At least 82 people died, and several went missing in catastrophic flash floods that hit the Texas Hill Country over the weekend.
The floods were triggered by torrential rains, causing the nearby Guadalupe River to rise rapidly. Within two hours, the floods swept across central Texas, including a girl’s summer camp in Kerr County.
As officials continue rescue efforts to locate the 41 missing people, questions are being raised against the National Weather Service, or the NWS.
The federal agency’s Austin and San Angelo units faced the heat for allegedly providing inaccurate forecasts ahead of the Friday floods.
Texas officials blamed the NWS for underestimating the amount of rainfall that struck the region.
But, former NWS officials point out that the weather agency was understaffed, and there was a lack of adequate warning systems.
The NWS has been running with reduced staff ever since the DOGE, under Elon Musk, laid off hundreds of meteorologists in February.
According to the Guardian, the NWS office in San Angelo, where the heaviest rains fell, has two vacancies—the meteorologist-in-charge, who leads each NWS office, and the staff hydrologist, who helps make decisions about flood threats.
Similarly, the Austin office, which oversees Kerr County, is missing a warning coordination officer, whose primary function is to be a decision-making point of contact for local officials and the public.But President Donald Trump denied that the staffing crisis affected forecasting by the NWS.
Amid scathing criticism, the NWS defended its forecast, saying that it was exceedingly difficult to predict the rainfall of this magnitude.
They said that the warnings issued in the run-up to this weekend’s flooding were as timely and accurate as possible.
