Comedian Rosie O’Donnell says President Donald Trump’s “horrible decisions” are to blame for the flash floods in central Texas that have killed at least 70.
“What a horror story in Texas,” O’Donnell, who moved to Dublin, Ireland, earlier this year after Trump was re-elected, said in a TikTok video posted Sunday. “When the president guts all of the early warning systems and the weathering forecast abilities of the government, these are the results that we’re going to start to see on a daily basis.”
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The Department of Government Efficiency had previously cut hundreds of jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) in its effort to cut government spending earlier this year. The NWS lost around 600 staffers at the time, according to a June report from The New York Times.
“It’s because he put this country in so much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions and this ridiculously immoral bill that he just signed into law,” O’Donnell continued. “As Republicans cheered, people will die as a result and they’ve started already.”
“Shame on him…Shame on every GOP sycophant,” she concluded.
Catastrophic flooding first struck central Texas on July 4 after torrential rains caused the Guadalupe River to rise around 26 feet within just 45 minutes. The surge washed out roads and destroyed property across six counties.
Texas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd bemoaned inaccurate forecasts from the NWS in a press conference Friday, saying that “the original forecast that we received Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6 inches of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches in the Hill Country.”
“The amount of rain that fell at this specific location was never in any of those forecasts,” he said.
The president has since issued a Major Disaster Declaration prompting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to be activated in Texas. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has also indicated that alongside emergency, on-ground support, the White House is also “currently upgrading the technology” at the NWS and NOAA “to renew this ancient system that has been left in place with the federal government for many, many years.”
“I do carry your concerns back to the federal government and to President Trump, and we will do all we can to fix those kind of things that may have felt like a failure to you and to your community members,” Noem continued. “We know that everybody wants more warning time, and that’s why we’re working to upgrade the technologies that been neglected [for] far too long.”
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