Texas Governor Adding Flood Warnings
to SS Menu after Camp Mystic Nightmare Capitol Inside
July 6, 2025
Governor Greg Abbott vowed to add the second deadliest flood in modern times in Texas to the agenda of an upcoming special session in the face of questions that are raging on the way a major summer camp for girls was blindsided without any warnings or other assistance in advance from local law enforcement or the state.
As the death toll rose to 70 on Sunday afternoon with several young female campers still missing, the Republican governor said he would have Texas lawmakers consider proposals to beef up an emergency warning system that left 750 girls at the century-old Camp Mystic defenseless against a monstrous wall of water that swept more than two dozen to their deaths on the 4th of July.
The inclusion of the flood's aftermath in the agenda for a special session that begins on July 1 is a calculated move with considerable potential to backfire with all levels of government vulnerable to some degree after a tragedy that could have been prevented with swift and decision action that failed to materialize at Camp Mystic until it was too late. The addition of the catastrophe to the special session marching orders could be an attempt by the governor to take the steam out of a blame game that could
Local officials complained on Friday night that federal weather casters failed to provide adequate information on the possible severity of the storm that turned the Guadalupe River into a killing machine after dumping 10 to 12 inches of rain on Kerr County in a span of several hours in the wee hours of Friday morning.
The National Weather Service has disputed the accusation - saying that it issued a series of urgent alerts between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. on the need for people to move to higher ground. That suggests that Kerr County officials dropped the ball by sleeping through the warnings or failing to take them seriously.
Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said at a press conference with Abbott on Saturday that no one there had a clue that the area would get as much rain in a period of several hours as it gets in a full month on average. Kelly said he didn't know if Camp Mystic had an emergency plan of its own for a flooding disaster. Abbott could instruct legislators to develop legislation that would require summer camps for kids in the area to have emergency systems that would be subject to state approval.
The governor and lawmakers may want to know why state emergency officials in Austin didn't make certain that county officials had taken every possible step to ensure the safety of people camping in the area when it was under a flash flood warning throughout Thursday afternoon and evening. The NWS predicted rain up to 8 inches for an area with a history of flooding disasters due to a combination of climate and steep and rocky terrain that curls through west central Texas from the western edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth area to northwest San Antonio.
Camp Mystic is anchored In a swath of Texas that's known as Flash Flood Alley as a consequence as the death and destruction that the Guadalupe River and a myriad of creeks that feed it have left in their paths when it rains hard. The general rule is that people should get to higher ground if it rains at least 6 inches in the Hill Country. But the NWS forecast for rain as much as two inches more than the threshold that should have sparked a last-minute attempt get campers out of low-lying that are flood prone like those that the river swallowed up when it crested more than two dozen feet above the banks sometime after 5 a.m. there on Independence Day.
While the tragedy could have been averted if local emergency officials would have responded without delay to the NWS alerts in the hours before the disaster, Abbott chose to dish out accolades instead to search and rescue crews for efforts that intensified on Sunday in the face of rapidly-diminishing hope.
"Collaboration between our state, local, and federal partners is critical to our state’s recovery," Abbott said on Sunday in a post on X. "Thank you to our brave first responders working around the clock to find missing Texans."
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gave local officials some cover at the press conference with Abbott and Kelly on Saturday when she suggested the NWS forecasting technology was the culprit as an ancient system that Trump inherited from the Biden administration. But the federal weather agency may be less vulnerable than state and local officials in the epic breakdown in communications that left a summer camp that's been a fixture in the area for 99 years unprepared and helpless in the midst of violent weather.
The new Elon Musk artificial intelligence chatbox Grok cut to the chase when users asked who was responsible for the Texas flooding deaths. “Trump’s NOAA cuts, pushed by Musk’s DOGE, slashed funding 30% and staff 17%, underestimating rainfall by 50% and delaying alerts,” according to the AI robot that Musk developed to counter misinformation on social media after acquiring the site he renamed as X.
The worst flood in Texas history in terms of fatalities killed 215 people in the tiny Central Texas hamlet of Thrall in 1921 when a tropical storm dumped 40 inches of rain in 24 hours that triggered flooding on the San Gabriel River and left parts of San Antonio and Austin buried under water as deep as 12 feet.
.Hurricane Beulah in 1967 ignited widespread flooding that claimed 40 lives, inflicted damages topping $1 billion and left nearly a quarter-million people homeless on or near the Texas coast.
Thirty-one people died during a five-day span in October 1998 when a cold front collided with warmer tropical air and caused severe flooding on the Guadalupe, San Marcos and Medina rivers and at Canyon Lake north of San Antonio as well. San Antonio residents in areas near downtown like Alamo Heights had water in homes that was ankle-deep in some cases.
Ten young people died near Comfort on July 17, 1987 after a caravan of vehicles tried to cross the Guadalupe River while fleeing a church camp that was badly flooded on the other side by a storm during the night. The river surged at the low-water crossing and carried some campers to their deaths while others were pulled from by helicopters in an airlift that saved numerous lives.
A flash flood less than a month ago on the eastern periphery of the Hill Country near San Antonio when they tried to drive cars through high water from a creek that had flooded there. Fifteen people died in the Hill County near Wimberly in 2015 when the Blanco River rose 45 feet and destroyed more than 400 homes.
more to come ...
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