We’re safe here in San Antonio but been watching the local news coverage since it started yesterday. The tone of Abbott’s press conference last night was almost like “brace yourselves for tomorrows news” it feels like the death toll is going to be going up considerably. I watch the same newscasts that go out to Kerrville, no one saw anything like this coming. It just sat over that area like TS Allison
Not sure wtf the Lakers are doing there. You’d think the Spurs especially with Wemby being so tall. In all seriousness, I hope they find some of those people alive.
Everyone saw it coming who knew what to look for. It was pissing rain upstream for hours before anything hit that area of the Guad.
I remember when the forums biggest moron @Space Ghost said who cared if we defund the weather services
This dynamic is notoriously difficult to predict and there is nothing but more uncertainty and extreme events that outstrip our experience on the way. In light of this, it seems absurd we have apparently made a choice to get rid of the scientific research that might bring better forecasting tools. Also, under the currently degraded FEMA, this will be a tougher than it should be recovery. Under the nearly defunct FEMA planned for next year, this would be a state-only recovery and rebuild operation—but I’m sure nothing bad will happen in 2026.
true story. Last night I went out to the city’s 4th of July fireworks celebration. I noticed it was a bit space than previous years. Apparent a microcell moved in earlier and lighting struck the firework display and blew it up. All I could thing about is @astros123 dire prediction how we will not be able to predict the weather. can someone just think about the fireworks? Who is going to protect the fireworks from the lightning if we don’t have weather.com??
I really don’t need politicians patting each other on the back and telling us what a great job they are doing at a time like this. Just give us the details on the recovery effort.
Saving money is fine, but when you cut infrastructure like this it's hard to know what "could have been", we will never know but NOAA is not wrought with fraud and abuse, cutting back on this is as stupid as cutting back on preventing Cancer and USAID....................its all high 5`s until something like this happens and you have to wonder if "some" of this could have been prevented
Saving money is good and id give Trump credit if he actually did cut the deficit but hes added 6 trillion dollars of cut and double the deficit all while defunding the FDA/ATC/FDA/medicaid We got trillions in tax cuts for billionaires but when it comes to essential services no thanks.
One thing this does is show the likelihood that disasters will be worse in our future than they should be. As federal funding is taken out of emergency management for planning, preparedness, response and recovery, a greater burden falls on local governments. But they have been able to make compromises and ignore some risks because of the centralized coordination and the knowledge that assistance and support is always coming. Kerr County didn't install sirens because that would have meant an extra $16 or so for each county taxpayer. Both the taxpayers and government failed to see the risk and/or assumed it would be handled by someone else. Similar failures, assumptions, and compromises are about to be front and center for many local governments. Things are fundamentally different for them now, but only a few see it. State and local governments will need to raise taxes to cover for the feds walking away from fields and responsibilities. Of course, it will be much more expensive to do some of this stuff 50+ times as opposed to one time at the federal level. We saw that with COVID when states were bidding against each other for supplies. There's always been a prevention problem for government at all levels. If you acknowledge the risk you are compelled to do something about it, to do what you can to prevent the disaster. So you ignore it and pretend it won't happen here. But then a disaster occurs. The first thing an elected official will say is to vow it won't ever happen again and they commit some money to prevention. If they're successful or maybe just lucky, not much bad stuff happens for awhile. Then they wonder, why are we spending all this money on nothing? So you cut the prevention funding and soon enough, a bad thing happens. Rinse and repeat. "Who could have imagined?" "Nobody predicted this." "We don't get floods (fires, tornadoes, plant explosions, earthquakes, etc...) here." It's been the same dynamic since before the beginning of my career, only now, we have intentionally degraded the expertise that could have been voices in the room and experts regarding preparedness, planning, and response. When you look at all this from a systems perspective, the folly of breaking FEMA and much of the disaster response capacity in other agencies leaves state and local govs more exposed and less knowledgeable. Compound that with breaking more stuff like public health and education, and you have the occasional disaster competing with daily concerns in state and local budgets. We aren't close to seeing and understanding all the brittle and broken parts of our systems, but they will show up eventually.
