The Deadly Floods Revealed Texans’ Heroism—and Their Failed Politics
Texas novelist Billy Lee Brammer once described the rivers and creeks of the Hill Country around Austin as “running deep like old wounds, boiling round the fractures.” This past weekend, those wounds opened. As of this writing, the catastrophic floods have claimed 95 lives, including 27 from an all-girls Christian summer camp.
Climatologists peg the start of Central Texas’s years-long drought to the La Niña event of 2021; over the past four years, we’ve had a “rain deficit” of 36 inches. On July 4, parts of the Hill Country—that distinct, creek-carved, cedar-green and chalk-bright thumbprint in the heart of my state—received almost half of that in one day. Kerr County got 12 inches in just a few hours. With the death toll rising and more still missing, this is now set to be the deadliest flooding event in modern Texas history, surpassing even Hurricane Harvey.
As I write this on Monday morning, a flood watch is still in effect in Travis County, where I live. The dangers near me are mostly in the streets that dip into formerly dry creek beds, but even I can see that the ground is too wet to absorb anything more. The water seems to push up out of the dirt rather than sink into it.
The land here has always been prone to flooding; its thin soils and steep slopes funnel water into rivers with brutal speed. When I heard about the children lost at Camp Mystic, I thought about the Hill Country girls’ camp I went to as a kid, also set along a river. The riverbed was nearly all limestone—bright, slick, shallow, quick and easy to underestimate. It made for fun canoe runs but there was nothing to hold onto if the water came fast. When it rained, the counselors would put a chain up blocking the trail down to its banks.
Geologists have called the region “Flash Flood Alley,” or sometimes, “the Flash Flood Capital of North America.” Over the last thirty years the pace of destruction and the lives lost have only increased. The 31 people who died in 1998’s Central Texas floods were followed four years later by floods which that claimed fewer lives (12 casualties), but crushed the built environment: 48,000 homes lost to the waters, and nearly $1 billion in total damage.
Just weeks ago, news organizations published solemn remembrances of the 2015 Memorial Day floods in nearby Wimberly that killed 13 people; at the time, The Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder described the floods as “like nothing you’ve ever seen.” Previously unthinkable disasters have followed hard on that flood’s heels. Since 2013, this area has experienced two “500-year storms” and one “300-year storm,” to borrow the terminology that civil engineers still use to describe events that were once thought to be rare.
Given all of this history, officials who say that they couldn’t have seen this past weekend’s floods coming are simply lying. At a more macro level, the failure to act on climate change is the most sweeping systemic failure—one that amplifies every other mistake. Zoom in and the temptation to assign blame gets murkier, even as it gets harder to resist.
Warnings from the National Weather Service went out as quickly as they could, starting on July 3. The nut of the horror seems to be older and more intractable than the Trump administration and DOGE cuts: Local officials lacked the infrastructure — literally, no local alert system in Kerrville—to warn residents effectively. As Rob Kelly, Kerr County’s top elected official, told The New York Times, “We’ve looked into it before … The public reeled at the cost.” Asked on July 5 if he thought that the weekend’s events might change the calculus, he replied, “I don’t know.” (By this time, 15 children had already been reported dead.)
You’re horrified, I’m horrified. Still, what looks like political callousness needs to be balanced against the heroism and generosity displayed over the past few days. Here in the Lone Star State, there is a contradiction I’ve puzzled over for most of my life: Texans have made a whole brand of independence, proud of our “come and take it” toughness. But they are as eager to come to one another’s aid as any human on earth; I happen to think they might be above average in that regard.
I signed up to help with sorting donations and shifting displaced pets in foster homes only to find out thousands of people had signed up before me. On Sunday, the city of Kerrville asked people to stop coming to the area; so many had already shown up with flatbeds, boats, chainsaws—anything that could carry help in or haul wreckage out they didn’t need any more non-professional volunteers. Instead, they are directing folks to drop-offs and fundraising. There is such a powerful instinct to help, to give, to protect—an urge to collective action that is instantaneous when the threat has come and gone.
Yet that same generosity does not translate into broad support for the kind of public infrastructure that can prevent or mitigate disaster. I have seen people stand on a roadside and cheer an H-E-B truck rolling through floodwaters; meanwhile, the local siren system goes unfunded. People will risk their lives to pull a child out of a tree but refuse to invest in what might have kept both the child and themselves safe in the first place.
This reflexive aversion to taxes and the social safety net didn’t come out of nowhere. Conservative politicians in Texas in particular have spent decades weaponizing the impulse to aid each other on the ground, lauding it as superior to help “from the government.” They frame government as a thief rather than a partner and separate “community” from the structures meant to uphold it. And when the government does falter, as all complex systems sometimes do, those failures become proof of its supposed uselessness. In their project, government failures are a design feature, not a bug: starve public systems of resources until they cannot deliver, then hold up their collapse as proof that nothing public can be trusted. But what is H-E-B’s emergency relief, really, if not a massive public works project that also sells groceries? The problem isn’t massive institutions; maybe it’s that Texans have been trained to love the wrong ones.
Trump’s administration has pushed that spiral of dysfunction and distrust into something so tight and steep it might as well be just an arrow pointing down: slashing FEMA, cutting the National Science Foundation, dismantling public health protections, abandoning the disabled and the poor. That leaves communities even more dependent on last-minute neighborly heroics and more suspicious of the idea that a government could ever act with the same urgency.
What mutual aid groups and even H-E-B show us, whether they mean to or not, is that mutual aid and volunteering are not the opposite of government; they are what government ought to be. Taxes are just a sandbag brigade stretched across thousands of miles.
It’s tempting to blame those who resist building that line—to scoff at anti-tax voters or wish their cynicism washed away. But blame is paralyzing. Responsibility, even when it hurts, is a blueprint to action. And responsibility belongs to all of us.
I have strong opinions about what the taxpayers of Kerr County should do differently—and about that decades-long GOP project to undermine faith in government—but as images of the mud-torn Hill Country dominate my phone, I’m drawn to thinking about the middle-term, and how I can influence the people closest to me. Not today or tomorrow but in six months or a year. Maybe the challenge is for those of us who already believe in public systems—who already vote and believe in how taxes work — to go smaller, too. To show up at the food pantry, or at a lifeguarding shift at the YMCA, lending a hand at a church fundraiser, or spending time at a Big Brothers Big Sisters orientation. We need to do more than protest or write letters and start building trust through repetition, routine, and being reliably present in the places where politics don’t lead.
The more granular and further away from explicit political undertones our actions, the more room there is to connect across the divides that show up at the ballot box. In the mutual aid networks I’ve been involved with, the political bent is usually progressive to anarchist but they are totally agnostic as to who benefits. In a flood, those groups work right next to evangelical Christian volunteers and alongside people who might call themselves libertarian, hauling supplies in a steroidal pickup. That collective, neighborly instinct is the closest we get to what the government should feel like: not a foreign power, but people helping people, at scale.
Billy Lee Brammer saw rivers as old wounds, boiling around the fractures. The Hill Country has always offered up those scars. But Brammer’s The Gay Place is a lightly fictionalized account of his time as a speechwriter for Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan willing to believe in a government big enough to heal historic trauma. Texans sent him to Washington to build the Great Society, even as they mistrusted Washington itself. That spirit feels far away right now. But maybe it isn’t gone. Maybe it’s just waiting for us to notice each other after the waters recede.