Also, I strongly disagree with the people claiming "Texas residents deserve this because they're in the south." Or "these girls were daughters of wealthy white families, they deserved it." I mourned for the lives lost in Katrina just as much as I am mourning for the lives lost at Camp Mystic this week. No one deserves to be a victim of a natural disaster regardless of what state they're from, period. (Except for maybe the corrupt men in power right now causing this mess)
Honestly the biggest issue is how much people underestimate flooding, so they don’t heed the warnings or prepare for it. Despite being the deadliest type of natural disaster, it’s not really that flashy compared to others. You never see flooding in movies or tv shows, only tsunamis which is different. Nobody really pays any mind to flooding, but it’s by far the most dangerous disaster since you can’t get out of the path of it, know for certain that it’s going to happen, and there’s no shelter
Even with tornado warnings, a lot of people are like “eh, it’s probably just a false alarm again” instead of taking shelter every time. I think the same thing goes for flash flooding. Anyone who lives in the same county as even one river or creek gets a lot of flash flood warnings, so they don’t really think that the next one they get will be any different no matter how well the NWS issues them in advance
The only times people even give any attention to flooding are when something like what just happened in Texas occurs. In a week from now, people won’t be focusing on the flooding aspect at all. They’ll only use it for political pull and go back to being ignorant about weather, and the cycle will inevitably repeat itself if a hurricane hits the US again in a few months
That’s usually the case for *watches* and seems to be the case in this area especially. At least for my area, tornado *warnings* means someone saw one. The issue here was likely a combination of “boy who cried wolf” (with the watches), no siren, a very rare event, the warning being issued in the middle of the night, and (possibly) no cell service
That’s not true at all about watches or warnings. There’s very specific requirements for the issuance of watches vs the issuance of warnings, and this doesn’t differ by area. A tornado warning can be issued if there’s high enough confidence based on radar data without anyone having to see one. Nobody really pays attention to it, but most warning notifications on your phone actually tell you this information. It’ll say “radar indicated”, “radar confirmed”, etc.
The majority of warnings are issued without someone seeing anything as a precautionary measure, which is why the “boy who cried wolf” effect has gotten so bad. However, it’s not really possible to change that since if you wait until you see something to issue a warning, often times a warning will never be issued at all when it matters most (ie. Rain wrapped tornadoes, nighttime tornadoes, etc)
It didn’t get as much publicity, but when a tornado hit London, Kentucky and nearby areas at night and caused a lot of casualties and damage, people were saying the same things. “Lmao good luck getting that fema money. You voted for this so now you deserve to suffer” “serves them right” etc etc
It’s not isolated to that instance either. Literally EVERY time a disaster has hit anywhere south of the Great Lakes, people have made the same comments (unless it happened in California because they don’t vote red). I’m kinda a weather nerd, so I keep up with events and it’s gotten really annoying because every time in the past 5 years when I’ve looked at the comments for more information on the event from local sources, it’s been flooded with death wishes and celebrating the disaster instead
And don’t I know it girl, I had family trapped in that shit. It’s also massively misinformed bc these bitches have never heard of voter suppression or gerrymandering apparently. Half of Texas voted for Harris. NC has had all Democratic governors except one since like the 80s. GA would have been a swing state ages ago if they let people vote. Sick of people going by stereotypes about places they’ve never been instead of looking at the facts on the ground.
People are just too chronically online. They refuse to go talk to anyone outside and find out that the majority of the country actually agrees on almost every issue, or at least agree enough to be able to make compromises. The 1% from each side (maybe even less than 1%) get all the publicity and make it seem like everyone is divided. If people would literally go outside and talk to one random person every day, they’d see that’s not the case. People just need to get off their phones lmao
I agree the cuts were bad, but they didn’t affect this specific disaster at all. The offices were *overstaffed* leading up to the event because they had been tracking the remnants of a tropical storm that traveled north and east after it dissipated over Mexico, and they developed enough confidence in catastrophic rainfall that they were able to issue the warnings with as much lead time as they reasonably could. Lack of funding didn’t affect this event. It’s important to focus on things that did
I mean the internet doesn’t help but real talk this isn’t new. As a very leftie southerner who’s lived outside they South most of my adult life I’ve been hearing this kind of misinformed and hostile shit for ages, it’s just more ghoulish and open now because people have an excuse. My theory is that the South is basically an excuse for the rest of the nation not to acknowledge our collective blame.
If you’d like an example where lack of funding genuinely affected a disaster, look into the London, KY tornado from earlier this year. That office was staffed with at most 2 people (more likely one) at the time, so the process for issuing high end warnings wasn’t able to occur quickly even though a regular warning was issued in advance. However, it likely still wouldn’t have made much of a difference because there’s not enough public awareness about differences in warning levels
Which is another thing that I think should be a bipartisan effort. The public is severely uninformed about warning levels and weather events as a whole, and now we’re letting conspiracies and hearsay take the headlines instead of anything that’s actually informative. A government push to issue more weather related PSAs should be something both parties can agree on
That’s very true. I’m also from the south, and it’s really weird how some people who aren’t act like we’re still the same region as the one that started and lost the civil war. Like no, it’s not all just flagrant racists who hate immigrants and that’s the only thing they care about voting for. The south is just as much of a melting pot as the rest of the country, if not more so in some ways because of how different the culture is down here
No ur right I think a lot of them assume that it’s ok for them to be like that there bc if they stereotypes they’ve absorbed. My equivalent was back when my accent was thicker and I’d just moved up north people assumed I was a safe space to say the most vile shit imaginable about nonwhite ppl 💀
Yeah plus 90% of people don’t read past headlines (and out of the 10 that do, only 1 of those 10 moves on past the intro hook. yes our attention spans are ruined, yes our brains are rotted and media literacy is in hell rn skull), so unless it mentions the specificity of the funding being cut, most people will unfortunately assume it’s the NWS without reading further
All I’m saying is i was asked many times if I was “ok” or safe with my Muslim boyfriend many times up to and including him getting pulled over by cops who basically asked if I’d been kidnapped when he was driving me home and none of that happened in the South. I’m not saying we don’t have problems but people really need to check their glass houses
I think their issue is that they see races and cultural differences as solid lines instead of dashed ones. The reason I say dashed is because I think it’s still important for everyone to have their own identity, but the dashed lines allow people to cross between and experience new ones. A lot of those same people like to pretend like one race isn’t allowed to experience the culture of another when that’s just not true
Idk why the idea of someone experiencing someone else’s culture has been demonized. Like isn’t that the whole point of having diversity? People will be like “actually you can’t go to that event, it’s meant for x race only” or “omg you’re acting too white rn” like god forbid someone have fun in life and do what they want without caring about race