As the Texas Floodwaters Rose, One Indispensable Voice Was Silent

Opinion|As the Texas Floodwaters Rose, One Indispensable Voice Was Silent

When a reporter demanded to know why the summer camps along the Guadalupe River weren’t evacuated before its waters reached their deadly peak on July 4, Rob Kelly, the highest-ranking local official, had a simple answer: “No one knew this kind of flood was coming.”

Why not? Kerr County, Texas, had lots of history to go on — as Judge Kelly went on to explain: “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.” The National Weather Service had even brought in extra staff that night. Most important, the service had issued three increasingly dire warnings early that morning — at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m. and 6:06 a.m.

What Kelly didn’t mention, but which has since become well known, is that the Weather Service employee whose job it was to make sure those warnings got traction — Paul Yura, the long-serving meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination” — had recently taken an unplanned early retirement amid cuts pushed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was not replaced.

To a Washington bean counter, his loss might have looked like one tiny but welcome subtraction in a giant spreadsheet, but not in a region so prone to these perilous events that it’s known as Flash Flood Alley. Hundreds of kids at summer camps slept in cabins along the river. The plan was for folks at the upstream camps to send word to the downstream camps if floodwaters got scary. But if even the highest official in the county wasn’t on high alert, how were the camp counselors supposed to understand the danger — or, in an area without reliable cellphone coverage, to act on it?

Few would dispute that the federal bureaucracy was, and still is, in need of reform. But instead of a targeted, smart and strategic intervention, DOGE brought a chain saw to vital government services, pushing large, indiscriminate cuts with little consideration for the expertise that longtime employees offered or the importance of the functions they performed. It’s not hard to understand why many experienced civil servants like Yura, especially those with private sector options, would leave under these conditions. In fact it’s remarkable any of them stayed. And of course what happened at the National Weather Service happened across a wide array of federal agencies.

Not all of the damage will be this obvious, at least not at first. Much of it will be a matter of death by a thousand cuts — systems and structures weakening and not being repaired, important but less visible jobs going undone, services that we all took for granted slowing down and even sputtering to a halt.