Two summers ago, in Hawaii, flames blasted by winds upward of 80 miles per hour rolled downslope like an avalanche of fire, destroying Maui’s Indigenous capital, Lahaina, and killing 102 in the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century. The death toll from Friday’s floods in Texas Hill Country has now exceeded it.
The flooding killed at least 119, including dozens of children from Camp Mystic, and according to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, at least 173 other people are missing. The disaster is one of the most lethal the country has faced this century, and yet the tsunami-like storm surge itself competes with the death toll for sheer horror.
When a river rises 26 feet in 45 minutes, it is hard to know what might’ve been done to staunch the damage — or to believe that we are anything close to adequately prepared for the storms to come. Too often, we’re responding to obvious threats of weather disaster less by properly adapting than by acclimating to them — with government offering a kind of shrugging indifference, too.
Think of flooding disasters and you’re likely to imagine hurricanes walloping the coasts — Harvey, Sandy and perhaps above all Katrina, which in 2005 killed more than 1,800, sent a major American city into a decade-long tailspin, and seemed at least temporarily to discredit not just a president but also his entire party. Last year, Helene offered a novel variation on the harrowing hurricane script, moving inland and ultimately inflicting much more devastation there, especially in western North Carolina, partly because the region was so unaccustomed to, and unprepared for, hurricane-scale flooding.
These days, more and more disaster stories appear to be playing out far from the coasts, in defiance of naïve intuitions about climate risk and even of our recent experience of climate horror. Five years ago, I would have told you that the most searing reminders of the worsening crisis were images of wildfire. Over the last few years, though, I’ve been more and more struck by harrowing images of inland flooding, with cities and towns entirely overrun with water, their streets transformed into rivers, and everything trapped or left behind in them turned into so much flotsam. These images are surreal showcases of a novel-seeming disaster; taken together, they also sharply expand our conceptual model of defensible space.
In the United States, the database of billion-dollar disasters long maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has drawn criticism in recent years, for failing to distinguish among the relative contributions of intensifying weather extremes, patterns of development and economic growth to eye-popping increases in the number of such disasters; this spring the Trump administration officially retired the database. But as a simple tally of dollars in damage, the database tells at least one undeniable and unmistakable story about the rapidly growing nominal cost of extreme weather. In 2024, five hurricanes crossed the billion-dollar threshold, as did one wildfire, two winter storms and one “drought event.” More quotidian “severe storm events” crossed the threshold 17 times. Almost two-thirds of spectacular-damage events that made the list came from unspectacular-sounding storms.
The phenomenon is a global one, perpetually live-streamed on social media. In Pôrto Alegre, Brazil, at least 180 people were killed last year and more than half a million were displaced by floods that affected 2.5 million acres for weeks and also partly collapsed a hydroelectric dam. In Valencia, Spain, last fall, at least 230 people were killed when a year’s worth of rain fell in just eight hours. On social media, the pileups of automobiles in dead-end alleys and downstream piazzas were called “car soup”; in total, more than 100,000 cars were wrecked by the floodwaters.
The regular flood of flooding imagery is enough to make you wonder whether these astounding meteorological events can be fully accounted for through the conventional explanation — that for every degree of warming, the atmosphere will hold about 7 percent more water vapor, leading to more extreme precipitation.
And there are other possible partial explanations for how common this kind of event appears to have become, including the way social media spreads news of every local disaster globally and the inadequacy of the built environment for a changing climate. Longstanding science also suggests that in a warming world the frequency of extreme events at the long end of the distribution tail will increase far more than annual averages. The same principle applies to heat waves, like one over the last two weeks across Europe estimated to have been made three times as deadly by climate change. And because of the way even modest shifts can overwhelm protections built on the basis of now-outdated climate expectations, there is also a logical threshold past which even small increases in intensity can have much more significant effects.
For decades, some scientists have also warned that our behavior on the ground — deforestation, paving and industrial development, agricultural expansion and soil degradation — can contribute to storm extremes, too, by disrupting the planet’s hydrological cycle and by changing how much moisture clouds draw and discharge from the landscape. In China, research suggests that, even independent of climate effects, declining air pollution has recently produced a drastic acceleration in extreme precipitation. (Reducing pollution increases temperatures, producing an environmental dilemma some describe as a Faustian bargain; there may be a similar one governing extreme rainfall.)
But for all its exceptional brutality, the Guadalupe River disaster in Texas last weekend was also a familiar-seeming one, leading immediately to familiar-seeming finger-pointing arguments about responsibility. (A similar blame game unfolded in Los Angeles before the January fires expired.) The downpour that produced the Texas flood was called a 500-year storm, but flash floods are not unknown in the area, which is sometimes known as Flash Flood Alley and where officials considered — and rejected — an early-warning system just eight years ago, after the Guadalupe flooded catastrophically. The river has breached its banks more than a dozen times since 1978.
In fact, the same is broadly true of Valencia, where a 1957 flood killed at least 80, and in Pôrto Alegre, where the 1941 floods long cast a shadow over local memories, and indeed in Asheville, N.C., too, where a 1916 flood killed 80 and was called, even a century later, “The Flood by Which All Other Floods Are Measured.” Helene broke that measure by a few feet last fall. None of these are places where flooding disaster was unthinkable — only places where too many people chose not to think too hard about it, and officials were only too happy to pass the buck.
And perhaps because the Texas tragedy feels as familiar as it does historic, two observations about it stand out to me.
The first observation is that, however we choose to apportion causality for such disasters, what they reveal to us above all else is our shocking and distressing ongoing vulnerability to them.
Every weather disaster now has both human and climate causes, but we often argue about which side of the ledger should get the blame when, either way, the headline message is that we were not ready. Perhaps this tells us something about the relative value of emissions reduction compared with adaptation planning and investment. But in 2023, when two poorly maintained Libyan dams collapsed under the pressure of rainfall that was made up to 50 times more likely and up to 50 percent more intense by climate, I found myself wondering whether the debates about whether the tragedy was powered more by fossil-fuel powered warming or infrastructure failure were just one way of avoiding the obvious first conclusion: that the two forces produced together an outcome for which the country was woefully, and tragically, unprepared.
The same is true in the United States: We may want to focus on the risks of warming to come, but as the eminent climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer likes to emphasize, we’re not all that well adapted to the climate we have now. That is what it means to be overwhelmed, again and again, by weather horror — the standards for safety and security we set for ourselves, in the wealthy modern world, are breached pretty regularly by weather events we should be able to manage much better. In theory, at least.
The second observation is that, increasingly, Americans staring down disaster are being told some form of, you’re on your own.
Just after the storm a few days ago, as Texas officials blamed the National Weather Service for forecasting the storm risk poorly, scientists rushed to fault the Trump administration’s cuts to NOAA and weather forecasting. As it turns out, it’s not clear to what extent those cuts exacerbated the tragedy, since despite the staffing shortfalls, relatively clear warnings were issued — another sign, if we needed it, that knowledge alone is rarely sufficient to prevent disaster in the face of extreme events.
But it is undeniable that the cuts will undermine the quality of weather forecasting and local disaster preparedness, depriving local officials of what had been fine-grained, real-time meteorological data that had been, before Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative, legitimately the envy of the world. In fact, this is one of the natural arguments against even a good-faith version of that initiative: Because much of government activity functions as a kind of insurance policy, you can’t very quickly see what protections are worth keeping and what are not.
The post-facto sniping about the quality and reliability of the N.W.S. forecast in Texas has been conducted in partisan bad faith, but the simple truth is that nobody in Hill Country on Friday would have turned away better information about the course of the storm. (And because the early warning system was rejected in 2017 because of cost, it’s safe to say nobody would have turned away federal funding for adaptation and resilience measures, either.)
President Trump’s cuts to FEMA, which he says he plans to entirely phase out after this year’s hurricane season, are in many ways more concerning — and telling. “The uncomfortable truth is this,” a former Department of Homeland Security official, MaryAnn Tierney, wrote in The Times this week. “With each passing day, the federal government is becoming less prepared to face the next big disaster.” She warned, “The help Americans rely on in their darkest hours is in danger of arriving late, underpowered or not at all.”
By law, states are generally forbidden from running up budget deficits, and as Juliette Kayyem, who worked for the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, has emphasized, that few if any are capable of running their own disaster response. At least when faced with disasters like these — of which, we can be sure, there will be more. Just in the days since the Texas flooding, a “500- to 1,000-year flood event” hit North Carolina, and at one river gauge, the Rio Ruidoso in New Mexico rose almost 19 feet in 30 minutes.
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