Bulwark Takes - Why the Texas Flash Floods Were So Deadly

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Sam Stein talks with Washington Post meteorologist Matthew Cappucci to break down the tragic flash floods that swept through central Texas and find out what made them so deadly. Cappucci explains how a nearly invisible system of triggers, moisture from Tropical Storm Barry, and stagnant storm cells led to a catastrophic rise in river levels from 3 feet to 34 feet in just 90 minutes. They also dig into why warnings may have gone unheeded and what this event reveals about the limitations of our weather alert systems.

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Training that sharpens your team, resources that keep jobs moving, and leads from interested homeowners. That's the sound of fuel for your business and it costs nothing to join. Get more from the work you're already doing. Learn more at jameshardy.com slash alliance. Hey guys, it's me Sam Stein. I'm here with Matthew Capucci, who is our favorite meteorologist. He has been on this show, what? This is your third or fourth time, always to talk about some dramatic weather event and usually, unfortunately, about tragedy.

In this case, we're going to be talking about the floods in central Texas that have as of the recording of this video, death toll is 95, including 27 girls from Camp Mystic, which is a camp just north of San Antonio. Matthew, thanks again for doing this. Sorry that it's always on such shady circumstances, but I do appreciate it. I guess for me, and I'm assuming for a majority of the people who are watching this, we just sort of want to know how something like this can even happen from a weather standpoint. So what I was reading was that this happened obviously on Thursday into Friday morning. The river, the Guadalupe River went from three feet in one spot to 34 feet in 90 minutes. That seems

metaphysically impossible to me. But how does that happen? Can you walk us through? Yeah, so this is Texas Hill Country. This is where they have wineries. It's the Edwards Plateau. The terrain is very favorable for flash flooding. We see this essentially once every generation or so. You know, the typical flow rate for many of these smaller streams or tributaries is only about a for flash flooding. We see this essentially once every generation or so. The typical flow rate for many of these smaller streams or tributaries is only about 1,000, 2,000 cubic feet per second. And suddenly during a high-end episode like this,

you can multiply that by 100 in only an hour or two hours time. That's why the water level spiked so quickly. What happened was that we had several slow-moving stagnant downpours stall and park over the same areas repeatedly. We knew going into the environment that there was sort of an antecedent very moist air mass, P watts or precipitable water indices around two and a quarter, two and a half inches. That meant every column of atmosphere bottom to top was holding like two and a half inches

worth of water. The reason the atmosphere was so moist was because six days prior, Tropical Storm Barry had made landfall in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and that leftover blob of moisture just infected or worked north. So, Texas had a very moist air mass going in. The big question though was whether or not anything would form because we didn't really have any fronts, we didn't really have any large pressure systems, there was nothing really obvious as a trigger. And so that's why going in, we knew the potential was there for some flooding and some downpours. But if this seemed like sort of a poorly forecast event, indeed it was.

What wound up happening was that something called a mesoscale convective vortex, a leftover swirl from earlier since dead thunderstorms off to the west, kind of worked eastwards and parked over Hill Country. And what that did was focused storm activity. You got storms parking for a while, but also it just kept feeding that moist air mass into the storms. So it was like there was this storm

that was just ingesting a fire hose of moisture. And we got three, four, five inch per hour rainfall rates for a couple hours. You know, with the second round of this flooding, the town of Burnett, Texas got 8.26 inches, I'm sorry, 8.6 inches worth of rain in three hours time, which is just obscene to think about because many of these areas average like 30 to 32 inches per year. So imagine four months worth of rain coming down in

three, four hours time. It's no surprise we saw a tragedy. So you're what you're saying is you have the ingredients for an incredible amount of condensation and moisture just to come down and what's just missing is the spark for that just to be released. And then what happens is the spark comes in and it's just planted there. It's not moving. It was very little to move it and just going to downpour until basically empties itself. 100% yeah. I, we knew the air mass was extremely moist. We didn't necessarily know what the trigger would be or if there would be one.

And the tricky thing, you know, in March, April, May, you tend to not have as big a flood events because it's a little drier and you have the jet stream to move things around. At this time of year, the jet stream is way north over Canada and the Dakotas. So over Texas, there's not really much flow in the upper atmosphere to scoop the system along. And so that's why even today we have flood watches in effect, the potential for additional rainfall of five to 10 inches. And it's been three up to four days

since the first round of flooding began. And so it's just that time of year when with nothing moving and ample moisture, you can get these high-end flood events. So how does a flash flood sort of, how does, so we know the condensation causes flash flood, and how does it become so dangerous compared to other storms? I mean, what is it about the flash flood that can just absolutely pulverize towns like this? Yeah, water just has an incredible amount of power. If you think about a cubic meter worth of water,

that weighs a metric ton, and that's one cubic meter. Now, we had something like four trillion gallons, if I did my math correctly, four trillion gallons of waterfall within just two of these smaller flood events. And this was just a subset of the much larger rainfall events. Think of all that water and that water rushing downhill and the power that carries with it. It essentially carves out miniature canyons. It takes everything with it. We still, I'd venture to say, we still don't have a good idea as to what the damage looks like because so many areas are still inaccessible. I want folks at home to picture like the storm surge from a category four, category five hurricane tearing through rural hill country in Texas. And that's sort of what this will

have been. And we've seen, it seems like every 20, every 30 years, we see flood events like this. Back in 1976, we had the big Thompson Canyon disaster in Colorado that killed 144 people. Similar set up, thunderstorm that parked, you had that rain wash down a river valley and catch campers off guard. This is the deadliest non-tropical flood event in the United States since that. The fact that we had nearly 100 people killed as of the confirmed death toll so far in a weather episode that wasn't a tornado, wasn't a hurricane, shows you how dangerous and deadly flash flooding can be. What about the...

So the way you're describing it makes me reconsider the idea of advanced warning because in this case there wasn't anything that really would have triggered people to say, uh-oh, this is coming. People were waiting, obviously it was moist, but is there a way to have more advanced warning for instances like this where you're just sort of looking for if there's a trigger out there and you're not totally certain about it? That's a really good point.

I think you phrased that a really good way. One of the tricky things that we deal with as forecasters is something called conditional forecast, meaning the ingredients are there, we're not sure they're going to come together. How do you communicate that low probability but high impact event? How do you communicate that low probability, but high impact event? How do you communicate that low chance, high impact risk? And we don't really have a good answer for that. Going into this episode, the National Weather Service did their best

to communicate that potential. The day before they had drawn a level two out of four slight risk for flash flooding and excessive rainfall, which to me, we have those all the time. That doesn't say there's anything too intense. The night before, they had a flood watch in effect. And so the flood watch said, yeah, we can see localized totals up to seven, eight inches.

And so going into it, we knew that, yeah, there will be some scattered flooding and there could be pockets of isolated significant flooding. I think it wasn't until overnight into very early in the morning hours when it became apparent that this was gonna be a real deal high- end extreme flood event. And while there were flood warnings and flash flood warnings issued about three hours in advance, people didn't

necessarily act on them the way they should have. And I think that that comes to a couple different issues. Number one, there is some morning fatigue. This part of Texas has seen seven flash flood warnings in the past two years. People over time are trained to not act. If they are told something's coming and they don't get the impact, the next time they're less likely to act. That's a tricky thing with flash flooding. It's such a localized thing that you can draw a box and notify everyone in the box that someone's going to get flash flooding. It's such a localized thing that you can draw a box and notify everyone in the box that someone's going to get flash flooding. And even if someone does get flash flooding every

time, if nine times out of 10, you get nothing, you're not going to really act as much the next time. I think the other thing too, systems of vulnerability. This was a holiday weekend. This was going into the 4th of July, 5th of July for a lot of folks. I'd venture to say a lot of people were tuned out. They were in party mode. they were in weekend mode, they were probably having a few drinks by the campfire, went to bed, thought maybe it'll rain overnight. It's a very unfortunate thing. And I think part of it too is there's some complacency. There were some good forecasts out there.

There's a guy, Avery Tomesco from the local CBS affiliate, who had a pressure forecast. I don't know how many people watched, but the tricky thing we're going to face too in the coming years is even if we have amazing technological advances and make the best most pressure forecasts, if people aren't going to seek that information, then there's nothing to really act on. Yeah, I was going to ask that. I mean, the last forecast alert that went out was at 4 a.m. according to the New York Times. Not saying of course you should give the forecast alerts around that time, but at 4 a.m. people

are asleep. I mean that's just the fact. Yeah. And they might have said, okay, this is a two out of four or whatever you said. I should be on guard, but no one's going to be checking their phones or watching the news or like, you know, waiting to see if they have to evacuate at 4 a.m. or going to be asleep. So is this just a situation where the system was down to fail almost

because of just horrible confluence of events and timing? I'll answer that in multiple ways. So what I will say is that the alerts they issued triggered the wireless emergency alert system. So when you get those squealing alerts in your cell phone, they're designed to wake people up. And so I'm sure there were a lot of folks who were woken up first, the first time around,

like 1.30, 1.15 in the morning. And then again, as you mentioned, right around four in the morning when they issued that flash flood emergency. And so folks were definitely getting those squeals. Whether or not there was cell service that can't mistake that allowed those alerts to be received is unclear. But I think a lot of folks probably just didn't ask didn't act because they can't visualize something that bad. You know, if

this happens only once every generation there, then people are going to forget the last time this happened back in 1936. It happened back in 1987. Different parts of the Guadalupe River, but but it still happened. But people have a very short memory. The other thing I'll say too- Let me just interrupt for once, question. The way you're talking about it, it's like,

well, this was sort of a unique event. It happens once every couple of decades. The other narrative around it, in fact, these once in a generation historic weather events are happening more frequently. Is that not your read of this? I mean, everybody sort of wants to examine if climate change is causing role. And I'll say that climate change makes the atmosphere a little bit more moist. It absolutely does. You know, every degree Fahrenheit, the air

temperature warms, the air can hold about 4% more water. But in this case, this was just really bad weather, bad luck. And yeah, it might have been made a little bit worse thanks to a moister atmosphere. But, you know, we're bound to have natural disasters every so often. It's just part of the landscape, part of how it's like in California, the environment is meant to burn and it will burn every couple generations. In Oklahoma, if you plant yourself and wait long enough, you're going to see a tornado. And you wait a couple more years, you might see another. If you live in Florida, you're going to get a hurricane. I think people forget the risk of flash floods in Texas Hill Country because they're so localized. You might have a devastating flood somewhere every five, 10 years, but if it didn't hit

a population center last time or hasn't for three, four decades, we forget. So that's a tricky part of it too. But I think there's also alarm fatigue and complacency. I mean, I live on the 20th floor of a DC skyscraper and my phone buzzes all the time with flash flood warnings. I'm never getting flash flooded up here. The water can't get me. You would need Noah's Ark and then some for the water to get me. And so if I get a flash flood warning in my phone and I'm a meteorologist, I go, hmm, it might rain. And I'm going to get a lot of clap back from my National Weather Service colleagues, but it's true that the overall

design of the flash flood warning product, I think, could use some work because if- What's the alternative? Well, that's the thing. It's a tricky thing. So there are different levels to flash flood warnings. There's the basic one, which you issue when someone in the area could see some flash flooding, maybe a street's washed out, maybe a street's inaccessible. This was something called a flash flood emergency, the dire top tier alert that the National Weather Service can issue that basically says it's life or death, this one's the one. And I know that difference, you now know that difference, but I'm not sure people at home know that difference.

And so part of it's going to be an education campaign, part of it's going to be, you know, there are sometimes extra warnings that, you know, desensitize folks. Part of it's going to be, you know, people, if they find themselves under a warning, and they didn't get something last time, they're not going to act this time. But I liken it to this. If you drove down the street right now, and you got to your destination safely, would you say, Wow, I didn't even need to wear seatbelts, I'm not going to wear it next time.

No, you'd still wear your seatbelt next time. But people do that with weather. People always do that with weather. There's that whole, you know, it can't happen to me thing. And yeah, I would argue and this is going to make me rather unpopular in some communities, but I would argue, we are to the point where no matter what technological advancements we have, we're never going to mitigate death

tolls any further. I think we're at the bottom of the curve. In the next 10 to 15 years, we'll have tornado warnings that might go an hour or two hours in advance. We might have tornado warnings before a thunderstorm even forms. We'll have better flood modeling. We'll have better hurricane predictions. And yet there will always be that crowd of it can't happen to me. And so I think from a social science standpoint, psychologically knowing how the audience in the United States is, I think we're never going to get much lower than the death tolls that we're already at.

Interesting, because there's a debate right now, obviously, as he knows, whether or not the actual resources were there from the National Weather Service to give the state or support that they needed to get the advance warning out there. Where do you come down on that one? Yeah, so a typical forecast shift in National Weather Service Office has two, maybe three people.

They were staffed up. They knew something big was going. They had five people there. So they did everything they were supposed to do. I do have inside folks at a couple of the National Weather Services down there who said that emergency management was tough to get on the phone, given it was a holiday weekend. So even though the forecasts were going out and the warnings were timely, I want to make it clear, the warnings were issued in a timely manner.

Core partners may not have known. And ultimately too, you know, if you're at a campground, if you're not paying attention to your phone, I just, I don't know what more- If you don't have cell service, right. I mean, who knows? And, you know, there's something called the NOAA weather radio.

And I'm sure you've heard of them before. So like a little radio and you punch in, it's something called the same code. It's basically the little code that corresponds to where in your county you are. Cell service or no cell service, it's going to ring if you're under any type of dire alert. Power, no power, there's a battery backup, it'll do the same thing. That has saved my rear when storm chasing multiple times, when I lose my cell service but I still know where the tornado is or I still know where the flooding is. Every camp, every school should have one of these. And it should be a state or a federal law, in my mind. Yeah. Well, the state's now saying, well, we should put flood warning monitors around

the Guadalupe River so that if something happens, that seems sensible, but reactive, honestly, to me. And I think what you're getting at is um something something the real issue here is sort of can we actually up the trust in our weather monitoring services so that people are not saying well I've seen this before and I can ride it out or people get that information in a more timely manner or they even trust what they're seeing from the federal government or state officials when it comes to weather forecasting and I suppose that to me might be the issue here, which is that when the administration is cutting back on services like this, when they're saying, well, we don't need this stuff, we can give it to private forecasters, that you're instilling a sort

of skepticism among the public with the Weather Service itself. And I do wonder if that as much as any budget cuts will be a damage that we look back and say, well, we shouldn't have done that. I'd say so. And I think there's, you know, weather forecasters are scientists. And I think there's such an increasing skepticism of science and distrust in science in general. You know, covering this event on social media, as I do, I've never in my career received more nasty comments, hateful comments, conspiratorial comments from people who believe either the government's controlling

the weather or clown seating did this. Or, you know, I feel like so often you and I are having conversations to debunk myths. It's becoming so much more frequent and so much more hostile. I'm wondering if distrust in the media, in the warning system, in science in general, is playing into people being less likely to take action

when we do issue a warning. It's distress and I think that's the point where we are in society. 100% and it does remind me that our first conversation was about the New Jersey drones and suddenly no one talked about it and then they revealed that it was nothing. And we just moved on to the next conspiracy. Yeah. All right. Any final thoughts before we let you go on this? What should people do if they're in a community now?

And it may not be in central Texas with the hills, but it might be some that's semi-pronged to flooding. Now, what do you recommend that you do to prep for some event like this if they're worried about it? Yeah, I think having a plan is important. I think having a plan also depends on people knowing what their risks are. Here in Maryland, for example, where I am, we've had EF3, EF4 plus tornadoes before, but people forget that because it's been more than five, 10 years.

I think it's important people know what can happen in your area, even if it hasn't happened recently, and know that whatever has happened in the past can't happen again. In this case, in Texas, we had the floods of 36, we had the floods of 87, we've had other floods in between then. And it can and does happen. And this will happen again somewhere in Texas Hill Country. So knowing what you're up against and knowing what hazards can happen is number one. Number two, having a plan. What will you do if a tornado warning is issued? What will you do if a flash flood warning is issued? When will you act? What is your threshold for acting? If you have elderly relatives, those with mobility challenges, what's going to be the threshold

to get their plans in place? We see this all the time with hurricanes. Are you going to leave for category one, category two, category three? You don't want to find yourself debating what decisions to make when it's go time. You want to have a plan in advance ahead of time. Because so often, when the adrenaline's popping and then when it's go time, you want to have a plan in advance ahead of time, because so often, when the

adrenaline is pumping, and then something big is going on, people aren't making the best most sound decisions, you need a protocol in place ahead of time. Just like if there's a fire drill, I know where to go right now, I know how to get out, people should be doing the same thing for severe weather for tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, whatever their hazard is. All right, wise words, Matthew Cappucci of the Capital Weather Gang. Thank you so much, man. Really appreciate it.

Always appreciate your insights. We'll have you back on hopefully for less horrific news. But thank you. All right, and thank you guys for watching. Subscribe to the feed where you get conversations like this. We'll talk soon. Going to the gym can be discouraging, especially if you're putting in the work,

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