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.