Floods hit Texas, then came the cloud talk

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0:54In the early hours of the 4th of July, torrential rain hit the hill country region in the US state of Texas. Central Texas is swamped by a summer's worth of rain in a matter of hours. The Guadalupe River, which runs through the region, rose by 26 feet. That's about the height of a two-story house. It took everything in its path, even entire buildings. So many people have been swept up into an extraordinary catastrophe. More than 130 people were killed. Some were children, little girls at a summer camp in Kerr County. The last message they got was, we're being washed away, and the phone went dead.

1:40Texas is no stranger to flash floods, but few have been as deadly as those on the 4th of July. Soon people started asking how it all came to be, and on social media a theory was quickly spreading. It didn't rain for months in Texas. Then they seeded clouds, and two days later the state was underwater. The claim? That the extreme rainfall wasn't natural, and that a weather modification company in California was behind it. They were cloud seeding and then they get flooding and all the things that happened around that. What started as a rumor became a full-blown social media frenzy. Politicians and lots of people alike were calling for my arrest or worse for having cloud seeded in the region and suggesting that that was to blame for the floods.

2:33Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Marco Silva. For BBC Trending, I've been investigating how deadly floods in Texas became the target of viral conspiracy theories and how one man found himself blamed and threatened for a tragedy he had nothing to do with.

2:55That man is 25-year-old Augustus Dorico. I'm the CEO and founder of Rainmaker. A tech startup that specializes in cloud seeding. That's a weather modification technique that involves manipulating existing clouds to help them produce more rain or snow. This is most commonly done by dropping small particles onto them from an aircraft. Whether you're in an arid region whose farms are collapsing because of water scarcity, or if you want more water and more energy for your country, whether you're concerned about ensuring that the rivers and the bogs near you have the water that they historically have, Rainmaker, by making it rain and snow more, makes water abundant and ensures that all of those outcomes come to pass.

3:39Cloud seeding has been around for decades and more than 30 countries, including the US, China and the UAE, have done it in recent years. In addition to using airplanes to seed clouds, Rainmaker is also trying to use drones and radar technology to make the process more efficient, more precise, with some limitations. You cannot make it rain just over one specific farm. You certainly can't make it rain over the house of your enemies if you had some sort of spiteful vendetta. But the precipitation that comes from cloud seeding occurs over tens to hundreds of square kilometers. Last year, a US government report on cloud seeding said it's hard to measure how well it works because research on its effectiveness is limited.

4:25But Augustus is convinced this technology could benefit entire towns or regions. So government is the natural customer for us for the foreseeable future because the water is a public good to everybody within their region. Augustus' company hasn't been going for long, but documents show it's carried out clouds seeding in several US states, including California, Oregon and Texas, which brings us to the events of the 4th of July. We are following breaking news for you at this moment. There's been massive flooding in Kerr County, Texas. I was in El Segundo, California. Where Rainmaker's offices are.

5:08And it wasn't until about midday on the 4th that I started to hear about the flooding. By the morning of the 5th, that's when I realized that cloud seeding was going to be wrongfully or mistakenly implicated in all of the floods that happened. By then, social media posts and videos claiming the flash floods might have been a direct result of cloud seeding were starting to rake in views. In a certain sense, I had suspected this moment would come inevitably. And that's because this wasn't the first time extreme weather was blamed on cloud seething. The same thing happened last year when Hurricane Selene and Milton battered parts of the US.

5:49But this was maybe a million times greater in magnitude than those previous situations. This time, social media users turned their fury on Augustus and his company. If you go to X, you can say Rainmaker Technology Corporation. Go in there and ask them. Were you cloud seeding down there in Texas? Go ask them. I've seen social media posts calling for Augustus to be arrested, punished, or more disturbingly, executed. We had to hire security not just because of threats on the internet, but because of very practical material in-person threats out in the world as well. And we still have security for that reason.

6:31I try to pray as often as I can and probably did a little bit more so in the quiet moments between meetings over the course of that. Of all the cloud-sitting companies out there, why did people turn on Rainmaker specifically? To answer that, here's one of the tweets posted four days after the floods. It wasn't by any means one of the most viral, but it still got almost half a million views. and it gives you a sense of what was being alleged online. Well, this is weird. A company called Rainmaker conducted a cloud-seeding mission on July 2nd over Texas Hill Country. Two days later, the worst flood in their history occurred.

7:15This tweet, voiced by one of my colleagues, was posted by content creator Jordan Crowder. I grew up in Texas. I used to go down there in our summers, so I spent a lot of time on that same river, and that's home to me. I got in touch with Jordan because I wanted to understand why he'd posted that tweet stating rainmakers seeded clouds in Texas before the floods. I was not setting out to blame anybody. But then whenever I found out about the cloud seeding operation that happened in the exact same county two days before, it doesn't take a rocket scientist just to at least say, hey, we should look into this.

7:51We'll hear more from Jordan in a moment. But first, let's just spell out the facts. There's this non-profit called the South Texas Weather Modification Association. It's funded by local water management districts to boost rainfall. Public records show this association hired Rainmaker to seed clouds just south of Kerr County, which is the area that was most affected by the 4th of July floods. And as it happens, two days prior to that, a seeding operation had indeed taken place. On July 2nd, within one of our program areas, about 100 miles south of the worst flooding, we conducted an operation at 1 p.m.

8:32Central Time. This is consistent with what public records tell us. That was a 20-minute flight wherein we seeded two clouds with 70 grams of silver iodide. That's the chemical substance most commonly used in cloud seeding. And 70 grams? That's roughly the weight of a large chicken egg. Those clouds then precipitated and dissipated. meaning by the 4th of July, these clouds had long gone. But let's say they had stuck around. Even then, Augustus says cloud seeding could not have produced that much rain. In the system that did flood Texas, we saw hundreds of billions of gallons of precipitation over the course of hours and in excess of a trillion over the course of the full event.

9:11The most effective cloud seeding operations that have ever been conducted have produced tens to about 100 million gallons of precipitation. So we're off by orders of magnitude there as well. And there's more. To protect public safety, Texas regulations do not allow seeding of severe storms, or storms that could produce excessive rainfall. Rainmaker says that after looking at the weather forecasts, it suspended operations in Texas more than 24 hours before the first flood warning was issued. Hello, and welcome to the Weather West channel. That is Daniel Swain. He's a climate scientist with the University of California.

9:51In his spare time, he runs a YouTube channel where he takes questions live about all things weather and climate change. I really enjoy doing these sessions, partly because it allows me to unearth, in some ways, my inner weather geek, which I have long been. Daniel studies extreme weather events like the flash floods in Texas. Last year, he also contributed to a US government report assessing how effective cloud seeding is. He's far from convinced. It's not imaginary technology. It exists, but it is so limited in its demonstrated scope of efficacy that there is real question about how useful it is in practice.

10:31And so my concern with it actually has more to do with whether it's a worthwhile expenditure of limited resources and that it might not work very well, rather than that it works too well. So he felt like the right person for me to ask, was there any chance that storms as intense as those that hit the hill country region could have been in any way engineered? We don't have physically the ability to exert direct control on the path or intensity of storms in any form, anywhere in the world, in any case. The technology not only does not exist, but it's unclear even theoretically what would be required.

11:11People who these days struggle to trust the government, politicians, institutions, scientists say we've been lied to before about technologies and science that we were told didn't exist, but actually was there. What would you say to the people who say we've been lied before by scientists such as yourself? The main reason is not necessarily because I trust my own government with 100 % certainty. It's rather that it is unclear to me that it would be possible, even in theory, to develop that kind of technology. So this is something that governments do not have the ability to do, just thinking through the basic, fundamental, physical realities that exist.

12:03If not cloud seeding, what then caused the 4th of July floods? Many factors contribute to flooding, but we know the geography of this hilly part of Texas makes it prone to flash floods. We also know that there was significant moisture in the air, linked in part to a tropical storm that had swept through Mexico days before. And scientists say climate change would have made the rainfall more intense. That's because as the planet gets hotter, the atmosphere's ability to absorb and release more water increases. Much as a progressively larger kitchen sponge would do if you were trying to soak up and then wring out, yielding progressively more water.

12:45But amid all the social media chatter were scientists like Daniel Heard. That's coming up next. This is a documentary from the BBC World Service.

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14:13I'm Marco Silva and this is the documentary with BBC Trending. On social media, many scientists, including Daniel, did try to set the record straight. But in terms of clicks and views, they were no match for the many posts suggesting that Augustus De Rico and his company Rainmaker had questions to answer. I think when we try to play God, I think that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That's Jordan again, whose tweet you heard earlier. There was something about that Rainmaker guy and his attitude is he just immediately came out and said there is no possible way that we had anything to do with this, none whatsoever, case closed.

14:49People want answers. And if the truth comes out that they had nothing to do with it at all, period, awesome. But you're only going to get that truth if you actually ask the questions. Jordan insists that his tweet did not actually blame Rainmaker for the Texas floods and that he was only asking people to consider the possibility cloud seeding might have played a role. But if you look at some of the replies to his tweet, that nuance seems lost on some.

15:19Augustus is a mind-controlled asset. Murderers. Sue to oblivion.

15:28Does it worry you that you may unwillingly have contributed to that internet mob? I feel bad if anybody made threats towards the company or anything like that. But at the end of the day, we're emotional beings and that was an emotionally charged situation. And what I was saying, even a couple of weeks later now, I stand by every word. I mean, I wouldn't even have worded it any different if I made that post today.

15:52Jordan was far from the only person with suspicions. In the two weeks that followed the Texas floods, Augustus's company, Rainmaker, was mentioned more than 164 ,000 times on X. Some of those posts got millions of views. Many of these users wanted to piece together what really happened. And as far as they were concerned, everything was a potential clue. The interviews Augustus gave, even a photo he once took with former US President Bill Clinton, who's for a long time been the subject of many conspiracy theories. It is just wild how all these people that tend to be close to some sort of controversy end up friends with these people, isn't it?

16:33So I am Claire Patriot and I just really love to speak about politics. That is my whole existence on the internet. Claire is a content creator with over 150 ,000 followers on TikTok. During a video call, I can see that on the wall behind her, there's a framed copy of a Time magazine cover featuring US President Donald Trump. She first caught my attention because of the videos she posted online about the floods, like this one. We've gotten a lot of rain in this country in the last several years. We've gotten a lot of flooding. We've gotten a lot of horrible events. And you're just continuing to spray chemicals into the clouds.

17:13In those videos, she too raised the possibility rainmakers' clouds seeding in Texas might have contributed to the floods. And she made a broader point. Personally, I think that we should probably not spray chemicals into the sky. I think that we should just stop that in general. I'm glad I live in a state that doesn't allow that. Clare is based in Florida, where as of July this year, it is effectively forbidden to spray chemicals into the atmosphere to influence weather or climate. This means no cloud seeding, but also no solar geoengineering. Now, if you don't know what that is, I'm talking about this totally separate idea of spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space and in theory, cool down the Earth.

17:56Beyond a small number of highly localised experiments, solar geoengineering is not taking place at scale anywhere in the world, and there's limited scientific research about it. So I asked Claire why she opposed, in her words, spraying chemicals into the sky. We don't know what it's doing to our soil and our environment. And I think that in order to protect those sort of things, we need to make sure that we have enough research and data from both sides. Because here in our country, we have had a lot of instances where they have said things have been safe and then, you know, turn around. Well, maybe it's not.

18:34And that makes me a little bit suspicious. The World Meteorological Organization says studies haven't found any serious risks to people or the environment from silver iodide or other substances used in cloud seeding. But it also says if the quantities used were to increase, or if new substances were deployed, then further testing and research would be required.

19:02In the days after the floods, many of the social media posts that claim this was a man-made tragedy often mention both cloud seeding and geoengineering. In the scientific community, these things are so distinct that you wouldn't even discuss them in the same meeting. Holly Jean Buck is an associate professor of environment and sustainability at University of Buffalo, New York. But to the public, it makes perfect sense that they would be linked because they all involve airplanes and chemicals in the atmosphere. Holly has spent some time researching how conspiratorial thinking has entered discussions about the environment.

19:40So I asked her why, in the wake of extreme weather events like the Texas floods, some people might blame them on shadowy forces spraying chemicals in the sky. It fits within their worldview to some extent that there would be manipulation because they distrust the government, they distrust companies, Silicon Valley, the tech industry, different people that they perceive to be manipulating the world. A point that, quite frankly, made me think of my conversations with Jordan and Claire. Why would you think there's not things happening at scale that we're just not told about? I just think that's completely naive.

20:16I feel like there are genuine scientists out there, but it's hard to weed out who is genuine and who is being paid. I asked Claire, is there anything that scientists could have offered you in the way of an explanation to the 4th of July floods that might have put your concerns about weather manipulation and geoengineering to rest? What, if anything, would have made you trust the scientists over the social media chatter? I don't know what would have made me trust it, honestly. I do wish that we could trust that community completely, and I'm hoping going forward the trust will be rebuilt. The thing I want people to understand is that the seeds of their concerns are real issues.

20:57Holly Jean Buck again. There's a lot of reasons why people are sceptical of these forces. in the world. And trying to work with that and address it and build trust, rebuild our institutions, I think is a much more proactive way to find a deep solution rather than making fun of people or dismissing them. Meanwhile, in El Segundo, California, Augustus is still working on new ways to bring rain to the most arid parts of the US, or so he hopes. Do you anticipate that in the next five years you might have to fight more social media battles like the one you just went through? I suspect that the next time that this comes up, which probably it will, there will be more people that come to our defense from the scientific community, social media itself, the political community.

21:50But as long as people have concerns, no matter whether they're grounded or guided by misinformation, I'm happy to meet them where they are and engage on them.

22:01You've been listening to the documentary with BBC Trending. I'm Marco Silva. I produced and presented this episode. Gareth Jones did the sound mixing. Flora Carmichael was our editor. If you'd like to get in touch about this story, come and find me on my socials at bbcmarcosilva or email me marco.silva at bbc.co.uk. Thanks for listening and goodbye.