In deadly Texas floods, one town had what some didn't: A wailing warning siren

[waterwatcher123]

35. The imagery certainly makes it look like lots of the upland areas have been cleared.

The point I was trying to make is that forests are critical to water storage. So, to the extent that forests can be re-established on the upland, it will help a great deal in slowing runoff from reaching the main stem of the river. It is especially true in areas with considerable elevation change from the river channel to upland areas. You know the tree canopy better than anyone who is less familiar with the region. So, I assume there are groups working to replace trees lost to oak wilt? Any variety of tree canopy is better than no canopy. There is a great free tool produced by the Davey Tree Company and NY University to help communities design and plan replanting efforts. If you are interested, it is called I-Tree Canopy (https://canopy.itreetools.org/). I saw that Texas is engaged in trying to bring beaver back to the state too. This is a good idea as beaver are incredible when it comes to storing water and restoring streams (although they do impede recreation to some degree - fish passage not as much as originally thought).

It is terrible what happened to everyone and the kids at Camp Mystic. But, as someone who has studied rivers and watersheds for years, what occurred to me is that camp is situated in an extremely dangerous place for floods. It is on the inside of a large meander with a bedrock wall on the left bank. There is little to no floodplain on the left side of the river. As such, once the river over tops its bank and floods, all the water would be directed right at Camp Mystic and Cyprus Creek. This river would cut right through this meander naturally if allowed to pursue its own course. Rivers do this all the time and form oxbow lakes and riverine islands.

My apologies if the post sounded insensitive. This is a tragedy that might have been minimized to some extent with more emphasis on keeping water on the land (forests, depressions, wetlands, and wild lands). This was a huge storm event that would have had a serious impact regardless of the mitigation efforts. We had a similar event in 2012 in our area that dumped 8-10 inches of rain on the land in a 24-hour period (there were periods of extreme rainfall intensity too). What I noticed in walking/photo documenting the streams is that areas with forests survived better than non-forested regions. What you also see is that humans do all sorts of foolish things with streams (like building personal dams, diverting parts of the stream channel, installing their own drainage systems that dump into the river and building in the floodplain. I even had a picture of a house where the homeowner used a culvert to run the small creek right under their house (condemned by local authorities).

I hope they do find all these missing people. However, it is highly likely that some of these people will never be found. Rivers can move unimaginable amounts of sediment, gravel, and boulders. I have struggled to find monitoring equipment buried by sediment after a typical storm event. This event is so large that finding someone buried by feet of sediment or gravel will be a herculean task.