FEMA, Texas
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Texas, flash flood
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"Let's put an end to the conspiracy theories and stop blaming others," Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement.
Texas leads the country in flood deaths. Steep hills, shallow soils and a fault zone have made Hill Country, also called "flash flood alley," one of the state's most dangerous regions.
Over just two hours, the Guadalupe River at Comfort, Texas, rose from hip-height to three stories tall, sending water weighing as much as the Empire State building downstream roughly every minute it remained at its crest.
This is false. It is not possible that cloud seeding generated the floods, according to experts, as the process can only produce limited precipitation using clouds that already exist.
"These are roughly one-in-1,000-year events, [and] would be extremely rare in the absence of human-caused warming,” one climate scientist says.
Safety and weather protocols are top of mind for parents and summer camp leaders following a deadly flood that overwhelmed Central Texas.
There was little indication of how torrential the Texas downpours would become before dawn. At least 27 people were killed, many of them children at Camp Mystic.
Texas Hill Country is no stranger to extreme flooding. In the rugged, rolling terrain it’s known for, heavy rains collect quickly in its shallow streams and rivers that can burst into torrents like the deadly flood wave that swept along the Guadalupe River on July 4.
The Gulf, which borders Texas, has become significantly warmer in recent years due to climate change, Swain explained. This results in a very warm body of water that produces a lot of evaporation, releasing more tropical moisture into the air than seen historically.
Federal forecasters issued their first flood warning at 1:14 a.m. on July 4. Local officials haven’t shed light on when they saw the warnings or whether they saw them in time to take action.