photogenic face—pre-adolescent, sun-kissed, affluent—and the coverage followed accordingly.

That other camps along the same river had evacuated swiftly, heeding the earliest alerts, received little mention. That two young counselors at Camp Mystic—a name now etched with unintended irony—had managed to shepherd their charges to safety should have provided a contrast, a lesson. It did not.

Instead, we find ourselves in the realm of the tragic yet preventable, where the true failing was neither federal nor meteorological, but profoundly human.

The fault, in the case of Camp Mystic, lay not in budgetary neglect nor legislative omission, but in the ordinary and consequential lapse of those entrusted with children's lives.

Weather alerts had been issued; others had listened.

The staff at Mystic, whether through denial, distraction, or sheer disbelief, had not.

Disasters, like mirrors, reflect what we bring to them. In Texas last week, they revealed a familiar tableau: institutions straining at the edges, officialdom tangled in blame, and private citizens—some heroic, others heedless—left to bear the consequences.