Having children makes me feel vulnerable. They’re like extensions of myself — if they feel pain, I feel it too. To imagine one of them dying… this story broke my heart.
My wife had been pushing me to try for kids for, well, a couple of years, and I was finally getting there. I always knew I wanted kids, or figured I did, but then reality comes: can we afford it, shouldn't we enjoy what we have a little bit longer, are we sure we want to do this, etc.
Then, my friend messaged me one night and asked me to join him at the children's hospital to take a few photos as they were saying "goodbye." His 18 month old had been fighting cancer, and it was 1 in the morning and my melatonin-addled brain thought "oh, they must be taking him home."
It wasn't until I walked into the room with my DSLR that I realized what he meant. In fairness, he had prefaced the request with, "do you mind if I ruin your night?"
I am not even close to a professional photographer. But I tried to take as many pictures as respectfully as I could of the literal hardest moment any parents could ever hope not to have to go through. At a certain moment, it became time, and I found myself... stuck, in a sense. I was the only other one in the room aside from the parents, but I didn't feel like I could abandon them, and so I sat there as they disconnected the machines keeping their son alive. It was the most awful two minutes as the attending sat there with a stethoscope against this tiny chest.
I waited until an opportune moment, and then hugged them, quietly took my leave, went home, edited the photos as quickly as possible, uploaded and sent them, and then bawled for an hour or so.
Needless to say, this set back our efforts at even _trying_ for kids by about 2-3 years. Because I just was stuck by this all-encompassing thought: you can't lose what you don't have. You simply aren't open to that sort of vulnerability if you don't have children. It doesn't exist, until you form it into being. And that thought haunted me. Just like it haunts, well, every parent on some level.
And to clarify: this didn't even _happen to me_. It happened to _them_, and their son. But it was a defining moment for me that made it really tough to overcome.
Eventually, we did have two kids (after a miscarriage, of course, because isn't that how it goes), and they're sitting behind me watching a movie as I type this. But these sort of thoughts are always there in the background. And yeah, reading a story like this one about the flood just spears you in the soul.
Being there is a powerful and supportive thing. Yes, it is incredibly hard to deal with the loss of a child, we lost one, too. Having someone there is a help and a support, we didn't really get from others.
There were three deaths in my family over a 10 month period. Both my parents and my cousin.
I still felt like it was worse when, prior to this, I attended the funeral of a little girl from my kid's school. Tiny coffin, painted with horses. All the kids having their first experience with death. The impossibility of saying anything useful to the parents at the reception afterwards.
Sorry to hear that, no parent is unmoved deeply with such stories which just shouldn't be happening, but life is... life.
Its a mistake in general in life to get swayed and stunned by the negative aspects of it and be blocked to experience the positive aspects, even if some risk of harm is involved. Although some healing and reconciliation is required, no doubt there. You did allright based on your description. Trying to play the game of life as safe as possible ultimately means losing the game.
Life doesn't have to be always a positive experience, rather an intense one compared to keeping it always safe and ending up with meh story (and usually tons of regrets before dying). My philosophy only, but I really think it should be pretty much universal.
Also yes miscarriages are very common, we had one, and so did basically all couples in our circle in various phases. I take it as a defense mechanism of woman's body, figuring out it wouldn't work out later so aborting the mission (at least under normal circumstances). One was very brutal (in 37th week, basically a stillbirth and woman still had to go through whole birth process), a proper traumatic experience that leaves permanent scars on souls of parents. But still, after mourning one has to get up and keep moving even if feeling empty and powerless, thats life.
You want to hear empty phrases like typical 'thoughts and prayers' that help absolutely nothing and are overused to the point of losing any value, just so that writer feels for 5s better about themselves? Internet is chock full of those from all those me-participating-too people.
What I wrote is unfortunately true, and brutal. Don't think I didn't cry for those babies who never stood the chance, both ours and other's. But eventually you have to get up, the only other alternative to this is far worse. So I did, and so did my wife, and all the other parents affected. Life goes on and doesn't care about your personal woes.
We live in extremely safe times compared to how things looked even 150 years ago, 40-50% of kids didn't survive to age 5 and deaths during even normal pregnancies were very common. Go read a bit about that if you feel like I talk extreme or are an outlier.
This sentence in a HN article from a day ago caught my eye [1][2].
> Second, between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US maternal death rate fell by 94 percent, according to Sarygulov and Arslanagic-Wakefield. Early antibiotics in the 1930s, followed by the mass production of penicillin in the 1940s, “drove down incidences of sepsis, [which were] responsible for 40 percent of maternal deaths at the time, and made caesarean sections safer,” they write.
No, I merely want people not to be unnecessarily and unhelpfully “brutal” (crass). The fact that vapid aphorisms don’t add utility to the commons doesn’t mean that their mirror image does.
The story was powerfully honest, but I think it also concludes that love is as powerful as death. Death will come for all of us, and instead of trying to fight against it, it might make sense to try and understand what it is, and what it also brings. If we fear death so much, it is often because that fear has stopped us from truly living while we are still alive.
I can't remember where, but somewhere I heard that before kids you live with your heart inside you, and after you have kids you live without heart out in the world.
Reading this account made me think of a paper I read in grad school about the Mann Gulch fire and how quickly one’s ability to make sense of the situation unravels.
Reading this makes me so sad and reminded me of a book I read years ago: Hiroshima by John Hersey - about the first-person narrative account of survivors who witnessed the impact of atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima that morning.
If you have the opportunity to visit, I recommend Nagasaki over Hiroshima and especially these two places in Nagasaki:
Shiroyama Elementary School
Nagai Takashi Memorial Museum Nagasaki
These felt much more personal than anything I saw in Hiroshima and there were zero (other) tourists to interrupt the experience (very much unlike the museum in Hiroshima).
What an insensitive, assumptive, stupid remark. You can't possibly know that the person you replied to behaves as you claim. It's 2025, the firebombing of Tokyo is widely recognized now, maybe not by most normies but certainly by any historical adjacent nerd.
Theres videos from different people as the flooding started live. It's WILD to watch what happens in a short span of time. We're talking under 30 minutes I think before it starts overtaking a bridge. The water will sweep you up and drag you around too, the random debris is what's fatal.
I watched the first couple minutes of this video (certainly wasn't going to watch 40 minutes) then skipped ahead in chunks, thinking it was clips from different locations.
Then I scrubbed around and realized, no, it was the same place, which left me stunned.
Make sure to watch the last 3-5 minutes or so for the cherry on top. Then I recommend skipping back to the beginning to really drive home how insane this was.
I will never again be cavalier about flash flood warnings.
I live in an old watermill. We’ve had a “run for your life” flood. Fortunately, I was well aware of the risks when we moved here, and always keep an eye on the weather in winter.
We had about 10cm of rain fall on already saturated soils upstream of us, and as darkness fell that evening I could see the river rise… and rise… and rise - and in the nick of time came to the realisation that we had to evacuate, NOW. Our car had already washed away, so we ended up bushwhacking a few km out in the driving rain, two very pissed off cats stuffed into our go-bags. Turns out the car being gone was no great impediment as the road was gone, too, utterly washed out.
Came back to an almighty mess - flood was a 10,000 year one, the house was buried in gigantic flotsam, entire trees that had been uprooted, and tumbled down the river in an enormous jam, inches of mud coating every surface. The chimney had washed away.
The mill itself was fine. Three meter thick stone walls, for a reason, it turns out.
We still live here. The year after the flood we had a small earthquake, enough to send boulders crashing down into the valley - and the year after that a wildfire, which reduced much of the valley to a moonscape. That time, we fled with a toddler in tow, as well as the cats.
Perhaps one day this place will be the end of us - but the 99.9% of the time it isn’t trying to kill us, it couldn’t be better.
We now at least have huge water tanks and a deluge system for the fire risk, and a cabin 30 meters above the river for us to decamp to in the winter when the flood risk grows - and a new roof with a steel substructure to catch any errant bits of mountain that decide to visit.
I live in Auckland, New Zealand and had never been in a flood until 2023.
We got something like 280mm in a 24 hours, on the back of a wet month. At its peak we we getting 50mm an hour.
It was incredible. Manhole covers popping off, mildly sloped roads were rivers with rapids and flat ones were lakes, growing as you watched.
Caught completely unprepared, it was chaos.
Living near a river or flood-plain is a hard no for me, even if I had 3m thick stone walls.
I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades - largely because this area is full of rivers so any flooding is just spread thin. I feel this is mostly a drainage problem of areas where all water is channeled into a narrow area by the surrounding geography? "Narrow" being a relative term here of course, considering geological scale.
Being fine for decades is not a useful metric, unfortunately.
If you want to know, look into the last time it was flooded.
If it has never flooded in the scope of human history, it’s possible that the danger of flooding is indeed not significant.
If it has flooded, it will likely flood again.
If it is a flood plain, it will probably flood again many, many times. Weather changes associated with climate change may exacerbate this. It would not be particularly surprising to see the variance in significant precipitation events to double, triple , or more.
In any rate, climate change aside, it would not be particularly remarkable for a flood risk that aggregates to one in ten years to not flood for 50 years running, just as it would not be unexpected if some such areas flooded each year for 3 years straight. Both of those events would be consistent with patterns that would be expected to happen in the big picture.
I know nothing of your situation, but if I were living within less than 100 feet of the altitude of a nearby river or sea, I would consider moving. Life is short, and in my tiny life I have been humanly connected to floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes within my direct circle of friends and family enough to internalize that these risks are not theoretical.
When an existential risk can be categorically eliminated from your life, it is often worth doing.
One of the things about natural disasters, is that everyone focuses on the big, kinetic ones, like fires, volcanoes, tornados, earthquakes, etc.
But the one that kills the most people, and does the most damage, is good ol' H₂O; water. The giver of life. Even with hurricanes, most of the damage is done by the flooding. Up here, we had Sandy, which, I think was only a Cat 2 or 3, but did 70 Billion dollars' worth of damage, and killed a bunch of folks.
Hulu has a great documentary on the Tsunami from 2004, in the Indian Ocean. It was a true horror.
Insurance companies sure as hell know this. Try getting home insurance in an area that they deem "flood-prone" (you might be surprised, where they say so). I think that most big insurance companies have refused to insure homes, in many parts of Florida.
> I think that most big insurance companies have refused to insure homes, in many parts of Florida.
Yes, and instead of making the people who choose to live there bear the true cost of that choice, we instead create state-owned flood insurance plans that subsidize the risk for (typically wealthy) coastal homeowners.
> I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades
For the non-expert reader, I must point out that there are many factors that contribute to how "safe" rivers are.
Large parts of texas are flat, or have flat lands further up the water shed. This means that wide areas of rain, even though modest all get funneled into small areas. This is a common cause flash flooding.
More over the river basins are wide and flat too, which means that there isnt much to slow the water down and no shelter for when it comes.
In the same way that some costal areas have tame tides, and other have 7 meter swells, or where I grew up, tides that come in as fast as you can run.
The mix of terrifying immediacy and raw loss is haunting, especially when you hear about people literally being swept away from shelters they trusted.
It’s a stark reminder that robust early warning isn’t just technology, it’s life or death and the costs of underfunding those systems aren’t hypothetical.
The "Once in a hundred year" saying is misunderstood. It's actually 1% chance each year. So you roll your D100 every spring.
Whether that's an acceptable risk is up to you. Having lived in central Texas, it's a region known for it's flash floods, and you should take the warnings seriously. If there's heavy rainfall - you should be asking where all that water will go.
In this case, I hope that Texas looks into upgrading their alerting system so that people get word in time to leave the area. The news was saying the weather center added additional staff for the storm (five meteorologists) but if their forecasts can't get to where they're needed, that's not good enough.
> In this case, I hope that Texas looks into upgrading their alerting system
Since the July 4 flooding, I feel like the over correction of flood warnings via mobile phones is not a good thing. My phone has been going off with near daily flood warnings with 0% precipitation. I get how rain upstream can cause flooding where it’s not raining downstream, but it hasn’t even been raining upstream. I’m also well over 200 miles away from where the worst of the flooding happened. People that far away do not need these warnings. The notifications have listed counties not close, so it just comes across as “let’s do something just to say we did something”
This might be a good project for someone - take the terrain contours and rainfall location & amount into account when determining where to send alerts.
It's a terrible solution if it is the only solution. Up until this situation, the alerts I received on my phone have been pretty spot on, which has been impressive. Yes, local sirens are a good idea, but they come with caveats. I have local sirens in my area, but they are for tornado or other severe weather. If I hear those sirens, my action to take is totally different than for a flood. Naturally, if I were to come to an area where the sirens are meant for flooding, my reaction to them would be the wrong move. I would hope that a siren for flooding would just sound different than how the established tornado siren warning system sounds.
This trained response to a siren/warning system is the reason they chose not to use the tsunami warning system in Hawaii during the fire. When that siren goes off, people seek higher ground which would have driven them to the fire.
I think once-in-one-hundred-year is a definition for weather events used in building standards (sorry to be vague and possibly misleading - if my resident architect/partner was here, I could be more specific). I've certainly heard of constructions like levies etc "build to withstand once-in-a-hundred-year storms". I wonder if these standards are being revised by appropriate international bodies?
At a (central Texas) city council hearing today on granting someone a variance to build tennis courts on a meadow next to a creek, a longtime resident said, “I think I’ve lived through five 500-year floods here.”
Where I live in Texas, we had three “500 year” events in three consecutive years, with the last one probably closer to a 1000 or 10000 year event - more rainfall in one spot than anywhere else ever measured.
We’ll see how long that record holds (I’ll take the under on 1000 years).
There's probably many other 1 in a 1,000 year events that haven't happened in many thousands. It's really hard to reason about infrequent events, especially post-hoc.
If in the Netherlands a river floods millions are affected and there is trillions in damage. If in America a river floods a few hundred people die. That's why my country takes this stuff seriously.
Right. It's the multiple-endpoints principle. The extreme events feel overly frequent because we cherry-pick and only notice them. We never notice the other 99/100 of places that don't have a hundred-year flood in a year.
And just 10 days after the event to be released, so written earlier. Not sure of the exact date it was written as the article has an August 2025 date in the byline. Hopefully it was helpful in their grief, which with how the last half was written seems to be at least part of the intent.
It would have helped if the columns were correctly tied down - those rebar stumps tell a story, which is that they did the foundation pour, left stubs, and then poured columns atop them with a cold joint. Fine if you’re doing a carport in a desert. Criminally negligent in a river floodway.
For that kind of structure, you must tie the rebar in - best is to have the entire length of the rebar for the column splay at the base and be threaded through and tied into the rebar for the footing, pour the footing, and then pour the columns as soon as the footing is cured enough to support the mass, but before it’s totally hard. That way the footing and the columns form a continuous structure, without any point where they can just lift or shear off.
I speak from experience, having built exactly this type of structure myself, and seeing it resist an enormous flood and a barrage of high-speed trees, unscathed. Absolute mess inside the timber structure atop, but anyone trapped within would have survived.
Unfortunately what they had there was a disaster waiting to happen.
Honestly, that protruding rebar reminds me of the common practice in some Central American countries of pouring the columns and crossties for the first story and leaving rebar stubbed out the top for a future second level which may or may not ever get built.
Oh, that’s a common thing all over the world - it’s generally because property taxes aren’t payable on incomplete structures. Seen it everywhere from Bulgaria to Cambodia to Egypt.
That's a myth, albeit one commonly held everywhere, even by locals.
You don't find it odd that so many poor- and middle-income countries with wildly different legal histories and taxing structures have the same glaring property tax loophole? Despite often wildly different origin stories for how the loophole came about?
Yes, some jurisdictions tax incomplete structures differently, but that only begs the question of whether a habitable structure lived in would be considered incomplete merely because some rebar is sticking out.
The real answer mostly relates to patterns of savings and real estate finance. In places where people invest their savings into their home directly, without a mortgage or similar as is common in more developed countries with robust retail financing options and comparatively liquid real estate markets, they often plan to build incrementally over time. Today you have enough money to build a 1-story out-of-pocket; in a few years you hope to have enough saved to expand to a 1-1/2 story or 2-story. This is much more feasible with concrete construction as it's relatively cheap (if not free or even cheaper than finishing) to just leave rebar exposed. Of course, as you pointed out earlier this doesn't make for great engineering. So you're more likely to see this in areas with loose building codes or lax enforcement.
In really poor areas you'll often find partial structures that aren't even habitable. That makes no sense in the tax loophole theory, but perfectly fits the theory that these structures are methods of investing savings. What's sad is that it's not uncommon for these to sit unfinished (to the point of habitability) for many years, or never finished at all; hard-working people's savings effectively lost.
Reasonable question. Yes, in that case, the house probably would have been fine. The lateral force on concrete pillars, even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily withstood.
The very first thing in TFA is a photo of where one of the pillars was ripped from the foundation. If that happened because of the force of the water against the house on top of it, then it could also happen when a tree or other large piece of floating debris hits it.
> even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily withstood.
Physics is not on your side here. if it was just water, then perhaps, although I am sceptical given how much force is generated by 10foot of water moving at 18 mph, which is ~6metric tons of lateral force. (assuming 1m2 cross section.)
Thats before any flotsam gets attached increasing the surface area.
Sure you could build something to withstand that, but could you afford to build it?
Being the parent of a child in the boys age, this was incredibly hard to read. I started yesterday, stopped half way through, could not sleep at first, woke up in the morning to finish the story. To me, as a non-native english speaker, the story is very well written to paint an extensive picture of the events unfolding as well of the environment, which made it much more frightening.
What astounds me is how quickly America moves on from environmental catastrophes. As an example, a huge part of Florida was pretty much devastated earlier this year but now you would never know. The electricity and other services were back up in days and all evidence of destroyed buildings gone as if the trash was just collected.
If a similar extreme weather event hit the UK, that would be all you would hear about for months and there would be no instant clear up. The populace would be deeply traumatised and would not move on from the tragedy. America is different, resilient and it is rare for articles like this one to make the light of day.
Directly from their website: https://www.fema.gov/flood-insurance. This encourages everyone to build in places that shouldn't be built in the first place.
"Floods can happen anywhere — just one inch of floodwater can cause up to thousands of dollars' worth of damage. Most homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Flood insurance is a separate policy that can cover buildings, the contents in a building, or both, so it is important to protect your most important assets — your home, your business, your possessions.
The NFIP provides flood insurance to property owners, renters and businesses, and having this coverage helps them recover faster when floodwaters recede. The NFIP works with communities required to adopt and enforce floodplain management regulations that help mitigate flooding effects.
Flood insurance is available to anyone living in one of the 22,600 participating NFIP communities. Homes and businesses in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from government-backed lenders are required to have flood insurance."
Yes. I recently used the online calculator and it quoted me $4200/yr for $250K of coverage.
I live in a "zone X" neighborhood. Interestingly, it appears that significant areas around me are all "zone X" but personal experience and common sense show vastly different flood risks. Meaning there are lots built on the edges of "100 year" flood areas in "zone X" and properties 50-100 feet higher in elevation in the same neighborhood. Surely the risk would actually be quite different? I guess the models aren't particularly fine-grained.
Resilience and foolishness are very close together.
I can't imagine living in a place where you have to rebuild every X years when you can just move somewhere else. The people are just used to it.
This will get worse and at some point you have to ask if the areas are actually habitable or if it's just a colossal waste of resources to live there.
As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[4][5] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[4][6] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.
Japan is similar in terms of moving on from environmental catastrophes. Due to it's geographic location, the number and severity of earthquakes and tsunamis not to mention the regular stuff like wildfires, flooding etc. there's just a lot of devastation and loss. Japan does memorialize the larger events of course and there's public memorials at annual schedules, etc.
> Aira caldera is surrounded by the major city of Kagoshima which has a population of more than 900,000. Residents do not mind small eruptions because they have measures in place for protection. For example, school students are required to wear hard helmets for protection against falling debris.
I'm not sure that a country being "resilient" in that manner is a good thing. It's callous towards the individuals involved, who may not be as quick to move on, emotionally or otherwise. And moving on quickly doesn't exactly encourage learning from tragedy, which really is its only upside.
Quite a few people live near riverbeds, if not all of them. I mean like, it was one of the basic requirements of a settlement to have some flowing water source nearby.
And while not directly on the river bed, I've seen my share of swollen rivers in all places I lived. My grandparents had a house at the edge of the village, the river was some 200 meters from it and much lower but a few times with heavy raining, the garden was flooded and water nearly got to the house. I recall watching in awe from uphill the raging torrent and wondering how the funk could it have gotten so big from the original peaceful river.
Right now, I live downstream of a 100 meters tall water dam holding 200 hectares (500 acres) of lake. If that dam breaks, it's lights out for many. You forget about it but shit happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
Watch any movie with the settlers moving out west, and you’ll see them all right next to a river. It all makes sense as nobody likes carrying water far
I’m sorry to report your friend is a complete dumbass.
Being a democratic government does not mean you can’t be proactive and have emergency services. Does he think Switzerland has a public consultation every time there’s an avalanche?
In the US the latter used to be FEMA’s job, and with respect to the former the feds allocated flood (and more generally disaster) mitigation funds, for the day decade or so Texas has systematically ignored those funds or tried to route them elsewhere, and in 2021 under ARPA the county was awarded millions which could have been used for flood alert and prevention but decided to not do any of that for political reasons, and send most of it to the PD instead.
After the 1999 super cyclone in Orissa, and the tsunami in 2004, the Indian government put together a comprehensive disaster management programme involving better weather satellites, forecasting, early warning systems, and disaster response plans including evacuation strategies with food and shelter for evacuees. The effort spans local, state, and central governments, as well as para-military forces that are deployed in an emergency. India also provides warnings to other nations, like Bangladesh, and the programme has been supported through major political changes.
The results are plain to see, and in my opinion at least, put much more expensive US responses to shame. So much for a democratic government being unable to plan.
A democratic government can set up an independent emergency response organization that doesn’t need government involvement to declare and respond to an emergency.
For holders if a particular political ideology, inherent government incompetence is a deeply embedded meme that wont be undone by a single counterexample. Any example of competence has to be attached to cost to salve the cognitive dissonance.
It's not just a strong central government in the PRC, technically the USA has that as well (just look at what ICE is allowed to do, and states may do nothing in return), it's also that the PRC is a single-party government, and more and more evolving into a Xi personality cult (to be fair, the General Secretary always had an extraordinary amount of influence, see Deng Xiaoping).
Texas has been run by Republicans for all of living memory, and when it was given money for spending on this exact situation (flash flood warning system), it was given it by Democrats, and therefore politicized the money by spending it on police (the framing being that democrats don't want police to be funded, which is of course absurd). American bureaucracy is rendered nearly nonfunctional by overpoliticization such as this. I can't remember the last time a funding bill was being voted on that didn't result in a government shutdown or nearly so. Imagine a country's legislative body being so politicized it can't even fund the country's bureaucratic organs. Clownish behavior.
Meanwhile the PRC, for all its flaws, suffers none of this oppositional politicizing. The downside is that corruption can run much deeper and essentially unchallenged so long as it serves the greater needs of the one party, among other things. The upside is that the majority of the government's power (which includes money) is spent with remarkably little waste and redirection, despite that corruption.
However in the specific case of the floods it's almost certain that the CPC's propaganda arms worked overtime to make it seem like there was less death and damage from the flooding than there really was. There's a large class of "undocumented" poverty class people in the PRC that lose swaths of their populations in disasters like this and it's very easy to hide their deaths.
If liberal democracies want to survive they need to be better at governing than something like the PRC or they're all going to be wiped out on the global marketplace as the PRC overcomes its historical issues and further solidifies and enriches its population and infrastructure.
I was hesitant to even comment on this, but I do have an opinion and some familiarity with this region and it’s flooding. I’m Texan and lived in the hill country for a handful of years. I once got trapped on a narrow ranch road at night and my vehicle was pushed into the ditch. I got stuck between two flooded low points then it rose even more, it wasn’t even raining when I embarked on my journey and the water only rose about 12”-18”, not even high enough to come into my stock height Chevy Silverado, but it was insane forceful. I was outside my vehicle and couldn’t stand upright once it was about 6”. I was a bit scared but it was obviously nothing compared to this.
Anyways, I unfortunately believe most of the deceased likely perished within minutes of being swept away. I don’t know how any response time could beat that especially given the terrain and conditions at the time. I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system similar to tornado sirens we have up in Dallas. If people could have been woken up and moved to higher ground even with just 10 minutes notice, the death stats would be significantly lower. If I had property anywhere near this (there are other similar rivers in the region), I’d be installing something on my property right now.
> I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system
Now is better then never. However this was already evaluated and dismissed before. Tragedy described in the blog could be prevented. Here is example from Kerr county commissioners' court:
> COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: You know we had a baby flood a couple weeks ago, a month or so, whatever it was. And I keep hearing these reports of the old, old system, and I know we're not going to deal with that though. Expect that to be gone where the Jones call the Smiths, and the Smiths call Camp Rio Vista, and Rio Vista blah, blah, blah, along down the line. But it's still there and it still works. The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I'm going to have to start drinking again to put up with y'all.
We'll get the 1 million now of course, for this region, for this type of disaster, for now. In 8 years if another million is needed to upkeep the system, I don't think we'll get the funding again, unless some more kids died.
Actually... maybe we won't even get the 1 million now. How many kids died at Uvalde, for example? My mom's a Texan teacher. The post Uvalde response: her principal asked her how she'd feel about carrying a handgun in school. My experience is if an issue is politicized, then Texas will make the wrong choice, every time.
I have no hope for my state anymore. If you can maintain optimism, I admire you and hope you stick around, we'll need more people like you.
This is my sentiment as well and why I moved out of Austin shortly after the freeze in 2021.
Republicans have an iron grip on Texas and the result is any funding for disaster preparedness will never be used. They were warned of the cold weather issues a decade ago and decided to pocket the money. They've been warned of flooding and other issues, and again pocket the money. The only way things are going to change in Texas is if people get actually angry about these disasters and the ineptitude of the state government but I don't see that happening in my lifetime.
This is why I mentioned I would do it privately if I owned property there. I hope this tragedy encourages some political action but I sure as hell wouldn’t count on it. Our politicians simply do not care.
I actually think the private option is ideal given how rural a lot of this area is. Public infrastructure makes more sense at camp sites and where RV parks and such. It will be difficult / maybe overkill to get a full coverage alert system and likely will hold ip any investment in such thing. As the plan for full coverage is likely 5x the cost of 90% coverage.
I’ve been in Texas all my 45 years and don’t even know what hope in politics looks like so in a weird way I’m used to it and it’s my status quo to not expect anything from them.
Here's an interesting article from a few days ago on Kerr county's efforts in recent years to address this [1].
They couldn't come up with the money on their own because apparently a lot of the residents are really into wanting to reduce property taxes and government spending:
> An examination of transcripts since 2016 from Kerr County’s governing body, the commissioners court, offers a peek into a small Texas county paralyzed by two competing interests: to make one of the country’s most dangerous region for flash flooding safer and to heed to near constant calls from constituents to reduce property taxes and government waste.
They did apply for a FEMA grant for this, but apparently there was an issue with the application:
> By the next year, officials had sent off its application for a $731,413 grant to FEMA to help bring $976,000 worth of flood warning upgrades, including 10 high water detection systems without flashers, 20 gauges, possible outdoor sirens, and more.
> “The purpose of this project is to provide Kerr County with a flood warning system,” the county wrote in its application. “The System will be utilized for mass notification to citizens about high water levels and flooding conditions throughout Kerr County.”
> But the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which oversees billions of FEMA dollars designed to prevent disasters, denied the application because they didn’t have a current hazard mitigation plan. They resubmitted it, news outlets reported, but by then, priority was given to counties that had suffered damage from Hurricane Harvey.
A great opportunity came in 2021 to deal with this but it was not taken:
> In 2021, Kerr County was awarded a $10.2 million windfall from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, which Congress passed that same year to support local governments impacted by the pandemic. Cities and counties were given flexibility to use the money on a variety of expenses, including those related to storm-related infrastructure. Corpus Christi, for example, allocated $15 million of its ARPA funding to “rehabilitate and/or replace aging storm water infrastructure.” Waco’s McLennan County spent $868,000 on low water crossings.
> Kerr County did not opt for ARPA to fund flood warning systems despite commissioners discussing such projects nearly two dozen times since 2016. In fact, a survey sent to residents about ARPA spending showed that 42% of the 180 responses wanted to reject the $10 million bonus altogether, largely on political grounds.
> “I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money.
> “We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
All I can say is people's perspectives can change, especially after the unthinkable happens.
I somewhat get the individual spirit. Some of this was clearly fueled by the uber Conservative mindset of the area. If Trump offered them the same funds for the same purpose they'd kiss his feet. Most people in the area are also not living on the river and don't really suffer consequences from flooding other than minor inconveniences (maybe more this time than usual obviously), so it's easy for them to let their political biases take reign as they personally are not at risk for the problems these funds are going towards. This is the down side to overly individual spirits, they can't see (or don't care) how this is anyone's interests if it's not in theirs.
The sample size of 180 survey responses is laughable and means nothing, hopefully that didn't sway anyone. Of course the most vocal polarized views are going to be the ones that responded.
The only reliable way to survive a flood with strong currents is to not be in one.
I will not live long term on land that has historically been subject to flooding, or where the site forms part of a constricted drainage.
There are enough risks in life that cannot be realistically mitigated. No sense exposing your family to one day in and day out that is just a matter of choice. Unfortunately, humans are terrible about understanding probabilistic risks, and our short, brutal lives offer little opportunity to appreciate the nature of long-period risk.
A “hundred year flood” means that there is a seventy percent chance that your house will be wiped away within your lifetime. It’s like choosing to be habitually reckless with fire in your home. We aren’t reckless with fire because the risk is very tangible and within our control. Long period risks are just as real and often just as much within our control, but we have to think in terms of math and not our “feeling” of security. Our instincts about safety and security are honed over millions of years to understand what is a safe
Place to camp for the night. We are not intrinsically equipped to viscerally understand this kind of risk.
My parents property sits at the confluence of a creek and a river. They've built their house on a promontory that had signs of inhabitation by indigenous peoples. We had a "100-year flood" when I was growing up. It was quite impressive to wake up in the morning and see the water within six vertical feet of the house and 30 to 40 ft. of water the bottom field with entire trees floating Long.
One of the consequenes of our population growth, combined with our willingness to allow NIMBYs to dictate our housing policy, is that more and more new houses are built in areas that regularly experience major natural disasters. And if that isn't enough of a tragedy, these plots of land are treated as valuable when they really aren't, leading to people sinking big chunks of their net worth into what is objectively a liability.
This was a vacation house. It had nothing to do with building/density/urbanism/policy. Its purpose was to be by the water.
I am a fellow urbanist and while I see where you’re coming from this doesn’t apply at all to this situation. There’s a quote in the article talking about how the grandparents chose this house specifically for the summer memories.
The land is valuable as entertainment space. Such as temporary camping, hiking, fishing, and other outdoor activities. It is quite beautiful land.
Conversely there are also plots of land that are not valuable along the water where there is little natural beauty which leads to lower land prices, hence people setting up things like mobile homes and RVs as places to live that are less expensive options.
Having children makes me feel vulnerable. They’re like extensions of myself — if they feel pain, I feel it too. To imagine one of them dying… this story broke my heart.
My wife had been pushing me to try for kids for, well, a couple of years, and I was finally getting there. I always knew I wanted kids, or figured I did, but then reality comes: can we afford it, shouldn't we enjoy what we have a little bit longer, are we sure we want to do this, etc.
Then, my friend messaged me one night and asked me to join him at the children's hospital to take a few photos as they were saying "goodbye." His 18 month old had been fighting cancer, and it was 1 in the morning and my melatonin-addled brain thought "oh, they must be taking him home."
It wasn't until I walked into the room with my DSLR that I realized what he meant. In fairness, he had prefaced the request with, "do you mind if I ruin your night?"
I am not even close to a professional photographer. But I tried to take as many pictures as respectfully as I could of the literal hardest moment any parents could ever hope not to have to go through. At a certain moment, it became time, and I found myself... stuck, in a sense. I was the only other one in the room aside from the parents, but I didn't feel like I could abandon them, and so I sat there as they disconnected the machines keeping their son alive. It was the most awful two minutes as the attending sat there with a stethoscope against this tiny chest.
I waited until an opportune moment, and then hugged them, quietly took my leave, went home, edited the photos as quickly as possible, uploaded and sent them, and then bawled for an hour or so.
Needless to say, this set back our efforts at even _trying_ for kids by about 2-3 years. Because I just was stuck by this all-encompassing thought: you can't lose what you don't have. You simply aren't open to that sort of vulnerability if you don't have children. It doesn't exist, until you form it into being. And that thought haunted me. Just like it haunts, well, every parent on some level.
And to clarify: this didn't even _happen to me_. It happened to _them_, and their son. But it was a defining moment for me that made it really tough to overcome.
Eventually, we did have two kids (after a miscarriage, of course, because isn't that how it goes), and they're sitting behind me watching a movie as I type this. But these sort of thoughts are always there in the background. And yeah, reading a story like this one about the flood just spears you in the soul.
Being there is a powerful and supportive thing. Yes, it is incredibly hard to deal with the loss of a child, we lost one, too. Having someone there is a help and a support, we didn't really get from others.
I'm truly sorry for your loss.
There were three deaths in my family over a 10 month period. Both my parents and my cousin.
I still felt like it was worse when, prior to this, I attended the funeral of a little girl from my kid's school. Tiny coffin, painted with horses. All the kids having their first experience with death. The impossibility of saying anything useful to the parents at the reception afterwards.
Miscarriages are more common than people think!
Sorry to hear that, no parent is unmoved deeply with such stories which just shouldn't be happening, but life is... life.
Its a mistake in general in life to get swayed and stunned by the negative aspects of it and be blocked to experience the positive aspects, even if some risk of harm is involved. Although some healing and reconciliation is required, no doubt there. You did allright based on your description. Trying to play the game of life as safe as possible ultimately means losing the game.
Life doesn't have to be always a positive experience, rather an intense one compared to keeping it always safe and ending up with meh story (and usually tons of regrets before dying). My philosophy only, but I really think it should be pretty much universal.
Also yes miscarriages are very common, we had one, and so did basically all couples in our circle in various phases. I take it as a defense mechanism of woman's body, figuring out it wouldn't work out later so aborting the mission (at least under normal circumstances). One was very brutal (in 37th week, basically a stillbirth and woman still had to go through whole birth process), a proper traumatic experience that leaves permanent scars on souls of parents. But still, after mourning one has to get up and keep moving even if feeling empty and powerless, thats life.
“Well sometimes your kids just die, that’s life” isn’t really the most uplifting response to that.
You want to hear empty phrases like typical 'thoughts and prayers' that help absolutely nothing and are overused to the point of losing any value, just so that writer feels for 5s better about themselves? Internet is chock full of those from all those me-participating-too people.
What I wrote is unfortunately true, and brutal. Don't think I didn't cry for those babies who never stood the chance, both ours and other's. But eventually you have to get up, the only other alternative to this is far worse. So I did, and so did my wife, and all the other parents affected. Life goes on and doesn't care about your personal woes.
We live in extremely safe times compared to how things looked even 150 years ago, 40-50% of kids didn't survive to age 5 and deaths during even normal pregnancies were very common. Go read a bit about that if you feel like I talk extreme or are an outlier.
> We live in extremely safe times compared to
This sentence in a HN article from a day ago caught my eye [1][2].
> Second, between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US maternal death rate fell by 94 percent, according to Sarygulov and Arslanagic-Wakefield. Early antibiotics in the 1930s, followed by the mass production of penicillin in the 1940s, “drove down incidences of sepsis, [which were] responsible for 40 percent of maternal deaths at the time, and made caesarean sections safer,” they write.
94 percent!
[1] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-caused-the-baby-boom-wh...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572527
No, I merely want people not to be unnecessarily and unhelpfully “brutal” (crass). The fact that vapid aphorisms don’t add utility to the commons doesn’t mean that their mirror image does.
That's one of those things that's just hard to be uplifting about.
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> Having children makes me feel vulnerable. They’re like extensions of myself — if they feel pain, I feel it too.
Once heard the observation that you're only as happy as your saddest child.
The story was powerfully honest, but I think it also concludes that love is as powerful as death. Death will come for all of us, and instead of trying to fight against it, it might make sense to try and understand what it is, and what it also brings. If we fear death so much, it is often because that fear has stopped us from truly living while we are still alive.
A wonderful novella in this context. Hard science fiction in one respect, with correct physics, but also literature in my opinion: https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Reading/Ch...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
Our ancestors had families during wars and famines. In the case of my family, that wasn't that many generations ago.
It's also harder to protect them as well as yourself, adding to that sense of vulnerability.
I can't remember where, but somewhere I heard that before kids you live with your heart inside you, and after you have kids you live without heart out in the world.
Reading this account made me think of a paper I read in grad school about the Mann Gulch fire and how quickly one’s ability to make sense of the situation unravels.
https://www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Letture%20TDPC/K.%20Weick%2...
I think I read that in g school too. Where’d you go or what program?
It’s a really tough read regardless, but if you’ve got young kids (or nieces/nephews), it’s downright brutal.
This was possibly the saddest piece I’ve ever read based on how it was written
Reading this makes me so sad and reminded me of a book I read years ago: Hiroshima by John Hersey - about the first-person narrative account of survivors who witnessed the impact of atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima that morning.
If you have the opportunity to visit, I recommend Nagasaki over Hiroshima and especially these two places in Nagasaki:
Shiroyama Elementary School
Nagai Takashi Memorial Museum Nagasaki
These felt much more personal than anything I saw in Hiroshima and there were zero (other) tourists to interrupt the experience (very much unlike the museum in Hiroshima).
Like the little boy with his skin melted off walking down the road crying for his mother… horrendous stuff.
These stories always have me instantly sobbing, life can be tragically unfair.
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What an insensitive, assumptive, stupid remark. You can't possibly know that the person you replied to behaves as you claim. It's 2025, the firebombing of Tokyo is widely recognized now, maybe not by most normies but certainly by any historical adjacent nerd.
Hey, this is kind of a rude response in an otherwise thoughtful and empathetic thread
Oh, I see you don’t give a shit about Dresden?
That book lives rent-free in my head since I read it about 10 years ago. There's no way to forget some of the scenes in that.
Theres videos from different people as the flooding started live. It's WILD to watch what happens in a short span of time. We're talking under 30 minutes I think before it starts overtaking a bridge. The water will sweep you up and drag you around too, the random debris is what's fatal.
I watched the first couple minutes of this video (certainly wasn't going to watch 40 minutes) then skipped ahead in chunks, thinking it was clips from different locations.
Then I scrubbed around and realized, no, it was the same place, which left me stunned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kYjiTEDqtw
Make sure to watch the last 3-5 minutes or so for the cherry on top. Then I recommend skipping back to the beginning to really drive home how insane this was.
I will never again be cavalier about flash flood warnings.
Jeeeeesus, thank you for that link and tip about the last few minutes; literally incredible, as in I cannot fathom.
That's the video! I didn't have the link, so thank you for that.
Terrible story. I've lived near a river, and never will again. And the worst I had was just 4 feet of water in the basement.
I live in an old watermill. We’ve had a “run for your life” flood. Fortunately, I was well aware of the risks when we moved here, and always keep an eye on the weather in winter.
We had about 10cm of rain fall on already saturated soils upstream of us, and as darkness fell that evening I could see the river rise… and rise… and rise - and in the nick of time came to the realisation that we had to evacuate, NOW. Our car had already washed away, so we ended up bushwhacking a few km out in the driving rain, two very pissed off cats stuffed into our go-bags. Turns out the car being gone was no great impediment as the road was gone, too, utterly washed out.
Came back to an almighty mess - flood was a 10,000 year one, the house was buried in gigantic flotsam, entire trees that had been uprooted, and tumbled down the river in an enormous jam, inches of mud coating every surface. The chimney had washed away.
The mill itself was fine. Three meter thick stone walls, for a reason, it turns out.
We still live here. The year after the flood we had a small earthquake, enough to send boulders crashing down into the valley - and the year after that a wildfire, which reduced much of the valley to a moonscape. That time, we fled with a toddler in tow, as well as the cats.
Perhaps one day this place will be the end of us - but the 99.9% of the time it isn’t trying to kill us, it couldn’t be better.
We now at least have huge water tanks and a deluge system for the fire risk, and a cabin 30 meters above the river for us to decamp to in the winter when the flood risk grows - and a new roof with a steel substructure to catch any errant bits of mountain that decide to visit.
I live in Auckland, New Zealand and had never been in a flood until 2023. We got something like 280mm in a 24 hours, on the back of a wet month. At its peak we we getting 50mm an hour.
It was incredible. Manhole covers popping off, mildly sloped roads were rivers with rapids and flat ones were lakes, growing as you watched.
Caught completely unprepared, it was chaos.
Living near a river or flood-plain is a hard no for me, even if I had 3m thick stone walls.
I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades - largely because this area is full of rivers so any flooding is just spread thin. I feel this is mostly a drainage problem of areas where all water is channeled into a narrow area by the surrounding geography? "Narrow" being a relative term here of course, considering geological scale.
Being fine for decades is not a useful metric, unfortunately.
If you want to know, look into the last time it was flooded.
If it has never flooded in the scope of human history, it’s possible that the danger of flooding is indeed not significant.
If it has flooded, it will likely flood again.
If it is a flood plain, it will probably flood again many, many times. Weather changes associated with climate change may exacerbate this. It would not be particularly surprising to see the variance in significant precipitation events to double, triple , or more.
In any rate, climate change aside, it would not be particularly remarkable for a flood risk that aggregates to one in ten years to not flood for 50 years running, just as it would not be unexpected if some such areas flooded each year for 3 years straight. Both of those events would be consistent with patterns that would be expected to happen in the big picture.
I know nothing of your situation, but if I were living within less than 100 feet of the altitude of a nearby river or sea, I would consider moving. Life is short, and in my tiny life I have been humanly connected to floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes within my direct circle of friends and family enough to internalize that these risks are not theoretical.
When an existential risk can be categorically eliminated from your life, it is often worth doing.
A.f.a.i.k. this tragedy was preventable because the flood risk was already known: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/09/us/camp-mysti... Apparently this was disregarded.
One of the things about natural disasters, is that everyone focuses on the big, kinetic ones, like fires, volcanoes, tornados, earthquakes, etc.
But the one that kills the most people, and does the most damage, is good ol' H₂O; water. The giver of life. Even with hurricanes, most of the damage is done by the flooding. Up here, we had Sandy, which, I think was only a Cat 2 or 3, but did 70 Billion dollars' worth of damage, and killed a bunch of folks.
Hulu has a great documentary on the Tsunami from 2004, in the Indian Ocean. It was a true horror.
Insurance companies sure as hell know this. Try getting home insurance in an area that they deem "flood-prone" (you might be surprised, where they say so). I think that most big insurance companies have refused to insure homes, in many parts of Florida.
> I think that most big insurance companies have refused to insure homes, in many parts of Florida.
Yes, and instead of making the people who choose to live there bear the true cost of that choice, we instead create state-owned flood insurance plans that subsidize the risk for (typically wealthy) coastal homeowners.
> I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades
For the non-expert reader, I must point out that there are many factors that contribute to how "safe" rivers are.
Large parts of texas are flat, or have flat lands further up the water shed. This means that wide areas of rain, even though modest all get funneled into small areas. This is a common cause flash flooding.
More over the river basins are wide and flat too, which means that there isnt much to slow the water down and no shelter for when it comes.
In the same way that some costal areas have tame tides, and other have 7 meter swells, or where I grew up, tides that come in as fast as you can run.
The mix of terrifying immediacy and raw loss is haunting, especially when you hear about people literally being swept away from shelters they trusted.
It’s a stark reminder that robust early warning isn’t just technology, it’s life or death and the costs of underfunding those systems aren’t hypothetical.
I wonder how frequently that river (and the rest of the world) will experience once-in-a-hundred-year weather events from now on.
The "Once in a hundred year" saying is misunderstood. It's actually 1% chance each year. So you roll your D100 every spring.
Whether that's an acceptable risk is up to you. Having lived in central Texas, it's a region known for it's flash floods, and you should take the warnings seriously. If there's heavy rainfall - you should be asking where all that water will go.
In this case, I hope that Texas looks into upgrading their alerting system so that people get word in time to leave the area. The news was saying the weather center added additional staff for the storm (five meteorologists) but if their forecasts can't get to where they're needed, that's not good enough.
> In this case, I hope that Texas looks into upgrading their alerting system
Since the July 4 flooding, I feel like the over correction of flood warnings via mobile phones is not a good thing. My phone has been going off with near daily flood warnings with 0% precipitation. I get how rain upstream can cause flooding where it’s not raining downstream, but it hasn’t even been raining upstream. I’m also well over 200 miles away from where the worst of the flooding happened. People that far away do not need these warnings. The notifications have listed counties not close, so it just comes across as “let’s do something just to say we did something”
This might be a good project for someone - take the terrain contours and rainfall location & amount into account when determining where to send alerts.
Mobile notifications is a terrible solution to this
Need ground alert sirens or something that would be taken seriously
It's a terrible solution if it is the only solution. Up until this situation, the alerts I received on my phone have been pretty spot on, which has been impressive. Yes, local sirens are a good idea, but they come with caveats. I have local sirens in my area, but they are for tornado or other severe weather. If I hear those sirens, my action to take is totally different than for a flood. Naturally, if I were to come to an area where the sirens are meant for flooding, my reaction to them would be the wrong move. I would hope that a siren for flooding would just sound different than how the established tornado siren warning system sounds.
This trained response to a siren/warning system is the reason they chose not to use the tsunami warning system in Hawaii during the fire. When that siren goes off, people seek higher ground which would have driven them to the fire.
I think once-in-one-hundred-year is a definition for weather events used in building standards (sorry to be vague and possibly misleading - if my resident architect/partner was here, I could be more specific). I've certainly heard of constructions like levies etc "build to withstand once-in-a-hundred-year storms". I wonder if these standards are being revised by appropriate international bodies?
I think it has become a "term of art" used by agencies like FEMA and insurance companies. And it makes for a good soundbite on the news.
But you would question the dice if you roll your D100 ten times and it shows the same number on six throws
At a (central Texas) city council hearing today on granting someone a variance to build tennis courts on a meadow next to a creek, a longtime resident said, “I think I’ve lived through five 500-year floods here.”
Where I live in Texas, we had three “500 year” events in three consecutive years, with the last one probably closer to a 1000 or 10000 year event - more rainfall in one spot than anywhere else ever measured.
We’ll see how long that record holds (I’ll take the under on 1000 years).
There's probably many other 1 in a 1,000 year events that haven't happened in many thousands. It's really hard to reason about infrequent events, especially post-hoc.
If in the Netherlands a river floods millions are affected and there is trillions in damage. If in America a river floods a few hundred people die. That's why my country takes this stuff seriously.
I guess if you’re building something in vulnerable spots tennis court is better than house
Not for the neighbors. The courts are 10x the impermeable cover of the house they’re also trying to build. There should be nothing on that land.
There are over 2000 watersheds in the US. It would be unusual if we didn’t see around 20 100-year floods every year.
I would think they'd be correlated enough to mess up the numbers a little.
Right. It's the multiple-endpoints principle. The extreme events feel overly frequent because we cherry-pick and only notice them. We never notice the other 99/100 of places that don't have a hundred-year flood in a year.
Extreme precipitation events are also getting more common.
I cant imagine writing this having experienced the loss the author has.
And just 10 days after the event to be released, so written earlier. Not sure of the exact date it was written as the article has an August 2025 date in the byline. Hopefully it was helpful in their grief, which with how the last half was written seems to be at least part of the intent.
Reminds me a bit of A Marker on the Side of The Boat by Boa Ninh from Night, Again.
There’s a bit of horrifying tension, and you hope everyone’s ok. No matter how unlikely.
This is the most gripping thing I've ever read
With all the debris and the water force, would it have even helped if the concrete pillars were 10 ft higher?
It would have helped if the columns were correctly tied down - those rebar stumps tell a story, which is that they did the foundation pour, left stubs, and then poured columns atop them with a cold joint. Fine if you’re doing a carport in a desert. Criminally negligent in a river floodway.
For that kind of structure, you must tie the rebar in - best is to have the entire length of the rebar for the column splay at the base and be threaded through and tied into the rebar for the footing, pour the footing, and then pour the columns as soon as the footing is cured enough to support the mass, but before it’s totally hard. That way the footing and the columns form a continuous structure, without any point where they can just lift or shear off.
I speak from experience, having built exactly this type of structure myself, and seeing it resist an enormous flood and a barrage of high-speed trees, unscathed. Absolute mess inside the timber structure atop, but anyone trapped within would have survived.
Unfortunately what they had there was a disaster waiting to happen.
Honestly, that protruding rebar reminds me of the common practice in some Central American countries of pouring the columns and crossties for the first story and leaving rebar stubbed out the top for a future second level which may or may not ever get built.
Oh, that’s a common thing all over the world - it’s generally because property taxes aren’t payable on incomplete structures. Seen it everywhere from Bulgaria to Cambodia to Egypt.
That's a myth, albeit one commonly held everywhere, even by locals.
You don't find it odd that so many poor- and middle-income countries with wildly different legal histories and taxing structures have the same glaring property tax loophole? Despite often wildly different origin stories for how the loophole came about?
Yes, some jurisdictions tax incomplete structures differently, but that only begs the question of whether a habitable structure lived in would be considered incomplete merely because some rebar is sticking out.
The real answer mostly relates to patterns of savings and real estate finance. In places where people invest their savings into their home directly, without a mortgage or similar as is common in more developed countries with robust retail financing options and comparatively liquid real estate markets, they often plan to build incrementally over time. Today you have enough money to build a 1-story out-of-pocket; in a few years you hope to have enough saved to expand to a 1-1/2 story or 2-story. This is much more feasible with concrete construction as it's relatively cheap (if not free or even cheaper than finishing) to just leave rebar exposed. Of course, as you pointed out earlier this doesn't make for great engineering. So you're more likely to see this in areas with loose building codes or lax enforcement.
In really poor areas you'll often find partial structures that aren't even habitable. That makes no sense in the tax loophole theory, but perfectly fits the theory that these structures are methods of investing savings. What's sad is that it's not uncommon for these to sit unfinished (to the point of habitability) for many years, or never finished at all; hard-working people's savings effectively lost.
Reasonable question. Yes, in that case, the house probably would have been fine. The lateral force on concrete pillars, even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily withstood.
The very first thing in TFA is a photo of where one of the pillars was ripped from the foundation. If that happened because of the force of the water against the house on top of it, then it could also happen when a tree or other large piece of floating debris hits it.
> even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily withstood.
Physics is not on your side here. if it was just water, then perhaps, although I am sceptical given how much force is generated by 10foot of water moving at 18 mph, which is ~6metric tons of lateral force. (assuming 1m2 cross section.)
Thats before any flotsam gets attached increasing the surface area.
Sure you could build something to withstand that, but could you afford to build it?
> but could you afford to build it?
And, if not, could you really afford to live there?
Being the parent of a child in the boys age, this was incredibly hard to read. I started yesterday, stopped half way through, could not sleep at first, woke up in the morning to finish the story. To me, as a non-native english speaker, the story is very well written to paint an extensive picture of the events unfolding as well of the environment, which made it much more frightening.
What astounds me is how quickly America moves on from environmental catastrophes. As an example, a huge part of Florida was pretty much devastated earlier this year but now you would never know. The electricity and other services were back up in days and all evidence of destroyed buildings gone as if the trash was just collected.
If a similar extreme weather event hit the UK, that would be all you would hear about for months and there would be no instant clear up. The populace would be deeply traumatised and would not move on from the tragedy. America is different, resilient and it is rare for articles like this one to make the light of day.
Directly from their website: https://www.fema.gov/flood-insurance. This encourages everyone to build in places that shouldn't be built in the first place.
"Floods can happen anywhere — just one inch of floodwater can cause up to thousands of dollars' worth of damage. Most homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Flood insurance is a separate policy that can cover buildings, the contents in a building, or both, so it is important to protect your most important assets — your home, your business, your possessions.
The NFIP provides flood insurance to property owners, renters and businesses, and having this coverage helps them recover faster when floodwaters recede. The NFIP works with communities required to adopt and enforce floodplain management regulations that help mitigate flooding effects.
Flood insurance is available to anyone living in one of the 22,600 participating NFIP communities. Homes and businesses in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from government-backed lenders are required to have flood insurance."
Doesn't NFIP cap out at $250k?
Yes. I recently used the online calculator and it quoted me $4200/yr for $250K of coverage.
I live in a "zone X" neighborhood. Interestingly, it appears that significant areas around me are all "zone X" but personal experience and common sense show vastly different flood risks. Meaning there are lots built on the edges of "100 year" flood areas in "zone X" and properties 50-100 feet higher in elevation in the same neighborhood. Surely the risk would actually be quite different? I guess the models aren't particularly fine-grained.
You can play around with the calculator at: https://www.floodsmart.gov/policy-quote/
There are a bunch of available spreadsheets with costs by state/county that show some stats on those costs but I don't have the link handy.
Resilience and foolishness are very close together. I can't imagine living in a place where you have to rebuild every X years when you can just move somewhere else. The people are just used to it.
This will get worse and at some point you have to ask if the areas are actually habitable or if it's just a colossal waste of resources to live there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...
As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[4][5] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[4][6] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.
Japan is similar in terms of moving on from environmental catastrophes. Due to it's geographic location, the number and severity of earthquakes and tsunamis not to mention the regular stuff like wildfires, flooding etc. there's just a lot of devastation and loss. Japan does memorialize the larger events of course and there's public memorials at annual schedules, etc.
Add Japan's volcanoes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#Lis...
At least 3 of those are active calderas, with histories of producing VEI 7 eruptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#VEI...
A select quote:
> Aira caldera is surrounded by the major city of Kagoshima which has a population of more than 900,000. Residents do not mind small eruptions because they have measures in place for protection. For example, school students are required to wear hard helmets for protection against falling debris.
I'm not sure that a country being "resilient" in that manner is a good thing. It's callous towards the individuals involved, who may not be as quick to move on, emotionally or otherwise. And moving on quickly doesn't exactly encourage learning from tragedy, which really is its only upside.
> Alissa would tell me, five days later, that Rosemary wanted to play “I spy” while they waited in the tree.
I can't imagine a more grim version of this game as the floodwaters of the Guadalupe recede below you.
Absolutely devastating.
Quite a few people live near riverbeds, if not all of them. I mean like, it was one of the basic requirements of a settlement to have some flowing water source nearby.
And while not directly on the river bed, I've seen my share of swollen rivers in all places I lived. My grandparents had a house at the edge of the village, the river was some 200 meters from it and much lower but a few times with heavy raining, the garden was flooded and water nearly got to the house. I recall watching in awe from uphill the raging torrent and wondering how the funk could it have gotten so big from the original peaceful river.
Right now, I live downstream of a 100 meters tall water dam holding 200 hectares (500 acres) of lake. If that dam breaks, it's lights out for many. You forget about it but shit happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
Watch any movie with the settlers moving out west, and you’ll see them all right next to a river. It all makes sense as nobody likes carrying water far
And sometimes shit is made to happen: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/russia-shells-flooded-ukr...
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I’m sorry to report your friend is a complete dumbass.
Being a democratic government does not mean you can’t be proactive and have emergency services. Does he think Switzerland has a public consultation every time there’s an avalanche?
In the US the latter used to be FEMA’s job, and with respect to the former the feds allocated flood (and more generally disaster) mitigation funds, for the day decade or so Texas has systematically ignored those funds or tried to route them elsewhere, and in 2021 under ARPA the county was awarded millions which could have been used for flood alert and prevention but decided to not do any of that for political reasons, and send most of it to the PD instead.
After the 1999 super cyclone in Orissa, and the tsunami in 2004, the Indian government put together a comprehensive disaster management programme involving better weather satellites, forecasting, early warning systems, and disaster response plans including evacuation strategies with food and shelter for evacuees. The effort spans local, state, and central governments, as well as para-military forces that are deployed in an emergency. India also provides warnings to other nations, like Bangladesh, and the programme has been supported through major political changes.
The results are plain to see, and in my opinion at least, put much more expensive US responses to shame. So much for a democratic government being unable to plan.
A democratic government can set up an independent emergency response organization that doesn’t need government involvement to declare and respond to an emergency.
For holders if a particular political ideology, inherent government incompetence is a deeply embedded meme that wont be undone by a single counterexample. Any example of competence has to be attached to cost to salve the cognitive dissonance.
It's not just a strong central government in the PRC, technically the USA has that as well (just look at what ICE is allowed to do, and states may do nothing in return), it's also that the PRC is a single-party government, and more and more evolving into a Xi personality cult (to be fair, the General Secretary always had an extraordinary amount of influence, see Deng Xiaoping).
Texas has been run by Republicans for all of living memory, and when it was given money for spending on this exact situation (flash flood warning system), it was given it by Democrats, and therefore politicized the money by spending it on police (the framing being that democrats don't want police to be funded, which is of course absurd). American bureaucracy is rendered nearly nonfunctional by overpoliticization such as this. I can't remember the last time a funding bill was being voted on that didn't result in a government shutdown or nearly so. Imagine a country's legislative body being so politicized it can't even fund the country's bureaucratic organs. Clownish behavior.
Meanwhile the PRC, for all its flaws, suffers none of this oppositional politicizing. The downside is that corruption can run much deeper and essentially unchallenged so long as it serves the greater needs of the one party, among other things. The upside is that the majority of the government's power (which includes money) is spent with remarkably little waste and redirection, despite that corruption.
However in the specific case of the floods it's almost certain that the CPC's propaganda arms worked overtime to make it seem like there was less death and damage from the flooding than there really was. There's a large class of "undocumented" poverty class people in the PRC that lose swaths of their populations in disasters like this and it's very easy to hide their deaths.
If liberal democracies want to survive they need to be better at governing than something like the PRC or they're all going to be wiped out on the global marketplace as the PRC overcomes its historical issues and further solidifies and enriches its population and infrastructure.
I was hesitant to even comment on this, but I do have an opinion and some familiarity with this region and it’s flooding. I’m Texan and lived in the hill country for a handful of years. I once got trapped on a narrow ranch road at night and my vehicle was pushed into the ditch. I got stuck between two flooded low points then it rose even more, it wasn’t even raining when I embarked on my journey and the water only rose about 12”-18”, not even high enough to come into my stock height Chevy Silverado, but it was insane forceful. I was outside my vehicle and couldn’t stand upright once it was about 6”. I was a bit scared but it was obviously nothing compared to this.
Anyways, I unfortunately believe most of the deceased likely perished within minutes of being swept away. I don’t know how any response time could beat that especially given the terrain and conditions at the time. I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system similar to tornado sirens we have up in Dallas. If people could have been woken up and moved to higher ground even with just 10 minutes notice, the death stats would be significantly lower. If I had property anywhere near this (there are other similar rivers in the region), I’d be installing something on my property right now.
> I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system
Now is better then never. However this was already evaluated and dismissed before. Tragedy described in the blog could be prevented. Here is example from Kerr county commissioners' court:
> COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: You know we had a baby flood a couple weeks ago, a month or so, whatever it was. And I keep hearing these reports of the old, old system, and I know we're not going to deal with that though. Expect that to be gone where the Jones call the Smiths, and the Smiths call Camp Rio Vista, and Rio Vista blah, blah, blah, along down the line. But it's still there and it still works. The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I'm going to have to start drinking again to put up with y'all.
-- (2016) https://legacy.co.kerr.tx.us/commcrt/minutes/2016/062716CC.t...
Texan as well here.
> I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system similar to tornado sirens we have up in Dallas.
I don't share your optimism. Where will the budget for this come from? We both know our state, and how it votes.
https://apnews.com/article/texas-floods-camp-warning-system-...
We'll get the 1 million now of course, for this region, for this type of disaster, for now. In 8 years if another million is needed to upkeep the system, I don't think we'll get the funding again, unless some more kids died.
Actually... maybe we won't even get the 1 million now. How many kids died at Uvalde, for example? My mom's a Texan teacher. The post Uvalde response: her principal asked her how she'd feel about carrying a handgun in school. My experience is if an issue is politicized, then Texas will make the wrong choice, every time.
I have no hope for my state anymore. If you can maintain optimism, I admire you and hope you stick around, we'll need more people like you.
This is my sentiment as well and why I moved out of Austin shortly after the freeze in 2021.
Republicans have an iron grip on Texas and the result is any funding for disaster preparedness will never be used. They were warned of the cold weather issues a decade ago and decided to pocket the money. They've been warned of flooding and other issues, and again pocket the money. The only way things are going to change in Texas is if people get actually angry about these disasters and the ineptitude of the state government but I don't see that happening in my lifetime.
This is why I mentioned I would do it privately if I owned property there. I hope this tragedy encourages some political action but I sure as hell wouldn’t count on it. Our politicians simply do not care.
I actually think the private option is ideal given how rural a lot of this area is. Public infrastructure makes more sense at camp sites and where RV parks and such. It will be difficult / maybe overkill to get a full coverage alert system and likely will hold ip any investment in such thing. As the plan for full coverage is likely 5x the cost of 90% coverage.
I’ve been in Texas all my 45 years and don’t even know what hope in politics looks like so in a weird way I’m used to it and it’s my status quo to not expect anything from them.
Here's an interesting article from a few days ago on Kerr county's efforts in recent years to address this [1].
They couldn't come up with the money on their own because apparently a lot of the residents are really into wanting to reduce property taxes and government spending:
> An examination of transcripts since 2016 from Kerr County’s governing body, the commissioners court, offers a peek into a small Texas county paralyzed by two competing interests: to make one of the country’s most dangerous region for flash flooding safer and to heed to near constant calls from constituents to reduce property taxes and government waste.
They did apply for a FEMA grant for this, but apparently there was an issue with the application:
> By the next year, officials had sent off its application for a $731,413 grant to FEMA to help bring $976,000 worth of flood warning upgrades, including 10 high water detection systems without flashers, 20 gauges, possible outdoor sirens, and more.
> “The purpose of this project is to provide Kerr County with a flood warning system,” the county wrote in its application. “The System will be utilized for mass notification to citizens about high water levels and flooding conditions throughout Kerr County.”
> But the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which oversees billions of FEMA dollars designed to prevent disasters, denied the application because they didn’t have a current hazard mitigation plan. They resubmitted it, news outlets reported, but by then, priority was given to counties that had suffered damage from Hurricane Harvey.
A great opportunity came in 2021 to deal with this but it was not taken:
> In 2021, Kerr County was awarded a $10.2 million windfall from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, which Congress passed that same year to support local governments impacted by the pandemic. Cities and counties were given flexibility to use the money on a variety of expenses, including those related to storm-related infrastructure. Corpus Christi, for example, allocated $15 million of its ARPA funding to “rehabilitate and/or replace aging storm water infrastructure.” Waco’s McLennan County spent $868,000 on low water crossings.
> Kerr County did not opt for ARPA to fund flood warning systems despite commissioners discussing such projects nearly two dozen times since 2016. In fact, a survey sent to residents about ARPA spending showed that 42% of the 180 responses wanted to reject the $10 million bonus altogether, largely on political grounds.
> “I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money.
> “We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-kerr-county-co...
All I can say is people's perspectives can change, especially after the unthinkable happens.
I somewhat get the individual spirit. Some of this was clearly fueled by the uber Conservative mindset of the area. If Trump offered them the same funds for the same purpose they'd kiss his feet. Most people in the area are also not living on the river and don't really suffer consequences from flooding other than minor inconveniences (maybe more this time than usual obviously), so it's easy for them to let their political biases take reign as they personally are not at risk for the problems these funds are going towards. This is the down side to overly individual spirits, they can't see (or don't care) how this is anyone's interests if it's not in theirs.
The sample size of 180 survey responses is laughable and means nothing, hopefully that didn't sway anyone. Of course the most vocal polarized views are going to be the ones that responded.
What’s your opinion about letting developers build on floodplains?
I honestly think it’s a bit of a loaded question and I’m not going to opine here, my personal opinion doesn’t matter anyway
Well, that was no fun to read. I wonder if my house would survive a flood as well as it would an earthquake.
The only reliable way to survive a flood with strong currents is to not be in one.
I will not live long term on land that has historically been subject to flooding, or where the site forms part of a constricted drainage.
There are enough risks in life that cannot be realistically mitigated. No sense exposing your family to one day in and day out that is just a matter of choice. Unfortunately, humans are terrible about understanding probabilistic risks, and our short, brutal lives offer little opportunity to appreciate the nature of long-period risk.
A “hundred year flood” means that there is a seventy percent chance that your house will be wiped away within your lifetime. It’s like choosing to be habitually reckless with fire in your home. We aren’t reckless with fire because the risk is very tangible and within our control. Long period risks are just as real and often just as much within our control, but we have to think in terms of math and not our “feeling” of security. Our instincts about safety and security are honed over millions of years to understand what is a safe Place to camp for the night. We are not intrinsically equipped to viscerally understand this kind of risk.
My parents property sits at the confluence of a creek and a river. They've built their house on a promontory that had signs of inhabitation by indigenous peoples. We had a "100-year flood" when I was growing up. It was quite impressive to wake up in the morning and see the water within six vertical feet of the house and 30 to 40 ft. of water the bottom field with entire trees floating Long.
One of the consequenes of our population growth, combined with our willingness to allow NIMBYs to dictate our housing policy, is that more and more new houses are built in areas that regularly experience major natural disasters. And if that isn't enough of a tragedy, these plots of land are treated as valuable when they really aren't, leading to people sinking big chunks of their net worth into what is objectively a liability.
This was a vacation house. It had nothing to do with building/density/urbanism/policy. Its purpose was to be by the water.
I am a fellow urbanist and while I see where you’re coming from this doesn’t apply at all to this situation. There’s a quote in the article talking about how the grandparents chose this house specifically for the summer memories.
Eh, there are two conflicting things here.
The land is valuable as entertainment space. Such as temporary camping, hiking, fishing, and other outdoor activities. It is quite beautiful land.
Conversely there are also plots of land that are not valuable along the water where there is little natural beauty which leads to lower land prices, hence people setting up things like mobile homes and RVs as places to live that are less expensive options.