TX Floods Expose How Republicans Can Legally Kill You
This post was originally published on this site
Texas officials are pointing fingers at the National Weather Service for not accurately predicting the severity of the torrential rains that hit early Friday morning:
Texas officials provided search and rescue updates Friday on a flash flood that has killed at least 24 people and left some 25 others missing, blaming National Weather Service forecasts for not predicting “the amount of rain that we saw” after facing federal budget and staffing cuts, according to W. Nim Kidd, director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management.
Not mentioned here is that the NWS didn’t gut itself. The department is now dangerously understaffed thanks to Donald Trump’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.”
But local Kerr County officials seem to have their own share of blame.
While the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning at 1:14 a.m. for portions of that area, it would be hours before the city and county’s Facebook pages posted their initial urgent directions for residents from local authorities.
The Texas Tribune noted that Judge Rob Kelly, the chief elected official in Kerr County, said, “we do not have a warning system” and “didn’t know this flood was coming” when asked about the flash floods, “even as local reporters pointed to the warnings and pushed him for answers about why more precautions weren’t taken.”
You probably will not be shocked to learn that Kelly is a Republican or that Kerr County is about as solidly red as you can get, just like the Texas state government and the folks decimating running our federal government.
So, at this point it looks like there’s plenty of blame to go around.
That includes the Republicans denial of climate change, in general. “Colossal bursts of rain like the ones that caused the deadly flooding in Texas are becoming more frequent and intense around the globe as the burning of fossil fuels heats the planet, scientists say,” The New York Times reported. But the Trump administration has “dismissed the hundreds of experts who had been compiling the next edition of the National Climate Assessment, which was scheduled to come out in 2028. And it is proposing deep cuts to NOAA’s 2026 budget, including eliminating the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which conducts and coordinates climate research.”
One thing we know for sure: good government saves lives. Lack of it leads to preventable deaths and tragedies.