What Real Science Is Saying About the Texas Floods
Rick Moran : Jul 8, 2025
PJ Media
"Based on the peer-reviewed literature and observational records, there is little empirical basis to claim that extreme precipitation has increased in Flash Flood Alley (or indeed, most of North America). Similarly, there is little basis for claims that flooding has become more common or severe." -The Free Press
[PJMedia.com] "Flash Flood Alley" is how the locals and weather forecasters refer to the region in Texas where more than 100 people died in fast-rising waters of the Guadalupe River in the middle of the night. (Screengrab image: via CBN News)
According to AccuWeather, Flash Flood Alley is "a geographic region that tracks through many of Texas' major metropolitan areas, including San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and Waco."
Meteorologists say it's a matter of topography. The Balcones Escarpment, an inactive fault zone, forms a gentle, sloping rise in the Texas Hill Country that proves deadly when sudden storms dump one or two inches of rain in minutes.
Pete Rose, a meteorologist with the Lower Colorado River Authority, told AccuWeather, "Along with that, you have a lot of your hills and valleys that go along with that type of topography, and these hills don't contain a lot of soil; they have very thin soil. So, when rain does hit them, not much of it gets absorbed," Rose said, adding that "water will rush down the valleys and pile into creeks and streams."
Flash Flood Alley got its nickname for a reason: Tragedies like last weekend's flooding strike the region regularly but unpredictably.
A flash flooding event occurred in 1846, which, despite the meager population of Texas at the time, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of German immigrants who had settled in New Braunfels, Texas. Contemporary accounts spoke of the Guadalupe River rising "15 feet above its normal stand after these heavy rains, carrying with it in its swift torrent a number of large trees, uprooted farther up the hills."
The tragedy was not preventable, no matter what the left is saying. Typical of the kinds of attacks by Democrats was this tweet by California state Senator Scott Wiener.
The facts are far different. "We had adequate staffing. We had adequate technology," Greg Waller, service coordination hydrologist with the National Weather Service (NWS) West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth, told The Texas Tribune.
The timeline of NWS actions makes a liar out of Wiener.
The agency issued a flood watch on Thursday afternoon, a flash flood warning by 1 a.m. on Friday (about an hour after rains started), and a flash flood emergency urging evacuations at around 4 a.m.—about an hour before the most serious flooding occurred.
There did appear to be some delays when those NWS warnings were transmitted to the public via social media by local officials.
Lanza says that the weekend's tragic deaths from the flood resulted not from inadequate advance warning, but seemingly rather from people on the ground not responding fast enough to the warnings they were receiving.
"I think we need to focus our attention on how people in these types of locations receive warnings. This seems to be where the breakdown occurred," he writes on his Substack.
The warning system had serious gaps, as there was no formal means of warning the campers on the Guadalupe River. Considering the area's history of flash flooding, the lack of a formal warning system was inexplicable.
But it's a system that existed long before Elon Musk and Donald Trump came to power. If there is to be fault given, local officials should be forced to answer some tough questions... Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here
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