A week after the horrific flash floods in Texas, 120 people are now confirmed dead, most of them (96) in Kerr County — a number that will likely continue rising because at least 161 people are still missing. Of the confirmed dead, 36 are children. As of a Wednesday evening briefing, five campers and one counselor remained missing from Camp Mystic, the girls’ camp built partly in an “extremely hazardous” flood zone (New York Times gift link).
Also a week after the floods, we still have no official statement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (acting) administrator, David Richardson, who seems to have taken the disaster as his cue to go into hiding inside his office so no one will be tempted to tell him he’s doing a heckuva job.
News from Texas is unfolding tragically in both dimensions of time: The more we find out about events leading up to the disaster, the worse it looks at nearly every level of government, and the response has been a mix of heroic actions by rescuers, but incompetent fuckery and blame-shifting from the Trump administration and Texas state and local governments. It’s fuckups all the way down.
The big media are a couple days late to the story, but they’ve finally noticed something that indy journo Marisa Kabas reported on Monday: David Richardson, who at least on paper runs FEMA, was perhaps inspired by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to do his own cosplay, as The Invisible Man. (The HG Wells one, not the sometimes-banned-in-Texas Ralph Ellison one.)
Normal FEMA chiefs — even under Trump! — made a point of traveling to the scene of disasters and coordinating the federal response with state and local officials. By contrast, Richardson hasn’t so much as issued any public comment on the floods, not even to say “Attaboy, Donnie.” As Kabas reports in an update, staffers say that Richardson is
holed up in his Washington, DC office at FEMA headquarters. Sources confirm he was physically present on Monday and Tuesday and attended the daily morning meeting. But aside from alerting staff about a planned trip to Peru (purpose of the trip is unclear), Richardson had nothing to share; he did not mention Texas in any capacity.
He did show up for a meeting Wednesday — in New Orleans — of the “FEMA Review Council,” the Trump commission studying how best to leave the agency to rot away unused in a warehouse somewhere. According to a FEMA staffer who watched the meeting on livestream, Kabas says, the group “said a prayer for Texas and repeatedly commended Governor Greg Abbott for his leadership during this crisis. Otherwise, the floods were not acknowledged.” This administration is very big on prayer, so Mission Accomplished.
As of yet, Kabas notes, there are “very few — if any — federal staff are on the ground to help survivors register for assistance.” By Wednesday morning, just 11 households of the 26,000 in Kerr County had had their aid requests approved, according to FEMA’s website. By early Friday morning that number was up to 59, at least. A former FEMA official told E&E News that the agency “recently stopped its long-standing practice of having disaster workers knock on doors in damaged areas to sign people up for FEMA aid.” This is where we remind you again that at this point after Hurricane Helene last fall, FEMA had hundreds of people in western North Carolina doing exactly that, conspiracy theories notwithstanding.
But perhaps we are being too harsh. Maybe Richardson has been staying away from Texas out of courtesy to the few FEMA workers on the ground there (still only 105 of them as of Wednesday, plus another 300+ from other agencies) so he won’t be tempted to “run right over them.”
Some delays in getting help to Texas, CNN revealed this week, resulted from an “efficiency” roadblock Noem imposed earlier, requiring that any contract or grant for more than $100,000 be personally approved by Noem before funds are released. FEMA insiders told CNN that policy has created a new level of red tape in a system where getting help to people — preferably with a quickness — can easily cost billions because FEMA has to contract with local crews for much of the work that’s needed.
In essence, they say the order has stripped the agency of much of its autonomy at the very moment its help is needed most.
“We were operating under a clear set of guidance: lean forward, be prepared, anticipate what the state needs, and be ready to deliver it,” a longtime FEMA official told CNN. “That is not as clear of an intent for us at the moment.”
As a for-instance, the story notes that the policy slowed the usual practice of pre-positioning Urban Search and Rescue teams, specialists in dealing with catastrophic flooding, by contracting with a network of those teams all over the country and having them near likely trouble spots.
But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.
Once Noem approved the teams, they still had to get to Texas, instead of being available almost immediately after the floodwaters passed. As we keep pointing out, Texas, unlike a lot of red states, does have very robust state emergency resources, good for them — Trump’s new FEMA doctrine of leaving states to fend for themselves hasn’t yet been a complete clusterfuck.
Even so, CNN notes that Texas couldn’t get some federal resources it requested, such as
aerial imagery from FEMA to aid search and rescue operations, a source told CNN, but that was delayed as it awaited Noem’s approval for the necessary contract.
FEMA staff have also been answering phones at a disaster call center, where, according to one agency official, callers have faced longer wait times as the agency awaited Noem’s approval for a contract to bring in additional support staff.
Golly, can you imagine the conspiracy theories that would be all over the internet if that had happened under Joe Biden? Why is Biden hiding the aerial imaging? Is he covering up all the ISIS training camps and child smuggling warehouses he’s established in Texas?
DHS Propaganda Minister Tricia McLaughlin told CNN to stop worrying and love the slog, because other federal agencies, including the Coast Guard, had sent search and crews, OK? (Presumably that’s because those agencies didn’t have to wait days for Noem to sign off on operations, not that she said so.) In an evidence-free assertion, McLaughlin said things are much, much better under the new regime.
“FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”
We also learned yesterday that in the middle of all that slow-motion fuckery in Texas, as the death toll keeps creeping up, DHS went and cancelled a previously approved $3 million grant to significantly improve emergency alert systems in New York state, not that it matters too much since it’s a blue state. (Sure, the rurals who would have benefited from the system include lots of MAGAs, but tough luck, there are short-term savings to be had!)
All is well! Praise Trump! Remain patient! Your call is very important to us!
At a presser Tuesday, Greg Abbott said that in the days leading up to the flood, the state knew flooding was possible, so state agencies had “pre-positioned assets and resources and personnel” in anticipation of the storms, moving the resources closer as the weather picture became clearer, so that by last Wednesday, the state “made sure we had adequate supplies going into Friday. We were ready.” The invaluable nonprofit Texas Tribune reports that
The Texas Division of Emergency Management “activated” state emergency response resources across West Texas and the Hill Country on July 2, according to a TDEM press release. TDEM cited “heavy rainfall with the potential to cause flash flooding” and encouraged Texans to prepare for flooded roads and monitor weather forecasts.
The state agency listed a number of state agencies and Texas A&M services “available to support local flood response operations,” such as rescue boat teams, helicopters, and personnel to monitor road conditions.
Just one eensy-weensy problem: Nobody apparently thought to coordinate any of that with at least some local officials where the floods would hit. Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring said at a different press conference Wednesday that he hadn’t known about those assets, resources and personnel being in the area.
“I haven’t seen the governor’s remarks … I don’t know what resources TDEM had in place at that time,” Herring said. […] [National Weather Service] officials said they communicated directly with local officials the night of the flood, but Herring said he wasn’t aware of the flooding until around 5:30 a.m. when the city manager called him. By that time, floodwaters were already meters high and parts of Highway 39 were flooded, limiting evacuation efforts.
It’s probably terribly unpatriotic of us to point out again that Trump’s massive layoffs in the early weeks of his administration forced the early retirement of Paul Yura, the warning coordination meteorologist at NWS’s San Antonio office. In normal times, Yura, a 32-year veteran of the Weather Service, would have been responsible for coordinating the agency’s weather alerts with local officials, which would likely have included making sure officials like Herring were alerted when NWS issued its first warning of potentially deadly flash floods at 1:14 Friday morning, giving three hours and 20 minutes warning before the Guadalupe River surged through Kerrville.
Kerr County also received — and appears not to have acted on — another warning that flooding was imminent, as ABC News reports. A firefighter in Ingram, a town upstream of Kerrville, called the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office at 4:22 a.m. Friday to ask them to activate the emergency phone alert system for area residents. Audio obtained by local ABC station KSAT captured the call:
“The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on State Highway 39,” the firefighter said in the dispatch audio. “Is there any way we can send a CodeRED out to our Hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?”
“Stand by, we have to get that approved with our supervisor,” a Kerr County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher replied.
Fortunately, the request didn’t have to go through Kristi Noem, but even so, it was 90 minutes before the first alerts from Kerr County’s CodeRED system went out, and only to people who were subscribed to the service. Some alerts didn’t go out until as late as 10 a.m.; by then, the flood had already swept through most of the county.
ABC News explains that the CodeRED alert system, which sends pre-recorded phone messages in an emergency, has been around for about a decade in Kerr County, but is far from comprehensive. The system initially relied on phone company white pages listings, so people with unlisted numbers for their landline, or who have only those newfangled cell phone doodads, needed to sign up separately, and even then, cell coverage along the river is spotty. Campers and even counselors at Camp Mystic weren’t allowed to have phones, although it’s unclear whether they’d have had reception anyway. A power outage due to the storm also knocked out the camp’s loudspeakers. Just two days prior to the flood, a state inspector signed off on the camp’s emergency plan, but then, it’s Texas, where burdensome government regulations are minimal, making the state a paradise for business.
The New York Times reports (gift link) that several parts of Camp Mystic were in an extremely hazardous flood zone, and that during a $5 million expansion six years ago, the camp not only made no effort to move older cabins in the most dangerous locations, it actually added new cabins in flood zones. Texas remains open for business, the end.
Welcome To Trump And Noem’s Feral Emergency Management
What? Ted Cruz Did *Another* Disaster Hypocrisy? Well, Yeah, Obligatory, Really.
[Texas Tribune / Handbasket / CNN / ABC News / NYT (gift link) / TPM]
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