Flooding is common in Texas Hill Country. This was different

0:00Imagine standing in water, shallow enough to just barely hit the soles of your feet. and then it rises so fast that in just about 10 minutes, it's up to your neck. That's how fast the Guadalupe River in Texas rose last week, according to state officials. 26 feet in less than an hour. NPR's Sergio Martinez Beltran has been out around Kerbal where some of the worst flooding hit, talking to folks who survived. Hi, my name is Sergio. I'm a reporter. And you can hear how sudden this all was in the stories they tell. It was terrifying, dude. It looked straight out of a horror movie. Ryan Dale was in his apartment near the Guadalupe River with his three kids overnight Thursday into Friday, watching the rain come down, feeling nervous.

0:44He went outside around 6 a.m., and the water was about 100 yards from his house. And then it came out 15 minutes later, and it was smacking the side of the apartment, getting up over the fence. Dale and his kids literally ran to safety. Another person Sergio talked to is Melvin Harris. He and his wife woke up to a neighbor pounding on the door of their RV. Get out, get out. It's flooding. And we thought, well, hell, I've seen it flood before. I never even thought of getting that damn high. But he says by the time they got out, the water was waist deep. Of course, it washed the motorhome away, washed both our cars away.

1:24And we got out with our dogs and the clothes on our back, and that's it. Harris and his wife are now homeless. They moved here two years ago after Harris retired. This is all they had, and now all of it is gone. We had friends that were camped up the road here, and they didn't make it.

1:45So this has been very devastating. I don't know that this place will ever recover from what happened. We'll just have to see. But I'm not ever going to live this close to water ever again. Not ever. Consider this. In the Texas Hill Country, climate change and geography conspired to create one of the worst floods in generations.

2:18From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

2:29It's Consider This from NPR. We're going to start in Kerr County, Texas, where search and rescue crews are still hoping they may find survivors. My co-host Juana Summers is there. Just to give you a sense of the scope of this, we're a few days out from this event, and the river is still so incredibly high. Just in front of me, there are these trees that are completely destroyed. They're bent over at a right angle. Tons of debris floating through the water just across the river from us on the other side, which we haven't been able to reach because the roads are washed out. There's this mangled truck on the edge of the river.

3:04And Juana is with us now. Can you give us a sense, Juana, of what things are like there in Kirk County since you and the team arrived in the middle of the night? What have you seen today? Yeah. Hi, Ari. I mean, there are immediately just signs of how much this community is reeling and grieving right when you get into Kerrville. as we were driving down one of the main highways, there were signs on local hotels saying Kerrville Strong. Another local business that we drove past had a sign up that said thank you to first responders, which I'll just note we've seen everywhere, even if the hotel we're staying at.

3:33And all of that is even before you really get to some of the areas that were hard hit by this devastating flooding. Were you able to get to those hardest-hit areas? Yeah. So this morning, we were able to get to the banks of the Guadalupe River in Centerpoint, Texas, which is not far from Kerrville. And as we started to get closer, there was this sort of steady stream of cars and trucks and emergency vehicles. They were all driving, parking along the bridge, people were getting out. And then when we got out of our car and sort of looked out over the river, I just have to say there were so many uprooted trees.

4:03There was a ton of debris lining the riverbanks. There were these deflated flotation devices. At one point, I even saw a neon green kayak that was tangled in this tree. There were these loud helicopters flying really low and overhead that were clearly continuing this really desperate search for survivors or any signs of life. Search and rescue crews and bands of volunteers fanned out around a stretch of the Guadalupe River in Centerpoint, Texas. That's where we meet Virginia Mann, who lives in nearby Harper, Texas. She used to live in this area and remembers going fishing at the river's edge. Sometimes you could even walk across it over here.

4:42And it was just a quiet place to get away from, You know, sit down by yourself and enjoy fishing. But it's nothing like this. When these rivers rage, when they converge together, it just causes a dramatic, well, you know, they say, how did it get 34 feet? Well, that's what happens. It all converges together and just, it's hard to believe. And that wall of water was just unbelievable. I mean, nothing could survive that. Man is among those looking for news, hoping that a friend survived the flooding. I thought I'd come over. I have a friend I haven't found yet here in Centerpoint. And so I came over here to see if he was OK because he's not answering his phone.

5:23So but they tell me he lives on the other side of the river. So I'm hoping that's where I'm headed right now. See if he's OK. But it's amazing how people have pulled together and are helping out everywhere. She said Kerrville and the surrounding area is close knit, full of families that stay for generations. It's the type of place where everyone knows each other. As we walk through the debris, the hum of chainsaws is persistent. Volunteers cut away at fallen trees and drag the severed tree limbs into big piles. Matt Trissel drove in from Austin, about 100 miles away. Just clearing debris, clearing trees, getting the piles open so people can see down in there.

6:04He knew a number of people who had children at Camp Mystic, the nearly 100-year-old girls camp that sits on the river. The camp said in a statement earlier Monday that it was grieving the loss of 27 campers and counselors. My heart just breaks for the parents that are missing kids. And hopefully, you know, we can maybe help find them and have some closure for them. What do you think people from outside of the area from Texas who maybe haven't been here before should know about this community and what's happening here right now? You know, Texans take care of Texans. You know, Americans take care of Americans.

6:37I think you're going to see that more and more as the days go on. But, you know, this is a place of the country that believes in God, and we still hope there's some kids that are still alive, and hopefully we can try to help find them. I asked Matt Trestle how long his group planned to keep at it, and he told me the answer is as long as they're needed.

6:58Juana will be bringing us more reporting from Texas this week. One question she's dug into, how much might climate change have played a role in Friday's storms? Heavy rain and flash flooding are familiar in the Texas Hill Country. But even for this part of the country, what happened on Friday was extreme. She talked through it with Rebecca Hersher from NPR's Climate Desk. So Becky, I'm here in Kerr County, which has a history of flooding. But even by local standards, this storm was extraordinary. Do we know if climate change played a role? We don't have a really clear answer yet. A preliminary analysis by a group of climate scientists in Europe estimates that the storm may have dropped slightly more rain than it would have without human-caused warming.

7:40And scientists will be able to do a more accurate analysis as more detailed data from Texas become available in the coming days and weeks. But it was an unusual storm, as you say, even for an area that gets a lot of flooding. A foot of rain in just a few hours is too much for the ground to soak it up. You know, it pools on the surface, it runs downhill. That area is hill country, so it's like a funnel. All that water quickly gathers speed, and that's how the Guadalupe River rose so incredibly quickly with extraordinarily deadly results. These floods are among the most deadly in modern history.

8:12So in that way, this disaster is exceptional. In terms of how much rain fell, how high the river got, it's not record-breaking, but it is on par with the worst flooding ever recorded in that area. And I think it's really notable that these types of extreme rain events, record-breaking or not, are getting more common. Help me understand that. Why would climate change cause more common extreme rain events? So a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. So that moisture, it falls as heavy rain. And, you know, obviously humans have released a lot of planet warming pollution into the atmosphere. So things have gotten a lot warmer.

8:50I talked to a climate scientist named Christina Dahl about this. She works for the nonprofit group Climate Central, which makes information about climate change available to the public. And here's what she said. Basically, the entire U.S. has seen an increase in the amount of rain falling in the heaviest events. And this latest flood in Texas is one example of what the consequences of that are. So the heaviest rainstorms are dropping more rain than they used to, which is a problem because our homes and roads and bridges and emergency plans are all based on the past. Even people who know an area really well can be surprised by the weather these days.

9:28Becky, do we know how much more rain is falling because of climate change? Yeah, we actually have a rough sense. So in Texas, the heaviest storms are dropping about 20 percent more rain today than they were in the late 1950s when the climate was significantly cooler. That's according to the National Climate Assessment. And as a side note, information like that from the National Climate Assessment, it's really hard to access right now because the Trump administration took down the website for that assessment last week. I actually have a copy downloaded on my computer. That's how I found it. Another thing we know from that assessment is that as the planet heats up, floods like this are causing more damage.

10:02So in the last 30 years or so, about one third of the damage caused by inland flooding would not have happened without human caused climate change. That's more than 80 billion dollars of extra damage. And that's just damage to property. You know, you can't put a price on hundreds of lives lost. What can be done to save lives? One thing that would be really helpful is updated information about how much rain to expect, you know, taking climate change into account. A lot of the rainfall records in the U.S. are decades old, so that's a problem as storms get rainier. The federal government is in the middle of updating those records, which could help local governments make better decisions.

10:37There are also flood warning systems, you know, sirens that can help alert people. They cost money. Most places don't have them. And forecasts could be better, but that requires investments and research to understand rainstorms more deeply.

10:52That was NPR's Rebecca Herscher speaking with my co-host Juana Summers. This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlom, Erica Ryan, Connor Donovan, and Mark Rivers with audio engineering by Ted Meebane. It was edited by Courtney Dorning, Rachel Waldholz, and Alfredo Carbajal. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

11:18It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.