America Must Strengthen Resilience Against Extreme Weather. The Texas Flooding Tragedy Shows Why.

At least 135 people – dozens of them children – have been confirmed dead since catastrophic flooding swept through Texas Hill Country July 4th weekend, each of them literally inundated in the pre-dawn hours without warning because that state’s government had – not once, not even twice – three times refused to erect flood alarms along the Guadalupe River’s notorious “Flash Flood Alley.”

The third request from Kerr County officials, whose community was hit hardest by the flooding, even included the carrot that the federal government would pay for the alarms. Texas’ governor Greg Abbott rejected even that use of granted federal funds, saying that making an entire watershed, including children’s camps, safer at a cost of $1 million was “wasteful.”

It turns out that Governor Abbott’s “wasteful spending” amounts to less than $5,000 per life, far less than what he and state legislators have been willing to spend to recover from the tragedy.

Another willing participant: President Donald Trump, who approved most of the governor’s request for funding and recovery personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).  Yes, that FEMA. The same agency that, only weeks before Tropical Storm Barry last year unleashed what one meteorologist called a “rain bomb”, Trump had repeatedly threatened to eliminate.

Imagine how many more might have been lost without FEMA’s expertise and funding, both of which have powered much of the post-storm search to find and rescue flood victims.

Even a state as big as Texas, hit by a flood as admittedly limited as the one unleashed by Tropical Storm Barry, depended heavily on federal assistance as the waters subsided. As bracing, the director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather argues that the storms and flooding that ravaged central Texas are “exactly what the future is going to hold.”

Trump and his political party are playing a dangerous, life-threatening game of chicken with our national preparedness. As Mike Bloomberg recently wrote, “The latest episode of horrific flooding isn’t just about a natural disaster in one state. It’s also about a political failure that’s been happening in states across the country, and most of all in Washington. The refusal to recognize that climate change carries a death penalty is sending innocent people, including far too many children, to early graves.”

Fortunately, the impact of the Texas disaster, and the harsh reminder that storms are getting bigger and stronger, has caused the Trump administration to back down from their “kill FEMA” plan: abolishing the agency is no longer the favored option. That’s good.

Trump says he’s reforming FEMA, and getting the states in stronger leadership roles in disaster recovery and relief. He could begin by investing in one function that everyone agrees has to be managed at the national level: the weather report, and its disaster-related cousin, hurricane and flood forecasting.

The value of data – good data about what the weather is going to be – is critical. It’s also common sense. When Benjamin Franklin created fire insurance, his first requirement was better data on risk. The Trump administration has been at its worst in its evisceration of long-established and economically vital weather and climate data gathering. The selective firing of the top hurricane and storm experts from the Weather Service has absolutely guaranteed higher death tolls and property losses during this year’s hurricane season.

Putting back in place the federal weather forecast capacity he has shredded should be Trump’s first post-flood response. Sharpies are not a substitute for the best available forecasting.

Next, if Trump and Congress truly want to “reform” FEMA, as they say, then they should invest much more in flood, fire and storm protection and resilience.  That is another of Ben Franklin’s ideas. Reduce risk to reduce insurance premiums – when fire swept through the town of Paradise, California, part of the town survived: houses that had been built to the latest fire codes withstood the flames.  Every dollar FEMA spends on upgrading resilience reduces future disaster damages by five dollars. Congress needs to mandate more spending on preventing damages to keep the damage bill affordable.

As the Texas flooding tragedy shows, state and local governments don’t currently spend enough on prevention and resilience – it’s too easy politically to wait until a disaster happens and then clean up. But it’s also expensive.

The prevention-oriented Dutch have demonstrated this – with far greater exposure to North Sea floods, they have essentially no deaths from flooding, and lower costs on flood control and management than do communities here in the US.

Finally, reform must be selective. Trump should preserve FEMA’s third Ben Franklin tool: share the risk and the recovery burden across as big a population as possible. North Carolina couldn’t afford the $72 billion bill from Hurricane Helene; its total state annual budget is only $30 billion. States can’t legally run a budget deficit to clean up after a major disaster, and 30 US states couldn’t recover from a disaster the size of Helene.  But even a $72 billion disaster can be financed by the federal government.  Uncle Sam can borrow to pay for a hurricane, flood or a firestorm. And the federal cost of borrowing is only half what a state would have to pay.  So the smartest thing about FEMA today is that we are sharing relief costs across the entire US economy – keeping even the smallest state able to recover from major catastrophes and minimizing the cost of cleaning up from even the biggest disaster.

FEMA’s big “risk pool” is, in effect, a reinsurance policy for every American.  It needs to be combined with the best possible data and much stronger investment in resilience. America, led by Franklin, pioneered insurance for the masses. Insurance has been a core tool that enabled the US to become a financially secure, middle-class society.  Congress should make sure that Trump’s “don’t prevent, just mourn” philosophy  doesn’t become embedded in national policy. The American economy might never recover if flood and firestorm bills were dumped on families and communities.

Taken together, these are urgently needed steps the president and Republican-led Congress should take to strengthen the nation’s resilience against extreme weather. But they won’t be enough. Republicans must also reverse course on climate denialism and speed up the nation’s clean energy transition, which will lower the final bill we have to pay for climate change – because more people will die if we don’t.