Faced with an unfathomable disaster like the July 4 flooding, Texans have found pride, and maybe some comfort in their identity as Texans, strong, silent, stoical and resilient.
It can be seen on the “Texas Proud” T-shirts at the H.E.B., the grocery store chain that was founded more than a century ago in Kerrville, the epicenter of the flood. It’s there in a muddy state flag, rescued from the ground and attached to a flowering tree at the entrance to the town of Hunt, where the Guadalupe River cut through with frightening ferocity.
For miles along the river’s edge, the Lone Star Flag outnumbers the Stars and Stripes.
“Let me explain one thing about Texas,” Gov. Greg Abbott said last Tuesday when questioned about the failures of state and local officials to provide better flood warnings. He then reached for analogy from the state’s obsession with football. “Every football team makes mistakes,” he said. “The way winners talk is not to point fingers. They talk about solutions. What Texas is all about is solutions.”
Those who did otherwise, he said, were “losers.”
That image of Texans who would rather rush to help the victims than blame the government has been useful to elected officials from President Trump to Mr. Abbott to Kerr County commissioners and likely a comfort to some in the floodplain of the Texas Hill Country.
But in the days since Mr. Abbott’s comments, it has become clear that Texans were doing both — rushing to help and questioning their government.
They were helping out with donations of fuel and food, opening their homes to the displaced and tearing through the river’s debris in search of the dead.
“Everybody’s come together, everybody helps. I’m so proud of Texans,” said Johnny Treadwell, 70, who grew up going to the Hunt general store and would still get coffee there up until the day the flood tore it apart. “We’re born here, bred here, and we’ll be dead here,” he added. “It’s God’s country.”
And they were also more than happy to seek accountability, to wonder why more had not been done to prevent so many — at least 129 people at last count — from losing their lives.
“I don’t care if I make a lot of enemies,” said Raymond Howard, a City Council member from flood-ravaged Ingram, Texas, who has been outspoken in his outrage over years of fruitless discussions among officials in Kerr County about a warning system, “because this cannot ever happen again.”
For many others, Mr. Abbott’s football analogy fell flat, even in football-loving Texas.
“What our governor did, comparing it to sports, was wrong, very wrong,” said Earl Campbell, a Hall of Fame running back for the Houston Oilers, in a telephone interview. “We’re talking about people that lost their loved ones, and not football or basketball or baseball or whatever ball.”
Mr. Campbell, who grew up in the East Texas city of Tyler and has enjoyed hunting in the Hill Country, said the “grown-ups” should have put a warning system in place.
“There should have been something going off so the kids could hear it,” he said.
All states contend with disasters. But few have faced such a wide range of calamities, natural and man-made, with such regularity, as Texas: tornadoes around Dallas, hurricanes in Houston, chemical explosions, school shootings, deadly heat, an electricity grid crippled by winter cold, floodwaters that have slowly risen along the Gulf Coast, or, as they did again on July 4, arrived as a torrent in the Hill Country.
Texas has been impacted in about a quarter of the 400 weather disasters in the U.S. between 1980 and 2024 that resulted in $1 billion in damage or more, according to a federal list of such events. And Houston is considered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as the second most at risk area of the country for natural disasters, behind Los Angeles.
“Texas has historically been a rough neighborhood,” said Don Frazier, who lives in Kerrville and directs the Texas Center at Schreiner University. “That’s been a historical truth, and that informs a lot of the modern Texas mind-set.”
Sitting alongside Mr. Trump at a news conference in Kerrville on Friday, Mr. Abbott touted the hardiness of Texans. “It’s part of our bloodstream,” the governor said. “We’re made for challenges.”
But the state has also changed from a place that was dangerous because of its remoteness to a thriving hub of growing urban centers, with five of the 15 most populous cities in the nation.
The fact that many Texans still see themselves as needing to be self-reliant may be less an immutable fact of the land than an outgrowth of its politics, where leaders recoil from discussing climate change and push to have taxes as low as possible.
“We don’t have much of a social safety net, we never have,” said Joe Nick Patoski, who lives in Wimberley, Texas, southwest of San Antonio, paddles the rivers of the Hill Country and has written about the Guadalupe River. He said he had lived through several flash floods. “I’ve seen this way too many times and it’s going to happen again,” he said.
The mythos is part of what makes people move to Texas and want to see themselves as Texan, and part of what has kept the state conservative, even as it has grown more diverse. “Low taxes, low service — that attracts a certain American mind-set,” Mr. Frazier said.
Even after the flood, there remained a skepticism of government regulation.
“There will probably be an enlightened awareness of potential dangers now,” said Gordon Ames, 66, a former host of a talk and roots-music radio show in Kerrville. “But I’m not suggesting any new laws or any government intervention. As adults we should be able to figure this out on our own.”
At the same time, Texas officials have promised to devote significant state money to building a flood warning system with sirens, and helping the area recover. “We will rebuild the Hunt store very quickly,” Mr. Abbott promised.
Along Highway 39 that runs along the river to Hunt, the task of clean up remained immense. Downed cypress trees and storm-tossed household items — refrigerators, mattresses, living room furniture — sat near a row of perfectly square-edged bushes, somehow spared. Elsewhere, the river’s edge was visible through the frame of a large, hollowed-out home.
“It will never be the same,” said Deblynne Williamson, who has lived in Hunt since elementary school, staring out at the ruined water’s edge near the town’s destroyed store.
By her side was her niece, Janice Hailea Whan, who works at H.E.B. and drove in with food — eggs, milk, sausages, ground meat — for her aunt and uncle, whose house was not touched by water but still lacked power.
Ms. Whan said she is always ready for a sudden disaster: go-bags packed for each of her six young children and supplies enough to last seven days. “I have emergency food and blankets in my car,” she added, just in case they’re ever stranded on the road.
Texas might pride itself as rough and ready, but FEMA considers more far counties in California and Florida to be among the most at risk, perhaps because so many of the 254 counties in Texas are arid, hot and relatively unpopulated.
“What’s special about Texans is that we’re convinced we’re special,” said Stephen Harrigan, a journalist, novelist and longtime writer of the state’s history and lore.
Such self-confidence has helped many to get through moments of adversity. After Hurricane Harvey smashed into the Gulf Coast and Houston in 2017, Mr. Harrigan recalled seeing a storm-tossed pickup truck, rusted and missing its roof and doors, with a message scrawled along its side: “Nice Try, Harvey.”
“That, to me, embodies the Texas attitude toward tragedies,” he said. “It’s not exclusive to Texans, but Texans do gravitate toward it.”
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
The post Texan Stoicism Provides Comfort, and Excuses, After the Flood appeared first on New York Times.
