George Friedman
A little over a week ago, the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country went berserk, as rivers sometimes do in this area, killing some 130 people. Well over a hundred are still missing. Many of the deceased were children because the Guadalupe, when sane, is a beautiful river surrounded by woods,
punctuated by summer camps along its banks. This tragedy was met with a profound and intense sorrow, followed by a wave of self-righteous accusations and searches for villains, mostly from outside the Hill Country.
Local leaders were said by some to have failed in their duty to know that the Guadalupe would flood and failed to warn the victims to flee from the natural intermittent madness of nature. Very quickly the blame came in, from a lack of sirens to global warming to Donald Trump and cuts in the federal government that left the National Weather Service unable to anticipate the intensity of the rain and therefore that the Guadalupe would run amok.
All this is very personal to me and my wife. We live in the Hill Country and have spent time on the Guadalupe River. We chose to settle in the Hill Country about 20 years ago after a lifetime of global wandering.
We live in Hays County, which experienced some major flooding 10 years ago that claimed many lives, though it was mercifully spared from the catastrophe of July 4. The epicenter of the floods was in Kerr County, which is only about 80 miles (130 km) from my house, but many other counties experienced loss of life.
Texas is a very large state. The smallest state in the union is Rhode Island, with an area of 1,214 square miles. Kerr County is 1,107 square miles, and by no means is it the largest in Texas. The population of Rhode Island is just over 1 million people, while the population of Kerr County is about 54,000.
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