Texas, flash flood
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Texas, floods
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Texas officials promise to address flood warnings
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Sisters Blair Harber, 13, and Brooke Harber, 11, were killed, along with their grandparents, when surging floodwaters ripped through the community. Their parents were staying in a different home at Casa Bonita and survived, according to the family's GoFundMe.
More than 111 people have died across six counties after flash flooding from heavy rain began affecting the state last week.
Flash floods surged through in the middle of the night, but many local officials appeared unaware of the unfolding catastrophe, initially leaving people near the river on their own.
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After catastrophic floods hit Texas' Hill Country, many are asking about preparations for the next big flood. Jason Allen spoke to Jay Banner, climatologist at University of Texas at Austin, on the banks of the Guadalupe River.
Q: Is it true that if President Donald Trump hadn’t defunded the National Weather Service, the death toll in the Texas flooding would have been far lower or nonexistent? A: The Trump administration did not defund the NWS but did reduce the staff by 600 people.
Viral posts promoted false claims that cloud seeding, a form of weather modification, played a role in the devastation. Meteorologists explain it doesn't work that way.
Renee Smajstrla, a 8-year-old straight-A student from Ingram, Texas, who had played a role in her school’s production of “The Wizard of Oz,” was one of the victims who died in the flash floods at Camp Mystic, her family said.
There are reports some cloud seeding occurred a few days before the Texas flash flood. But it’s important to understand that cloud seeding has a relatively short-term effect in that a certain cloud is seeded and perhaps turns into one individual rain cloud or even a thunderstorm. The increased rainfall would not last for days.
Together, they dropped more than four months’ worth of rain—at least 1.8 trillion gallons, roughly enough to cover the entire state of Texas in four inches of water—in just four hours. Much of this rain fell over a picturesque stretch of the Texas Hill Country dotted by summer camps,