July 8, 2025, 4:54 p.m.
Every few months, we have an unspeakably tragic natural disaster in the U.S. Even as search and recovery efforts continue, the fighting begins over who and what is to blame for senseless death and destruction. Partisans point fingers across the aisle. Media breaks down all the various angles of what happened and brings us the most gut-wrenching stories of survivors and those lost.
The deadly floods in central Texas are following the script. The question, as always, is whether anything actually changes as a result of the tragedy. The hurdles for real change to help prevent and mitigate human loss in these disasters are as large as the disasters themselves: lack of resources, lack of political will, and lack of public outcry beyond the few days and weeks after the latest disaster.
The finger-pointing in this case focuses mostly on the resources—whether the National Weather Service was able to provide warnings, particularly in light of recent budget and personnel cuts, and why the local area didn’t have additional warning systems.
There is no evidence thus far that the NWS lacked resources or failed to provide warnings. The forecasts did not anticipate the volume of rain that battered the area until it was already accumulating. But like it or not, even the best-staffed forecast centers can’t always predict Mother Nature.
The bigger problem is that there was no warning system in place to reach people along the river in the middle of the night. This is where you have to understand the terrain. Kerr County, which bore the brunt of the destruction, is a large, 1,100-square-mile county with only about 55,000 people living in it.
For those in the Washington, D.C., area, it’s twice the size of Montgomery County, Maryland, with just 5 percent of the population. Many of those are retirees on fixed incomes—it’s a big retirement area because it's beautiful and quiet, with proximity to health care in San Antonio. My aunt and uncle retired there. It’s a lot of uninhabited territory along winding, hilly roads—the kind that can make people car sick when they usually never get car sick.
Critically, the low population density means low tax revenue. And warning systems to cover the span of typically uninhabited areas would cost a lot of money. On social media and in news articles, people ask why there was nothing like tornado warning systems, but that’s the same answer. Tornado warning sirens are based in towns. Truly rural areas usually don’t have tornado sirens for the same reason that Kerr County doesn’t have a flood warning system: it’s wildly expensive to cover huge swaths of land, and it only helps a few people.
There has to be political and popular will to get warning systems of this type in place. This isn’t just a red-state problem—it’s a country-wide problem of funding, approvals, impact reports, and public interest. Red and blue states alike suffer from being under-prepared for natural disasters.
A USA Today-Ipsos poll conducted in June shows where public interest and political will falter. A 58 percent majority of Americans think extreme weather events will become more frequent in the near future. But only 8 percent frequently worry about becoming a victim of a disaster. Nearly two-thirds of Americans rarely or never worry about it. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to worry about being a victim of a natural disaster, but even among Democrats the majority are not concerned.
Comparing this June’s results to the same questions the poll asked last year, you see how opinion on disaster risk is very time-specific. Last year’s survey was conducted in July, after tornado and storm season wound down for much of the country, so concerns about those weather events were lower last year than in the June poll this year. At the same time, hurricane risks are typically higher in July than in June, so last year’s poll showed higher concern about hurricanes than this year’s. It’s difficult to generate the political will to act when public attention is so temporary.
What happened in Texas is a massive tragedy with no easy answers, as are most natural disasters. We can point to things that can and should have been done, but time often moves on without much change. Ultimately, a lot of the things we need to do to save lives are about communication—how to reach people and how to get them to act appropriately in emergency situations. Plenty of researchers are working on these problems, but there has to be political will to fund the work and fund the solutions.
Contributing editor Natalie Jackson is a vice president at GQR Research.
