The Cost of Inaction: What the Texas Floods Reveal About Our Risk
The deadly flooding along the Guadalupe River over the July 4th weekend that killed at least 130 people with 160 still missing is a heartbreaking tragedy, and our hearts are with the families and communities who are grieving the unimaginable loss. This moment demands not just an outpouring of compassion and support, but also a commitment to systemic change. This wasn’t a freak event — it was another devastating reminder of what happens when floodplain development continues unchecked, flood mitigation is underfunded, and political decisions ignore science and expertise.
What’s more, the catastrophic floods that tore through Texas Hill Country, while the most deadly, were just one of at least four so-called 1-in-1,000-year rainfall events across the United States in less than a week. After the Guadalupe River rose from a height of 7.69 to 37.52 feet in fewer than four hours, just days later North Carolina, New Mexico and Illinois were all hit with major rain events and extreme flooding.
We know what works. We’ve known for decades. But inaction — or worse, deliberate rollback of protections — has once again left communities vulnerable. As Dr. Gilbert White wrote in 1942: “Floods are acts of God, but flood losses are largely acts of man.”
Unfortunately, we have yet to fully learn that lesson.
To help prevent tragedies like the one we saw in Texas, ASFPM offers six recommendations to strengthen our nation’s approach to flood risk management:
1. Adopt and enforce ASCE 24-24 – the nation’s new flood resilience standard.
Released this past January, ASCE 24-24 is a new national consensus building standard for flood protection and resilience. It is a significant update of the National Flood Insurance Program minimum requirements and reflects more than 45 years of floodplain management experience. While it has not yet been required under the NFIP, it is a standard that can nonetheless be adopted into communities’ flood ordinances. Flood protection elevation levels under ASCE 24-24 for residential, commercial, and industrial structures start at the 500-year level as the 100-year elevation is simply not adequate anymore.
2. Declare hazard mitigation as part of major disaster declarations — every time.
The federal government has developed important and effective programs to reduce flood risks and tragedies. However, since at least early spring, President Trump has failed to include Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) funding in disaster declarations — breaking with past precedent, including his own first term. This discretionary decision directly blocks critical post-disaster mitigation efforts like buyouts, elevations, and improved warning systems — just when survivors are most willing to act.
Hazard mitigation is not a luxury — it’s a legal intent and directive of the Stafford Act and a proven investment. According to NRDC, FEMA spends $100 to rebuild (often with no risk reduction) for every $1.72 spent on voluntary relocation, essentially using federal dollars to keep people in harm’s way, rebuilding in locations we know will flood again, putting lives at risk, and increasing costs.
3. Restore BRIC and FMA and invest in future-focused mitigation.
Two of FEMA’s largest and most important pre-disaster mitigation programs — Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) and Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) — have been canceled or held up by the Trump administration.
BRIC is essential to the nation’s strategy to move from reactive disaster spending to proactive risk reduction, and the program supports projects that involve elevating homes, building facilities that help reduce flood levels, and hardening infrastructure. FMA’s focus on repetitive loss properties improves the NFIP’s bottom line through reduced future claims due to home elevations, flood proofing and relocations, and buyouts.
These programs are critical tools for reducing disaster risk. Eliminating them not only ignores decades of progress but undermines efforts to reduce future NFIP claims and protect lives. These are not abstract investments — they’re the front line of defense in a world of more frequent and severe flooding. The failure to fund these programs will be felt for decades to come.
4. Stop unwise development in floodplains — and improve the rules we already have.
As author Tim Palmer writes in his recent op-ed, the most effective way to reduce flood damage is to prevent exposure in the first place. This means stronger local land use regulations, better enforcement of existing zoning and floodplain ordinances, and a renewed commitment to protecting the natural and beneficial functions of floodplains. State laws like those that recently passed in Florida to limit a community’s ability to more effectively manage flood risk will end up costing more in the long run.
There appears to be a gap in how we approach campgrounds and similar uses in the floodplain. Although they can be a compatible, open-space use, there has not been enough focus on reducing the public safety threats — particularly in flash-flood prone areas. That means setting limits on overnight accommodations in the highest risk parts of the floodplain, improving warning systems, and requiring effective emergency action plans. Too often, these measures are ignored, even with new research on warnings and lower-cost flood warning technologies now available.
5. Improve precipitation data and flood frequency analysis.
By relying on outdated precipitation information, we are likely designing infrastructure that is already undersized for tomorrow’s storms. For many infrastructure design decisions, flood maps are far less meaningful than accurate rainfall frequency data. That’s one of the reasons why the upcoming NOAA Atlas 15 is so important. This nationwide update will provide more precise precipitation frequency estimates and future conditions data, information that is especially critical in underrepresented regions and for short-duration, high-intensity storms — the kind that devastated Texas.
6. Finish the job developing flood maps for the entire nation.
Too many people mistakenly believe they’re “safe” because they live outside the mapped flood zone, but we’ve long known that FEMA’s maps are limited to showing the 100-year and 500-year floodplain, they cover only one-third of the rivers and coastline in the country, and are sometimes seriously outdated. At Camp Mystic, FEMA flood maps did provide valuable data such as the location of the floodway and base flood elevations to help guide building design and elevation.
But we need to do better. Nationwide datasets like those from First Street that examine many more types of flood risks as well as future flooding conditions show that our nation’s flood risk is far greater than shown on FEMA flood maps, yet those datasets can’t be used to regulate floodplain development, for example. That gap must ultimately be filled by a full and complete implementation of FEMA’s Congressionally mandated National Flood Mapping Program that implements the Future of Flood Risk Data approach that FEMA has been piloting for the past several years. This approach would provide flood hazard and risk information up to the 2,000-year flood event, and will give communities a much more robust set of tools they need to understand and respond to the evolving flood risk across the nation.
Responsibility at all levels
Federal programs matter. National Weather Service meteorologists do far more than produce forecasts. They are essential components of our emergency management system that works with communities and other organizations to educate them on how to use the data they produce and participate in exercises to understand and improve local, often life-saving, actions and they provide real-time information during flooding events. NOAA research institutes produce and calibrate the forecast models to give us as much warning time as possible.
State-led efforts are critical as well, such as those in Texas, which were implemented post-Harvey, where they not only created and started to self-fund hazard mitigation actions, but also took steps to carry out state-wide flood-hazard mapping. After devastating flash floods in 2013, Colorado adopted better building and land-use standards that exceed inadequate NFIP minimums. Meanwhile New Jersey is working to update its land use rules to respond to climate change by considering risks such as sea-level rise and chronic flooding.
No single entity can manage this alone. Local governments must enforce sound building practices, be willing to say no to developers, and, where necessary, implement smart flood warning systems tailored to the needs of the community. Business owners, campgrounds, and RV parks must understand their flood risk and if they are dependent on emergency action plans and human interventions, they must continuously exercise those plans so that during an event, those procedures become second nature. At the individual level, everyone needs to understand their own flood risk and do everything they can to minimize it.
What’s missing isn’t knowledge — it’s the commitment to act on it. Let’s not wait for another deadly flood to do what we already know is right.