Alive, writing, avoiding the heat…
Summer in Texas is days filled with sweaters and socks because you can’t get the AC adjusted and late evening or early morning walks or runs. The area never really developed until someone invented air conditioning.
Texas’ much treasured and protected freedom to do as one wish with your land either to avoid paying lots of insurance or taxes or as a way to make more money brought tragedy over the 4th of July. The hills along the Guadalupe River are steep, rocky, and beautiful. The weather in the summer is cooler than the coast or the cities. They call those hills Flash Flood Alley, and it is true. The area has more flash floods than anywhere else in the world. The cool waters of the Guadalupe have long drawn vacationers and campers in the summer. Dozens of summer camps for children line its banks and fill the valleys. One long established champ had cabins right on the edge of the water, on gravel bed in a bend of the river. The thunderstorm was predicted and noted, but no one was alarmed they say. The man from NOAA who usually called to warn them had been fired so no one called, but they did send some emails. That storm was dumping inches per hour. Get to high ground away from the water. But most of the folks in the campgrounds were asleep.
A friend of mine and her family were in cabins on the edge of the river. One teenager was playing video games like boys like to do when he heard the water right at the door. He woke the families and got everyone up to an old barn on the hill out of the rain and the flood. They lost their trucks and cars, but all the family survive. So many did not.
But here in Texas and now across the US, climate change is a hoax. Rain that falls at six or seven or ten inches per hour, that is a thousand-year flood. It won’t happen again for years even though we’ve had three in the last two years. And we can’t make much money off the campers if FEMA says our land is in the 100-year floodplain. The insurance will wipe out all our profits. Flood sirens will annoy the visitors and the residents. There are too many false alarms. And we might have to raise the taxes to pay for it. After all it only happens occasionally.
I read an opinion piece about how the idea of the common good seems to have been erased from common knowledge. Yes, climate change is a hoax by the Chinese, but if that is true, how come they just had similar flooding with similar results.
