Rescue crews are scrambling to find survivors of catastrophic flooding that tore through Central Texas on the Fourth of July. It’s already one of the deadliest flood events in modern American history, leaving at least 95 people dead, 27 of whom were girls and counselors at a Christian summer camp in Kerr County, which was inundated when the nearby Guadalupe River surged 26 feet in just 45 minutes.
“It’s the worst-case scenario for a very extreme, very sudden, literal wall of water,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, during a livestream Monday morning. “I don’t think that’s an exaggeration in this case, based on the eyewitness accounts and the science involved.”
It will take some time for scientists to do proper “attribution” studies here, to say for instance how much extra rain they can blame on climate change. But generally speaking, this disaster has climate change’s marks all over it — a perfect storm of conspiring phenomena, both in the atmosphere and on the ground. “To people who are still skeptical that the climate crisis is real, there’s such a clear signal and fingerprint of climate change in this type of event,” said Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
This tragedy actually started hundreds of miles to the southeast, out at sea. As the planet has warmed, the gulf has gotten several degrees Fahrenheit hotter. That’s turned it into a giant puddle of fuel for hurricanes barreling toward the Gulf Coast, since those storms feed on warm seawater.
I used to tube the Guadalupe, Frio and Comal rivers in the limestone hills in central Texas. I have spent countless summers floating the rivers in truck inner tubes. It’s well known that floods can and do reach the fucking treetops. I have seen cars and pick em ups wedged in tree boughs. Multiple times. The water has nowhere to go but follow the limestone. Climate change is exacerbating it, but this sort of shit happens regardless of the changing climate.
I always referred to them as gully washers, because they quite literally scrub everything away; trash, trees, humans etc.
This could have all been avoided. It deliberately was not.
