Boddhisatva @ Boddhisatva @lemmy.world

Posts

13

Comments

2,085

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yeah, where are all the preachers claiming that this is God's punishment for Texas' communal sins?

The US Department of Homeland Security responded to criticism of warning systems on Sunday on social media by saying mainstream media were “lying” and that the National Weather Service issued timely warnings.

Fuck Trump and everyone who still supports him.

Predicting “how much rain is going to fall out of a thunderstorm, that’s the hardest thing that a meteorologist can do,” Vagasky says. A number of unpredictable factors—including some element of chance—go into determining the amount of rainfall in a specific area, he says.

“The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event,” says Vagasky. “But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that.”

Flash floods in this part of Texas are nothing new. Eight inches of rainfall in the state “could be on a day that ends in Y,” says Matt Lanza, also a certified digital meteorologist based in Houston. It’s a challenge, he says, to balance forecasts that often show extreme amounts of rainfall with how to adequately prepare the public for these rare but serious storms.

“It’s so hard to warn on this—to get public officials who don’t know meteorology and aren’t looking at this every day to understand just how quickly this stuff can change,” Lanza says. “Really the biggest takeaway is that whenever there’s a risk for heavy rain in Texas, you have to be on guard.”

And meteorologists say that the NWS did send out adequate warnings as it got updated information. By Thursday afternoon, it had issued a flood watch for the area, and a flash flood warning was in effect by 1am Friday. The agency had issued a flash flood emergency alert by 4:30am.

The National Weather Service did stellar work with the tools that Trump's DOGE cuts have left them with. The tragically inept emergency managers in Texas that think posts on Facebook and Twitter are good enough for emergency alerts should be strung up by their feet and at the next county fair and used for target practice with rotten fruit. As should every politician who voted against a siren type alert system when it came up for a vote last year.

My money is on both.

Trump signed of on disaster relief for Texas yesterday morning.

President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he “signed a Major Disaster Declaration” for relief for Kerr County in Texas, as the region deals with heavy rains and extreme flooding that have killed dozens.

Of course he's going to help a red state. It will be another story when it's a blue state. Just like the last time.

Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, told E&E News on Wednesday that Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018 because of the state’s Democratic leanings.

But Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.

Nope. He's not a first responder, is he? If not, then it's pure PR. He could just as easily go out there after the recovery efforts are done when he wouldn't be in the way. Going out with the first responders means that he's taking up space and resources that could otherwise be used to help people in need.

Also...

“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” said Virdell, a freshman GOP lawmaker from Brady.

Probably. First hand view of the death and damage and he might, change his mind. Fuck him.

I suspect because they didn't have all his video files. Couldn't kill him if those files could get leaked after his death.

Who’s keeping the current list?

Mossad?

Oh, he never will. For his loved ones to be in danger he would need to be capable of feeling love in the first place.

“The only crime I committed is to love this country and to work hard and to provide for my kids,” she said.

Um... those aren't crimes, are they? I mean, things are changing fast under Trump, but these aren't really crimes yet, are they?

True enough, I guess.

He's lucky. He could have been detained for months and then dumped in gulag, a war zone or a country where you are likely to be killed or sold into slavery.

Do not come to the USA if you have any choice in the matter. It is not a safe place to come unless you are lily-white, wealthy, and speak English.

If I could control the weather, this woman would never not be getting targeted by lightning. She'd have to run serpentine whenever she was outside to dodge all the lightning bolts aimed at her.

"What we're witnessing isn't about security or solving problems," they said in a joint statement, "It's about inhumane political theater that endangers real people."

Yep. It's a theater of cruelty that would have delighted the Marquis de Sade.

Because wealth creates a kind of addiction cycle in people's brains that drives them to accumulate still more wealth. They are not going to just move to another country or their island fortress because they need to keep making more and more money.

And it's been like this since his first time in office. These people just do not learn.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton told Mazzei. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

That office’s warning coordination meteorologist left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure.

Some of the openings may predate the current Trump administration. But at both offices, the vacancy rate is roughly double what it was when Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January, according to Mr. Fahy.

Expect a lot more of this all over the country. NOAA and NWS have been gutted by this administration. Studies have been cancelled, staffing is still being cut, satellite data historically gathered by the DoD and provided to NOAA has been cut off making it harder to forecast hurricanes, this admin has even dramatically cut weather balloon launches making it harder to forecast the weather.

The warnings that went out in advance of this particular disaster, the flood warning the day before and the flood emergency alert that night, were possible because of the few weather balloon launches, including a single balloon launched in Texas that showed how saturated the atmosphere was.

Anyone attacking the weather services in the aftermath of this disaster needs to have their ass kicked. This disaster could have been at least partially averted if Trump hadn't gutted NOAA and the National Weather Service. It would have also been a lot better if the idiots in Texas had a method to alert people of flash floods besides posting alerts on Facebook and Twitter hours after the fact. This was not a failing on the part of the weather service. This was a political failing due to federal budget cuts, staff firings, and incompetent emergency management practices in the affected counties.

And mark my words, Trump and the GOP's climate change denialism, and their determination to destroy or hide all evidence of climate change is going to cost a lot of lives in the coming years.

Yep. Readers might think you're joking, but that's pretty much right there in the article.

In an interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending.

“Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Mr. Kelly said. Asked if people might reconsider in light of the catastrophe, he said, “I don’t know.”

The Venn diagram of the two groups is likely to be a circle.

It is honestly all of the immigration judges. Those judges work directly for the Executive branch and have been instructed by the Trump admin to quickly dismiss every case when requested.

In the memo, the Justice Department instructs immigration judges, who report to the executive branch and are not part of the independent judiciary, to allow Department of Homeland Security lawyers to make motions to dismiss orally and then move quickly to grant those dismissals, rather than allow immigrants the 10-day response time that had been typical.

Article updated to 24 known dead. Not sure if any of them are the girls missing from the camp. I cannot imagine how those parents must feel right now and they are being told things like this:

He added that if parents haven't been personally contacted by the camp, they can assume their daughters have been accounted for.

So, yeah, no news is good news. If we haven't called you, your child is probably not dead. They must feel so reassured.

According to the National Weather Service website, the flash flood watch, which included Kerr County, was issued at 1:18 p.m. Thursday. Nearly 12 hours later, a "life threatening" flash flood warning was issued at 1:14 a.m., according to the website.

When asked about the suddenness of the flash flooding overnight, Kelly said “we do not have a warning system” and that “we didn’t know this flood was coming,” even as local reporters pointed to the warnings and pushed him for answers about why more precautions weren’t taken.

“Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming,” he said. “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.”

They didn't know there was a flood was coming even after the NWS issued a flood warning? Worse still, he claims it's the most dangerous river valley in the nation, but they don't have any way to warn people when a flash flood is coming? Wait, it's Texas, yeah that tracks.