After the Texas floods, when is the right time to ask what went wrong?

The finger-pointing began as soon as the waters started to recede. 

Within hours of last month’s floods in Kerr County, Texas, which killed more than 130 people, pundits were already battling over who — or what — was responsible. Over the next few weeks, people blamed insufficient warning systems, sleeping officials, and even nature itself. But Governor Greg Abbott had a different target in mind: the blamers themselves. 

“Who’s to blame? Know this: That’s the word choice of losers,” Abbott said at a press conference, before launching into a drawn-out metaphor about how losing teams point fingers, while winners “talk about solutions.”

It was a familiar dodge (albeit with a sporty twist), but there was at least a kernel of truth to what Abbott was saying. The blame game that erupts after a tragedy can distract from getting things done. These early narratives often outpace evidence, and the conversation quickly devolves into talking points pitting one side against another. 

“Everybody starts pointing a finger at everyone else, and then what’ll happen is everything gets lost in the shuffle,” said Stephen Strader, a hazards geographer at Villanova University. “Days, months, years afterwards, and we’re right back to where we were.” 

Talking about mistakes is essential to finding real solutions — a fact that wasn’t lost on the many football fans, who criticized Abbott’s “loser” remarks. It’s hard to improve if you don’t unpack what went wrong. But people in power can weaponize the public’s distaste for the blame game in order to dodge questions about accountability. Few bother to distinguish between knee-jerk finger pointing and more nuanced, careful examinations of what factors put people in harm’s way. 

“Understanding what went wrong is often a bit different than blaming,” said Sarah Anderson, an environmental science and management professor at UC Santa Barbara. Ideally, the momentum coming out of a crisis can become a springboard for better long-term preparedness — not only in the affected region, but in other communities facing similar risks. A Kerr County-type flooding disaster, after all, could unfold in any state across the country. All the necessary ingredients are there: homes built in risky places, inadequate warning systems, and outdated flood maps that fail to account for the effects of climate change.

The period after a disaster can be a rare window of opportunity to enact real change. With the damage still fresh in their minds, people are more willing to take bold action and prepare for future disasters. 

“‘Do something, do anything!’ That is sort of how I characterize that period,” Anderson said.

That more thorough assessment doesn’t need to happen immediately, she said, but in the weeks and months that follow a tragedy. For the Texas floods, that means now. And yet our national attention span burns out fast, like a match fueled by hot takes — flaring out long before the hard work of recovery and preparation can begin. It’s a fundamental mismatch: By the time we finally have the distance and data to learn from what went wrong, it already feels like the moment to act has passed.

There’s a natural instinct to find someone (or something) to blame right after a tragedy. It’s a way to regain a sense of control when the world feels chaotic and dangerous. Deb Anderson, a lecturer at Monash University in Australia who has researched post-disaster blame games, said that in these times of grief, people are often “looking for something solid to latch on to in a space where everything’s disappearing.”

That search frequently follows political fault lines. After Australia’s “Black Saturday” bushfires, which in 2009 killed 173 people, Anderson found that the public discourse around blame quickly devolved into partisan bickering. Environmentalists were accused of blocking efforts to reduce fuels in forests, while government officials were targeted mainly based on political grievances. “It intensified in ways that almost defied belief,” she said. “It silenced the need for a really nuanced and difficult and complex discussion in terms of fire science in this country.” 

Last month’s Texas floods followed a similar pattern. Left-leaning news sites (and some local Texas officials) quickly latched on to the idea that the Trump administration’s staffing cuts to the National Weather Service might have worsened the disaster. That narrative made it all the way to Congress, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, calling for an investigation into the matter. 

But that blame narrative, while emotionally compelling, was premature. An examination by Wired found that the National Weather Service had performed its job — the real communication breakdown had happened elsewhere.

The federal cuts have the potential to lead to disasters somewhere else, but it’s not fair to tie them directly to the Texas floods, said Isaac Saul, who runs the nonpartisan newsletter Tangle, which sorts through views from across the political spectrum. “It’s complicated, which is how a lot of this stuff usually is,” he said. 

Democrats weren’t the only ones playing the blame game. Conservative commentators rejected the idea that any policy failures had occurred. They downplayed the role of Kerr County’s decision not to install outdoor warning sirens. The right-leaning blog Hot Air went so far as to claim that “no amount of government spending” could stop people from dying in flash floods: “Whatever people think, we have not tamed nature … And if you think that warnings will prevent tragedies, you are also mistaken.”

The idea that disasters are an inevitable force of fate drew swift pushback. “The whole point of politics and government is to create the conditions that try to shield people from the very worst,” wrote MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. In The Atlantic article “We Should, in Fact, Politicize the Tragedy,” Olga Khazan cited research showing that when politicians are held accountable, people’s lives are better. “Tragedy is part of life,” Khazan wrote. “But we should not invite more tragedies than are necessary by pretending we are powerless to stop them.” 

Part of the problem is that “politicizing” a tragedy can mean two very different things: the actual work of governing needed to keep society functioning smoothly, or the culture war clashes that overshadow meaningful debate. A tragedy often reveals the cracks in the former, a system that needs to be repaired to keep people safe. Yet when people object to a tragedy becoming “politicized,” it’s that second definition from which they’re recoiling, distracting them from having necessary, life-saving discussions about policy or process. 

In the weeks after the Texas floods, there were heartbreaking personal accounts, sharp reporting on what went wrong, and even citizen investigations into how local Kerr County officials were so unprepared despite the well-known risks. But those stories landed after the discourse had already hardened — the complexity of the situation flattened by misinformation and partisanship before the facts had a chance to emerge.

“The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one’s politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits,” author Rebecca Solnit wrote in The Guardian. Why dig into the details when you’re already satisfied?

In recent years, an increasing number of people have pointed fingers at another extreme weather culprit: climate change. That’s for good reason — greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the planet, intensifying floods, heat waves, and other climate-related disasters. But there’s a debate about the best way to bring climate change into the conversation in a way that leads to action, rather than deflection. 

Friederike Otto, a climate science professor at Imperial College London, warned that blaming climate change for a disaster can create similar problems as blaming “nature.” It can give people an excuse to avoid looking at other human failures, such as poor planning or knowingly building in harm’s way.

“Even if climate change plays a big role in the weather event, what turns weather into a disaster is always strongly shaped by vulnerability and exposure,” Otto said. 

Read Next

Kerr County’s tragic flood wasn’t an outlier. It was a preview.

The 2022 floods in Pakistan, for example, were likely made 50 percent more extreme by climate change. But the devastation was largely driven by the country’s outdated river management system and densely populated floodplains. 

In Kerr County, some similar dynamics were at play. Some of the cabins at Camp Mystic — the girls’ camp where 27 children and counselors died — were built in “extremely hazardous” floodplains. On top of that, the changing climate probably intensified the speed and scale of flooding along the Guadalupe River. “From a scientific point of view, it is the kind of event where we absolutely expect climate change to make it worse, because the rain fell in just a few hours,” Otto said. “That’s where we see, wherever we have studies, quite a strong impact of climate change.” 

The answer isn’t to leave climate change out of the story, but to place it in context alongside the other policy decisions that put people in danger.

After extreme weather events, people are actively looking for answers about the role that climate change played, according to Will Howard, head of insights at Potential Energy, a nonpartisan marketing firm focused on climate action. But when he analyzed the social media conversation a few days after the Texas floods, he found that only 2 percent of posts connected the problem to climate change. They were far outnumbered by posts promoting conspiracy theories about the event’s causes. The narratives that really took off online revolved around blame. 

While the immediate post-disaster discourse often falls into familiar political camps, Howard has advised climate groups to begin with shared values: that dangerous weather is affecting everyone, and events like the Kerr County floods could happen anywhere. “You can go from there to: ‘We really have to acknowledge the problem and start preparing for it if we want to protect the people that we love,’” he said. 

Howard said that framing the event as a “climate tragedy” can nod to a root cause while still being sensitive to the grief and hardship people have endured. The organization’s research shows that emphasizing disaster preparation can be just as effective at building support for climate action as talking about the need to cut carbon emissions. 

They have also found that framing extreme weather as an “unnatural disaster” made worse by “fossil fuel pollution” can increase demand for solutions — but much more so when the event is still fresh in people’s minds. 

That window of opportunity doesn’t stay open for long. In an attention-driven economy, it may be a matter of days before it closes, said John Marshall, the firm’s founder and CEO. That’s long before scientific studies can tell us exactly how climate change contributed to a given disaster. 

Scientists have tried to move faster, at times even firing off rapid analysis before a hurricane hits the shore. But science, along with disaster recovery, typically moves at a snail’s pace compared to the news cycle, churning out results long after most people have moved on.

Disaster survivors, on the other hand, don’t have the luxury of simply “moving on.” While national, state, and local officials are busy pointing fingers at each other, hoping to avoid footing the bill, survivors are living in horrific conditions — lacking running water and dealing with their houses rotting from mold, said Emma Tai, the managing director for Organizing Resilience, an initiative built to support grassroots organizing after a disaster. 

All the media attention has some benefits — it can lead to an initial outpouring of volunteers and donations. But as the country stops paying attention to a tragedy, that help often vanishes, making it more difficult to translate the initial outrage into long-term change. Elected officials, for their part, are much more likely to be rewarded for a speedy recovery than for long-term planning, even if returning to “normal” just sets the stage for the next catastrophe.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Tai’s group was founded on the idea that climate disasters are moments that can drive sweeping economic, social, cultural, and political change — and that survivors should be at the forefront of driving those developments. “There’s a real need to stand up these locally grown organizing committees that can fight and advocate for what they need after the cameras and the pallets of water bottles go away,” Tai said.

After the Texas floods, Organizing Resilience helped people affected by the disaster testify at a state hearing about the floods in Austin, more than a two-hour drive away from Kerr County, to speak out about their needs. They called for a warning system based on the precise level of river rise, sirens tied to federal weather alerts, and more robust rescue and recovery efforts. 

“Disasters are windows when we can not just restore the status quo, but make it better and more just,” Tai said. 

Blame can be a distraction from that hard work — or the beginning of it. Too often, it’s used to entrench divides after a disaster. But approached differently — as an opportunity to ask tough questions, identify what failed, and rebuild with the future in mind — it can be a tool for change. In the end, what’s dangerous isn’t the blame itself. It’s letting the moment pass without doing anything differently.