Flooding is a fact of life in Texas Hill Country, a region home to a flood-prone corridor known as “Flash Flood Alley.” Judge Rob Kelly, the top elected official in Kerr County, said as much on Sunday.
“We know we get rains. We know the river rises,” he said as a desperate search for survivors continued along the Guadalupe, a river that rose more than 30 feet in just five hours last week. “But nobody saw this coming.”
County records show that some Kerr County officials did see it coming and raised concerns about the county’s outdated flood warning system nearly a decade ago.
Their first request for help updating the technology was denied in 2017, when Kerr County applied for roughly $1 million in federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program aid from the Texas Department of Emergency Management. County officials tried again in 2018 after Hurricane Harvey swept Texas, killing 89 people and causing some $159 billion in damage. Again, the state denied the request, directing most federal assistance toward more densely populated areas, including Houston.
As neighboring counties invested in better emergency warning systems, Kerr County — the heart of Flash Flood Alley — never modernized an antiquated flood warning system that lacks basic components like sirens and river gauges. At least 110 people, including 27 children, have died so far in the deadliest floods the state has seen since 1921. Most of them drowned in Kerr County, largely because they didn’t know the water was coming. The search for at least 161 other people continues.
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The matter of who should have fronted the money for flood system upgrades is at the heart of swelling controversy in Texas. Public outrage has spurred the kind of action that, had it happened years ago, might have saved lives. “The state needs to step up and pay,” said Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick on Monday this week. “The governor and I talked this morning at length about it, and he said, ‘We’re just gonna do it.’”
But even as Texas races to prepare Kerr County for future extreme weather events, the federal government is speeding in the opposite direction. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has taken an axe to the country’s resilience efforts, undoing years of progress toward helping communities withstand the consequences of climate change.
In April, the Trump administration canceled the Building Resilient Communities Program, or BRIC, which funnels billions of dollars to states, municipalities, and tribal nations so they can prepare for future disasters. Ironically, Trump signed this program into law during his first term. But now, in the name of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the Trump administration has cut $750 million in new resilience funding and clawed back nearly $900 million in grant funding already promised but not yet disbursed to states for improvements like upgrading stormwater systems, performing prescribed burns, and building flood control systems. FEMA also canceled $600 million in Flood Mitigation Assistance funding to communities this year, money that helps states protect buildings from flooding. Government analyses have determined that every dollar spent preparing for a disaster reaps $6 or more in costs saved down the road.
The federal Hazard Mitigation Program funding that Texas Governor Greg Abbott requested alongside his request for a major disaster declaration following the catastrophic flooding that began July 4 — the same pot of money Kerr County tried to tap to modernize its flood warning infrastructure in 2017 and 2018 — is still pending as of Tuesday, according to the governor’s office.
“Historically, if a state has requested Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funding as part of the disaster declaration, it’s been approved,” said Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. But the government hasn’t approved that type of funding in months. “Ultimately, the president has the authority to declare the disaster declaration and determine what’s included in that declaration.”
In sum, these actions at the federal level make it more likely that communities across the country will be caught flat-footed as climate change makes extreme weather events more intense and unpredictable. “There’s so many communities that, when they look at their flooding data, their disaster risk data, their future climate projections, they understand their risk and they understand what their new normal may be,” said Victoria Salinas, who led FEMA’s resilience initiatives under former president Joe Biden. “But then they are powerless to do things about it because it often requires money, expertise, and people power.”
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Rural and underprivileged areas like Kerr County are at particular risk. They often lack the resources and know-how to obtain resilience funding from state and federal officials. The BRIC program had a technical assistance arm dedicated to helping these “lower capacity” communities develop strong applications. That’s also gone. “As far as we know, not only will there not be technical assistance provided through this program going forward, but there are communities out there that were, say, one year into a three-year technical assistance agreement through this program that are now unsure about whether or not they’re going to be able to continue,” Weber said.
That means it’ll largely be up to states and counties to fund preparedness projects. It’s not a guarantee that states will take action or that communities will embrace solutions. Even a state like Texas, which has the second-biggest economy in the country, has been loath to help counties pay for disaster resilience initiatives. A measure that would have established a government council and grant program to reform local disaster warning systems across Texas failed in the state Senate this year.
“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” said state Representative Wes Virdell, a Republican from Central Texas who voted against the bill.