As of this writing, at least 110 people are dead with 161 missing as a result of the July 4 catastrophic flooding of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, Texas. Next door in New Mexico, three people (including two children) were killed on July 8 after a 20-foot wall of water moved through their town of Ruidoso.
Appearing on Fox News Channel on July 7, Republican policy adviser Karl Rove blamed the large number of deaths on the lack of flood warning alarms on the Guadalupe River. On the same day, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick vowed to use state dollars to have an alarm system installed. The problem is that the Guadalupe’s waters rose 26 feet in 45 minutes between 4 AM and 6 AM on July 4. River sirens in addition to useless warnings from the National Weather Service—don’t have a prayer of preventing hundreds to thousands of future deaths because the real root of the problem is not being addressed.
How did millions of Americans—despite almost a century of government anti-flood efforts—come to live, work, and even recklessly build Christian girls’ camps in potentially dangerous flood-prone areas? …
None of this is to insinuate that had there been more competition among standards that no one’s residence or workplace would ever have flooded or there would be no flood fatalities anywhere. However, there’s no doubt that the federal government’s perverse subsidization of residential, commercial, and agricultural development in flood-prone areas, as well as artificially cheap flood insurance completely detached from risk assessment, have contributed to not only the untold loss of lives over decades but billions of dollars of property as well. Private policies, which have grown relative to the NFIP in recent years, are not available in many flood-prone areas and are still too stunted in many other ways.
Lives will continue to be lost in Kerr County, Texas if Texas’s political leadership and citizens believe river alarms will assure safety from flood waters that can rise dozens of feet in minutes in the middle of the night. To paraphrase James Carville’s most famous quip, “It’s the proximity, stupid!”
The widespread laissez-faire perspective in late-nineteenth-to-early-twentieth-century America was that everyone should enjoy the country’s pristine rivers, lakes, and oceans to their heart’s content, but be cautious during certain seasons and get far away when storm clouds gathered. And, if you were “dad-gum fool” enough to consistently live close to an ocean or river or dam, you were taking an acknowledged risk and no one owed you or your family anything if you lost a bet with Mother Nature, the forces of which no man can or will ever match. It was a fully adult country back then.
Yep, those darn old perverse incentives that the state just cannot avoid every time it does something to ”help” us. These incentives exist not only in flood plain insurance and such tomfoolery, but everything the state sticks its sticky fingers into. You will notice that this country lost its monopoly on tobacco, cotton and anything else it could economically interfere in. I assume that we will be also losing the edge in technology and probably even in war machine production because the state is such a bunch of losers, handing out perverse incentives in everything .they do. Can’t they leave well enough alone?