O Really wrote: ↑Sat Jul 12, 2025 10:23 am
Who would ever have thought Brownie's work would turn out to be so heroic in retrospect.
Just 15 years ago we were praising the vast improvements made to FEMA by both Shrub and Obama post-Katrina.
Trump’s Response To Texas Floods Is A Preview Of What’s To Come
After catastrophic flooding in central Texas left the area devastated, the Trump administration’s lackluster response offers a chilling glimpse of what’s in store for when the next disaster strikes.
... But as families picked through the rubble and emergency workers searched for bodies, the Trump administration’s response signaled that they don’t seem to feel any particular sense of urgency when it comes to helping the victims recover.
Typically, the Federal Emergency Management Administration deploys a myriad of resources to disaster zones, including search and rescue teams, aid workers who go door-to-door to assist victims, and staff who can set up semi-permanent locations where individuals and businesses impacted by a storm or flood can also figure out next steps. It’s a marathon, and getting off the starting line with urgency is crucial.
“These [disasters] are a very long-haul type of thing,” Margaret Cooney, a senior staffer at the Center for American Progress who focuses on climate disasters, told HuffPost. “And one of the things that helps folks in these communities get through it is FEMA.”
... But writ large, the response to the Texas floods largely encapsulates what the Trump administration has been aiming towards since January — decimating and undermining the programs that warn of impending disaster, coordinate the response, and work to minimize harm. And it’s a terrifying warning of what’s to come.
“I can’t tell you how bad their treatment of FEMA has been,” Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who studies effective public management, told HuffPost. “It’s shortsighted and naive.”
... But that was also before the Texas floods. On Friday, The Washington Post reported that the White House was backtracking on its plans to eliminate the agency.
But in a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told HuffPost the Washington Post’s headline “did not accurately characterize the Trump Administration’s continued efforts to overhaul FEMA,” while also calling FEMA “a bloated bureaucracy that disincentivized state investment in their own resilience.”
“President Trump is committed to right-sizing the Federal government while empowering State and local governments by enabling them to better understand, plan for, and ultimately address the needs of their citizens,” Jackson said.
When I was involved NC was VERY active in disaster prep, even with GOP Govs long one of the better states in the country. Still, FEMA leadership and resources were invaluable.
Kamarck says that plan is key to its own destruction. “The fundamental fact that the Trump administration doesn’t get is that the bigger the catastrophe, the more the first responders there are [also] victims,” she said.
Significant damage has already been done. As part of an effort led by Elon Musk earlier in the year, civil servants have been laid off en masse, including at FEMA, which has seen some 25% of staff leave the agency since Trump returned to power. For a department that has historically been underfunded and understaffed, it is devastating.
The reasoning behind the cuts was that these jobs were supposedly a waste of taxpayer dollars even though officials at FEMA and NOAA, which provides resources for forecasting and warning of disasters, said many of those positions were critical — and cutting them could lead to tragedies.
... The National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA and plays a crucial role in forecasting dangerous weather and communicating to the public, has lost 600 employees since January. The Trump administration has also made it harder for states and localities to get money for warning systems and has cut contracts intended for disaster preparedness.
“Not fully funding FEMA and NOAA is going to devastate communities,” Cooney said. “These agencies give communities a fighting chance.”
To add to the disorganization, as of July FEMA is now on its second director in six months: Cameron Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL, was abruptly fired in May and replaced by David Richardson, who previously worked in an anti-terrorism unit at DHS. Neither man has any experience in emergency management. Richardson has yet to make any public statements about the Texas flooding.
Cosplay Barbie sucking all the air out of the room?
... There is general consensus that natural disasters are getting worse. An analysis released by NOAA in early 2025 noted that each year was breaking records: “In 2024, there were 27 individual weather and climate disasters with at least $1 billion in damages, trailing only the record-setting 28 events analyzed in 2023,” the report said. And the World Meteorological Association found in a 2021 review that the rate of natural disasters had increased fivefold over the previous 50 years: “A disaster related to a weather, climate or water hazard occurred every day on average over the past 50 years.”
... In Kerr County, where the worst of the flooding occurred, local officials had been trying to get FEMA funding for a flood warning system for years. But, according to NPR, their funding application had been turned down by the state of Texas, which was responsible for administering the funds. Nor could they get funds via a state-level grant program....
Thanks, Gov Abbott.
It's not all on Dementia Don, though.
Good job, Obama.
That designation means an area is likely to be inundated during a 100-year flood — one severe enough that it only has a 1% chance of happening in any given year....
The flood was far more severe than the 100-year event envisioned by FEMA, experts said, and moved so quickly in the middle of the night that it caught many off guard in a county that lacked a warning system.
But Syracuse University associate professor Sarah Pralle, who has extensively
studied FEMA’s flood map determinations, said it was “particularly disturbing” that a camp in charge of the safety of so many young people would receive exemptions from basic flood regulation.
“It’s a mystery to me why they weren’t taking proactive steps to move structures away from the risk, let alone challenging what seems like a very reasonable map that shows these structures were in the 100-year flood zone,” she said.
FEMA exempted buildings at old and new sites
In response to an appeal, FEMA in 2013 amended the county’s flood map to remove 15 of the camp’s buildings from the hazard area. Records show that those buildings were part of the 99-year-old Camp Mystic Guadalupe, which was devastated by last week’s flood.
Bad job, Obama.
After further appeals, FEMA removed 15 more Camp Mystic structures in 2019 and 2020 from the designation. Those buildings were located on nearby Camp Mystic Cypress Lake, a sister site that opened to campers in 2020 as part of a major expansion and suffered less damage in the flood.
Bad job, Dolt .45.
... Experts say Camp Mystic’s requests to amend the FEMA map could have been an attempt to avoid the requirement to carry flood insurance, to lower the camp’s insurance premiums or to pave the way for renovating or adding new structures under less costly regulations....
Analysis shows flood risks at both camp sites
Regardless of FEMA’s determinations, the risk was obvious.
At least 12 structures at Camp Mystic Guadalupe were fully within FEMA’s 100-year flood plain, and a few more were partially in that zone, according to an AP analysis of data provided by First Street, a data science company that specializes in modeling climate risk.
Jeremy Porter, the head of climate implications at First Street, said FEMA’s flood insurance map underestimates flood risks. That’s because it fails to take into account the effects of heavy precipitation on smaller waterways such as streams and creeks. First Street’s model puts nearly all of Camp Mystic Guadalupe at risk during a 100-year flood.
In a statement, FEMA downplayed the significance of the flood map amendments.
“Flood maps are snapshots in time designed to show minimum standards for floodplain management and the highest risk areas for flood insurance,” the agency wrote. “They are not predictions of where it will flood, and they don’t show where it has flooded before.”
Yes they are and yes they do, along with other factors.
An ‘arduous’ appeal process can help property owners
... Pralle, who reviewed the amendments for AP, noted that some of the exempted properties were within 2 feet (0.6 meters) of FEMA’s flood plain by the camp’s revised calculations, which she said left almost no margin for error. She said her research shows that FEMA approves about 90% of map amendment requests, and the process may favor the wealthy and well-connected.
A study she published in 2021 with researcher Devin Lea analyzed more than 20,000 buildings that had been removed from FEMA flood maps. It found that the amendments occurred more often in places where property values were higher, more white people lived and buildings were newer.
Bad job, DonOLD and maybe Biden. The article doesn't mention Joe moving things back in the right direction.
Camp expanded after ‘tremendous success’
FEMA had cautioned in its amendments that other parts of Camp Mystic remained on the flood map, and that “any future construction or substantial improvement” would be subject to flood plain management regulations.
County officials not only allowed the camp to keep operating, but to dramatically expand.
Kerr County is 3 to 1 RepuQ.
Considered Texas royalty after decades of taking care of the daughters of elite families, Camp Mystic owners Dick and Tweety Eastland cited the “tremendous success” of their original camp in explaining the need for a second site nearby.
The expansion included new cabins and a dining hall, chapel, archery range and more. The camp had 557 campers and more than 100 staffers between its two locations when a state licensing agency conducted an inspection on July 2, two days before the tragedy, records show....
Yuck, imagine being one of those inspectors!
. Both survived. 
