Central Texas must stop building for yesterday’s climate

By Allison Morrison

GUEST COLUMNIST

As I write this, search and rescue teams are still looking for missing summer campers who were swept away in the catastrophic flooding that devastated Central Texas over the weekend, killing at least 84 people, including more than 28 children. For the families and communities impacted, this is an unthinkable horror.

But for emergency planners and infrastructure officials, this should have been entirely thinkable — and in an ideal world, preventable. This latest tragedy follows a grim pattern in recent years: Winter Storm Uri in 2021 killed more than 240 people. Record-breaking heat in 2023 killed more than 300 Texans. A violent hailstorm in Austin this past May left one dead and tens of thousands without power.

Each disaster prompts the same cycle of shock, sympathy and empty promises from policymakers. But the hard truth? Central Texas continues building infrastructure for the climate of the past, not the realities of today, or the future we know is coming.

Flash Flood Alley

Texas Hill Country sits in what is known as “Flash Flood Alley” — where Texas leads the nation in flood deaths by a wide margin, with 1,069 people dying in flooding from 1959 to 2019. The geography that makes Central Texas beautiful also makes it deadly. Steep limestone hills shed rainfall quickly into suddenly overflowing rivers. Yet we continue permitting development in flood-prone areas and operating camps for our children along rivers with well-documented histories of deadly surges.

“In a stunning admission, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said over the weekend, “We do not have a warning system” for floods. He went on, “Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming,” a bold statement given the region’s wellknown propensity for intense rainfall and flood-prone topography (and recent DOGE cuts that included the National Weather Service’s warning-coordination meteorologist for Central Texas).

Grid built for another century

The 2021 Winter Storm Uri exposed similar planning failures. While the damages and severity may have been historic, Uri can hardly be called the first winter storm that Texans had weathered. During the 2011 Groundhog Day blizzard, Texas faced similar outages, after which federal regulators warned that more winterization was necessary. But improvements were voluntary, and mandatory regulation was never established.

Since 2021, Texas has made incremental progress. The state has required improvements to aspects of the grid, including natural gas power plants, to make them less susceptible to frigid temperatures. ERCOT has greatly expanded battery storage capacity throughout the state to help meet high demand during extreme temperatures. And Texas recently issued Resilience Infrastructure Bonds and public-private initiatives to help bridge a $44 billion infrastructure funding gap. But experts warn we’re not out of the woods, and the current grid was built to largely withstand a climate that no longer exists.

The future we know is coming

Central Texas can lead the way in showing how growing communities adapt to climate change, but only if we stop treating predictable disasters as unforeseeable acts of God, and start treating infrastructure equity and resilience as the urgent moral and economic imperative it has always been.

As the search for the missing continues on, we need more than just thoughts and prayers. We need comprehensive flood management with early warning systems, updated floodplain maps and development restrictions in high-risk areas. We need continued grid winterization, expanded battery storage and strong regional coordination. Most critically, we need mandatory and statewide climate resilience standards ensuring all housing — regardless of price — can withstand extreme weather.

The question isn’t whether we’ll face more of these events. It’s whether we’ll finally start building for the climate of the future, not the one we remember. Allison Morrison is a former aide to U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, a current public policy strategist at Meta, and avid outdoorswoman and endurance athlete. She has experienced multiple infrastructure failures in Austin since moving here in 2019 and supports climate-resilient community planning.