Fourth of July flooding in the Hill Country of Texas took the lives of 135 persons and as of Tuesday, the number of missing stood at roughly 101.
Storms, natural disasters and other emergency situations are unpredictable. But floods in the Hill Country are not unusual and residents are familiar with how to react. Questions continue to be raised about whether the alert system in place provided enough time to respond and head for higher climes.
The National Centers for Environmental Information reported there were a record 22 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters across the United States in 2020. That shattered the previous annual record and led to $95 billion in damages, marking a bookend to a five-year period between 2016 and 2020 that saw the total cost of a billion-dollar disasters exceed $600 billion. Such figures illustrate that while the disasters themselves may be unpredictable, it’s not hard to conclude that they’re going to come and they’re going to be costly.
