And now public confidence in NOAA and NWS are easily at their lowest, thereby allowing private interests to “swoop in and save the day”.
Except the private interests must know how reliant they all are on NOAA data right?
Right?
I hope there is some investigation into the procedures and emergency protocols of the group(s) running camps in the area.
The article doesn’t discuss the safety measures in place should the region’s most predictable natural disaster occur on river banks nicknamed “Flash Flood Alley”. It’s an obvious question to ask with hindsight. The article gave the impression that there really wasn’t much - word of mouth from people further up river in a place with patchy cellular coverage - I’d be surprised if these camps could even get insurance without something more concrete in place. It’s Texas and this was a Christian camp - it occurs to me to ask, did the religious nature of the camp allow some exemptions or avoidance of administrative scrutiny such as safety standards which otherwise may have been applicable?
This is an unbelievable tragedy and I’m horrified at the indiscriminate culling of institutional knowledge that’s taken place. I’m left with the nagging wonder - had the warnings coordinator role at the weather service still been filled and the warnings been better broadcast - how different would the outcomes have been for those 27 kids and the survivors who will never be the same. I hope some learnings will come in this area too, either to implement or reinforce emergency management for these camps and similar organisations.
Honestly, people largely ignore flash flood warnings around here. There are just too many false positives.
All the more reason why a) They needed that coordinator role filled by someone capable with experience. And b) why the camps should have had their own emergency protocols for the eventuality that a general warning should turn into something emergent.
If there wasn’t something in place it sounds to me like gross incompetence and negligence. These people had a duty of care to children - not having a direct means of communication for an emergency seems inexcusable if they didn’t. I mean what were they going to do for the venomous snake bite or a severe injury, or even a missing person. Heck it’s in Texas right by the border, I’m surprised they didn’t have a plan for a Brown person sighting with an assumed motive of abduction. God, maybe they did - but 27 young girls all armed with semi automatic weapons doesn’t save them from a flood…
Okay this is getting dark, even for me.
I get the point of Trump and giving the buyout, yada yada. But why wasnt this guy’s duties replaced with someone else? Someone had to know about this gap. One gear in the machine breaks it sure, but no one decided to replace or patch it up?
Because Trump and his handlers never intended to replace anyone. They just want to fire as many people as they can and shrink the government. These are true believers who really think, like the article’s author apparently, “that the federal bureaucracy was, and still is, in need of reform.” They honestly believe that most federal workers are lazy and not doing anything of value and the whole government should be downsized in the interest of
profitefficiency.By the way, the author’s attitude really pisses me off a lot. Even ex-DOGE workers have since said they found very little fraud or waste to cut yet they still took a chainsaw to the federal workforce.
Bingo. Trump is a fucking Russian intelligence asset. His goal is to destabilize the US, make us less important on the world stage, and increase The distrust among citizens of the US government.
They didn’t do any of this to save money. If they gave a shit about saving money they wouldn’t have just approved giving 1.8 billion to ice.
Trump’s goal is to hurt America and American citizens. And lo and behold after this tragedy what’s happening? A bunch of petty in fighting in finger pointing at everyone except the single root cause which is Donald Trump. Until he is executed publicly there will be no justice in America in America will be no more
Just in case anyone is also curious the chainsaw is also an inspiration from the anarcho capitalist president of Argentina. DOGE is rooted in those libertarian/ancap views. They expect the market to somehow decided to fix its failures.
There is a (effectively permanent) hiring freeze government wide so no one will likely replace them. The duties however were already spread amongst the existing staff which is why the flood warnings managed to get out to in advance and most counties were able to react in advance.
The county official in charge of actually evacuating people largely dropped the ball here by, in the past refusing to consider flood mititgation strategies the Weather Service reccomended years ago, and choosing to just not engage with the Weather Service when they were loudly screaming about incoming floods.
To contextualize this, County, State, and municipal emergency managers get access to a direct communication line with their local forecast office(s). They chose to not respond to the weather service issuing these warnings via that direct line.
It’s honestly exhausting that our media apparatus simultaneously tries to spin the Weather Service as both victims of this admins incompetence but also are historically the ones made out to have dropped the ball whenever a local emergency manager decides not to do their job.
Because the Republican/Libertarian dogma is that government does not work and is inherently wasteful, that only private corporations are efficient and good. Their goal is to destroy the entire government and replace it all with private contractors doing the same thing for more money and half as well. Ignoring the fact that they are themselves government workers, and that there are many necessary services that explicitly should not be run to maximize profits, they’re also fundamentally wrong that the government is somehow uniquely wasteful and inefficient. It’s just one of many false beliefs they have, the biggest and most damaging of which being the idea of trickle down economics.
Because they have been awash in and floating in a sea of pro corporate propaganda for Generations at this point. That they cannot see government as anything but a negative. Government not functioning in their eyes is a good thing.
Even anarchist don’t hate government that much.
The point of the firings was to break government. Now you see a giant failure, and you’ll see a push to privatise the responsibility of weather forecasting and emergency warnings because ‘government just isn’t good at these things’.
SpaceX could get paid to put up weather satellites and sell forecasts to the government, shit like that.
