No.These types of things are unavoidable. The full risk profile of our planet is immpossible to determine. Should some great portion of the risk profile be determined, it will cover essentialy everywhere. Even reducing it to stuff with a fractional percentage of a disaster per year will be forbiding. And there is absolutly no way to impliment a country wide action and response network that does not end up running everything through the all powerfull department of saftey, which is politicaly and practicaly immpossible.

bottom land is always, flat, near water, productive, with many other resources on the hills and in the river, and then occasionaly, a trap

Just telling people not to live on fucking flood plains, goes nowhere......it is a perenial recuring problem that is so common and ancient that it has been recognised by archiologists, that humans have exploited the resources in river valleys, built there settlements, and then denuded all of the vegitation, and then blam, a flood, and there settlement gets instantly burried, bad for then, awsome for archiologists who find all there stuff, in water logged soil, interesting organic artifacts are often in "perfect" condition.

This article is juggling two topics that essentially aren’t related.

The first topic is whether people will listen to weather warnings and change behavior in response to them in the first place. In that sense, it seems like a direct and urgent evacuation order should have happened, but I do still find the timeline rather short. Hindsight is 20/20 on that.

The second topic is the author’s opinion that the left-leaning section of media isn’t doing their due diligence.

Let’s be real here, the author of the article is using a cherry-picked event that happens to allegedly not be a result of climate change to try and discredit the general idea of climate change. I don’t think the author intended to discredit climate change as a concept but that’s how the audience will read it.

Sure, the New York Times got it wrong in this specific case and at least partially jumped to a conclusion, but it is established observed scientific fact that human caused climate change is causing and going to cause more extreme weather patterns moving forward.

It is also established fact that DOGE made cuts to the NWS and had to re-hire to stabilize the department as recently as last month. [1] Furthermore, the Trump administration intends to make deep cuts to the NOAA within its 2026 budget proposal. [2]

So while this specific event may not have been affected by budget cuts, we don’t know that for sure yet. Opposition Democrats are asking for investigations into that very question.

And even if NWS cuts didn’t affect this event, it’s still entirely fair for the political discussion to question the merit of making cuts during the same timeline as a preventable tragedy. At some point the administration must own the optics it generates for itself. If it didn’t want those optics it would commit to fully funding the NOAA and NWS, but because this administration has taken action to cut staff and funding, they do have to own the optics even if the optics aren’t always perfectly in line with the truth of the cause and effect. That’s just how politics work.

In other words, if I cut funding to the road department or even merely propose funding cuts and the next day my constituent hits a pothole, they’re going to blame me even if my actions didn’t directly create that pothole. And that blame is politically justified and warranted, because my political stance is that we are spending too much on road maintenance, when clearly that’s not the case.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/national-weather-service-hiring-spr...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/11/nx-s1-5361366/major-budget-cu...

Wow I'm glad that one graph settled all of climate science such that it's now morally indefensible to think anything other than what the author thinks

I doubt this sad event could have been avoided, looking back, yes things could have been done. But based upon how funding is chosen and applied and who people vote for, things would have to been done differently for the last 40+ years.

This could be looked at as a result for bad choices our elected pols made over decades.

Why is this on hacker news...? An editorial opinion blog about a climatic disaster in a region of US?

Even typing out this comment feels dirty as it's against hn commenting rules.

However...this is 50 percent of threads nowadays.

> There is NO EVIDENCE that the central Texas floods are the result of climate change.

This isn't how climate science or causality works in relation to climate change. The climate is a chaotic, complex sysem that does not have a single, identifiable nexus by which we can "prove" things happen.

Climate scientists know this and, instead of trying to demonstrate irrefutable proof, point to a better need for monitoring and warning systems, of exactly the type mentioned in this article.

It is unfortunate that the author felt the need to lean into this argument, as is it precisely this kind of perspective that leads people to become suspicious of monitoring and warning systems (by generally rejecting scientific argumentation) - the exact problem that the author claims led to avoidable deaths.

The whole approach is quite confusing to me - why identify the issue and then act to reinforce the issue?

Author uses a bunch of maps and charts to support their own narrative, one which all but ignores the reality they get at in the fourth paragraph:

> Furthermore, weather model forecasts indicated the potential for a major precipitation event over this historically flood-prone region during the prior days.

So the answer is yes. Yes, it could have been entirely avoided had the landowners built in such a way that respected the land’s tendency to flood. Yes, it could have been avoided if landowners took warnings seriously, paid attention to past flood events, if the state had put flooding mitigation measures on a river or area known for flash flooding, or if literally anyone had observed that putting dormitories at or near river level was a generally awful idea from a safety perspective.

The fact people died in one of the most predictable types of disasters out there, yet are still trying to weasel around blame or fault, is beyond shameful, and something we don’t need Op-Eds about so much as we need more people calling it what for it is:

A wholly preventable tragedy.

Can someone explain how did climate issue became a political issue in USA? It seems rest of world does not have this problem( but it's becoming a problem for rest of the world who follows US politics.)