Hello, and welcome to the Texas Tribune trip Cast for Tuesday, August twenty sixth, twenty twenty five.

My name is Matthew Watkins, editor in chief of the Texas Tribune.

And you know, a hunch tells me Eleanor that this could possibly be our last trib cast recorded of twenty twenty five, that is, during a legislative session.

I cannot believe you would say that and curse us like this.

I just want you to know that, like, come Christmas, when we're still doing this, I will pull back this quote and throw this in your face.

Let's say, I hope greatly that this is the last trip cast we are doing during a special session.

This, of course, is because lawmakers have passed the maps, three districting maps, the topic of the trip cast for the past to maybe three weeks, in the middle of the night Saturday morning, Friday night, staving off a Democratic filibuster, which you know, we can talk about the rules, we can talk about all that, but I think those of us who were expecting to have to work through the weekend were greatly relieved about.

Some of us who were so this is funny.

Actually, I was on the was supposed to be on the five am to nine am filibuster shift, and I went to bed.

My whole plan right was like, go to bed at nine pm on Friday night because I have to be up at five am.

So at midnight I go to bed.

I went to bed.

I'm not joking.

What must have been three minutes before they said you cannot fill a Buster still woke up at four forty five am, saw that they had designed out Philbuster, went back to sleep, and then woke up at nine am like, oh god, I hope that wasn't a dream.

And I didn't go back to sleep, and everyone's like, where is Eleanor anyway?

So the timing was terrible, but the you know, my sleep debt appreciated it.

Well, I'm glad you were able to go back to sleep.

I've reached the age of my life where if I wake up, I'm it's it's over for me.

Yeah, four forty five is pretty like I can get back.

I can get back to sleep.

I can make it happen.

Yeah, okay, very good that voice.

Of course.

Eleanor klivanoff law and politics reporter for the Text Tribune.

I will eventually get that correct.

You'll create a editor in chief.

Yes, yes, I love that you think I actually have that much power and it's.

Not I did cook up the name myself.

Yeah, yeah, that's very good.

We are joined this week by climate reporter I do.

I got that one easily, Emily fox Hall, joining us from what is not ary Potter closet in Houston.

Hello, Emily, Hi, thank you for having me.

So Yeah, we, like I said, we I'm going to finish my thought here.

The maps have passed.

They are on their way to governor rabbits desk.

Now, we have a text legislature that is very tired, that is very sick of being in Austin.

Very angry with each other.

Very angry with each other.

And I think, you know, we got a three day weekend coming up.

I think they're going to want to try to get this done and move on and and and and finish their work for the year.

Is what Dustin Burrough said.

We're going to get this thing done by Labor Day.

Yeah, exactly.

And so the other big priority left.

To do is flooding, which is why Emily is here.

Emily has been watching very long and emotional committee hearings over this measure, over over you know, response to the floods.

She has been writing about the various legislative responses to those floods, and that is what we are going to talk about today, Emily, I want to start by just you know, I think you know, committee hearings are often dry affairs.

You know, you get a few bills a year that have the kind of emotional kind of testimony that happens.

This one was a particular one.

We saw families, particularly from Camp Mystic, coming and talking to lawmakers.

Lawmakers being I think like pretty blunt and frank and sometimes even kind of apologizing for their own kind of mistakes and past things that happen.

Can you just kind of tell us a little bit about what you've seen, particularly from those hearings in recent days and weeks, as lawmakers come together and try to, you know, prevent something like this from happening again.

They have been definitely very emotional.

It's interesting just thinking back, I feel like so much has happened.

It's almost been two months since the floods, so it's really felt like a whirlwind of these hearings.

But if we go back to the start, there were special committees at appointed in both the House and the Senate to look at flooding issues and disaster issues, and the first sort of like marathon hearing they held together was really focused on the disaster response.

So nim Kid was kind of like the star of the show that day.

He's the head of emergency management for the state.

Good yeah, thank you.

He just sort of went through like a litany of issues.

It was like almost overwhelming how many things had gone wrong.

So just to give you a few examples, he went over how emergency management coordinators who can help county judges or mayors in emergencies, they don't have any licensing requirements in the state.

He also went through a bunch of problems that happened with you know, so many people died in this disaster that the Justices of the peace and the medical examiners who came into help sounded like they had some issues keeping first deciding when autopsies were really needed, and then second, just like managing so many bodies, like multiple family members from within the same family died and the bodies got sent to different places, which made it harder on the families trying to recover.

So anyway, all to say, you know, that first hearing was sort of like you could see lawmakers getting frustrated with these sort of repeat problems and that.

Yeah, so that kind of culminated in later that day some discussion two of the local river authority not pursuing grand funding, and there was sort of an outburst by lawmakers at that moment too, at the end of what had already been a really long day with a lot of issues over frustration with you know, they had an opportunity, in the lawmaker's view, to put these sirens up and didn't move ahead with it.

So we went from that all the way to more recently when the Camp Mystic family spoke, and as you mentioned, it was just hugely emotional with people walking through, you know, the grief of losing children, kind of being haunted by these nightmares of imagining what those last minutes were like for these little girls as the floodwaters rose while they were in their cabins.

And I also was just struck in that hearing by not only the grief but also like the strength these parents were really pushing for change and not asking anyone, you know, to like feel sorry for them, but asking for these bills to make camp safer.

So it was both very sad but also a very like admirable effort.

You know, they were really focused on making change in that one, and you could see lawmakers you know again kind of these frustration with errors that have sort of long been known as problems in this state.

But also many of them were moved, you know, lawmakers removed tears.

So it was certainly a heavy feeling watching those.

Yeah, I want I want to go back to the first part.

I think we should talk about the camp mistic families and everything there.

But going back to your first kind of statement, I mean, something that has stood out to me from the beginning here was the sort of lack of professional expectations for these particularly like more rural small town officials, whether that's you know, the emergency management coordinators or you know, people going out for jogs in the middle of the night when like flooding has already started and everything like that.

In some ways, maybe it almost felt like, uh, you know, underresourced local governments not fully comprehending the scope of their responsibilities or what needed to be done in order to keep their constituents or people visiting their communities safe.

I'm curious, you know you heard all that, you heard that frustration from nim Kid, who of course is a professional and who has dealt with you know, if not dozens, then at probably at least a dozen like major catastrophes in the state for a long time.

But you know, he can't be deploying everywhere across the state every moment everything comes up.

They're you know, usually coming in after the terrible thing has already happened.

I mean, did you since any kind of effort or intention by lawmaker to kind of change that in terms of giving those local entities the infrastructure needed, training needed, or whatever else it is to make them be more prepared for future events like this.

That's definitely a big piece of the problem.

I spoke to one expert early on who said, the state Emergency Department really has like relatively a good reputation in the country, and as you said, they are professional, they're somewhat well funded.

And so this woman was telling me often these local governments can get kind of lost that people don't realize just how much the local governments are struggling in disasters because the state comes in so quickly.

But in this case, you know, the disaster really happened over a matter of hours.

They call it flash flooding for a reason, and so you see the gaps in the local response very clearly in this case.

The one hearing we didn't talk about was the one that was in Kirk County that was you know, sort of like a mounting sense of anger with the way the local authorities, you know, essentially just weren't awake.

The county judge who's supposed to be responsible for emergency scenarios was asleep at another home, you know, at a lake home that they have, and the county emergency management coordinator was sick and also asleep as these floodwaters were rising.

So that's clearly been established as part of the issue here.

But the changes the lawmakers have made is to put in now they're going to have licensing requirements under these proposed bills for emergency management coordinators, so that will come with some training, and they're trying to put in place kind of like a chain of command where if the county judge isn't awake or the emergency management isn't awake, here's who the responsibility will fall to.

I remember hearing though, it's like if you're going to train the emergency management coordinator, like there seem to be some questions about who in the chain of command is actually going to get the training right, Like if you go down the chain and that person doesn't understand what's going on, that feels like a gap I've been interested in.

But like I.

Assume like most of these people, like you know, you go decades, maybe your entire career as like a county judge, and you never have a disaster like this, right, So, like I understand sort of on a human level, how easy it is to get kind of complacent and to think like, yeah, I'm the guy that like if there's a disaster, they will call, But like that doesn't mean I can never go to my friend's lake house and then this happens and you think like oh shit, basically, and so like it is it's interesting to me that they like didn't have a chain of command of like you know, I bet there were a lot of counties out there that weren't affected by flooding that now were like whose job was, Like if this was us, whose job is this?

And like it's interesting they're going to put that in place now.

And there's so many compounding issues with this, right, I Mean, there's these questions of like do people understand the difference between a flood watch and a flood warning?

No, thank you.

We've talked about that on this song here with Yeah, like right after it's like, I think it's one of those things like, you know, the weather people vastly overestimate how much people can keep that straight in their brains.

Yeah, yeah, And then these problems of just warning fatigue, like maybe some of these officials or some people who were visiting saw the watch, but they didn't you know, take action or necessarily prepare for it, because so many times we get these watches and nothing, nothing happens.

How much is this response, particularly around emergency response.

You've written about a few different bills, Centate Bill two, which I think pertains more to the justices of peace and how to handle the bodies that you already mentioned, the training program for them, Housepeled three creating a Texas inter Operability Council to kind of help develop strategic plans and communication and everything like that.

Some other bills related to that as well.

How much of this response, particularly around emergency preparedness for local governments, is addressing what Eleanor just talked about, where it's like sure in Kerr County.

There's a flood, and you could be worried about that, but you know, in the Panhandle or on the Gulf Coast or you know, it's it could be something that we're not already talking about anymore.

Like, do you think that the actions that are being taken by this legislature in response to this are going to help the next thing that comes along that we're not talking about right now, a flood?

Right?

Yeah?

Yeah, a lot of the legislation looks really reactive to me.

You know, the bills that you mentioned SB two with the trainings and the dealing with the bodies, a lot of that just came straight out of the hearing from what nim Kid told lawmakers was a problem.

The other big piece of legislation we haven't mentioned yet was SB three, which is the bill that's going to require sirens in certain parts of the Hill Country, and that's very focused on this area where the disaster occurred.

You know, it's focused on flash flood Alley specifically, and we'll set aside if it passes, some money to fund these required siren and early notification systems.

So yeah, I think this point you raise is something I've been thinking a lot about the last two months.

Because you all know I live in Houston.

I've covered so many hurricanes.

Sometimes as a reporter, I feel like I'm just going from one disaster to the next, and you see kind of this cycle, right, It's like this grief and mourning and shock at what happened.

There's this immediate reaction to trying to fix the very specific problem, and then there's this recovery which we try to pay attention to, but often we are just moving on to the next thing.

So I think I'm certainly hoping to do some more reporting looking at how there are opportunities.

The state has had to be more forward looking, and a big part of this legislation so far that I've seen is pretty reactive to this specific issue.

But there's certainly things that I think they expect to help make emergency response better.

There's some measures in the camp safety bills that the Mystic Parents have pushed that will make camps, you know, trying to get cabins out of the floodplane will help keep people out of harm's way in the future.

And there is some money that's being set aside to improve weather forecasting, you know, so a lot of environmental groups have really supported that one as a pretty forward looking at a bill.

But of course you're right, every disaster is different, every part of the state faces different disasters, and you know, kind of like these big discussions, for example, on what flood plain development should look like, those really haven't happened that I've heard in these meetings so far.

Because it is interesting that like the bill that I think got a lot of spotlight that didn't pass during the regular session was actually was being carried by Ken King in part because as a response to the Panhandle wildfires.

And it's like, you know, I mean, there's obvious a lot of discussion about whether or not that well, actually, I think it's clear that that would not have been in place in time to.

Help with this.

But it's like, like you said, we're just moving from like one disaster to the next of like wildfire response, Like then the windows between them are becoming narrower and narrower.

You mentioned the camp Safety Bill.

Let's talk a little bit about that and that committee hearing.

I want to talk a little bit about the parents first.

I mean, you mentioned there's a lot of bravery and of course a ton of sadness I mean, one of the things that has stuck with me is the picture that ran at the top of one of your stories, right where you you see these families in the in the gallery and just the pain on their faces.

It like, there's been very few things since those floods that have really hit me as hard as that.

Just how sad and how much human suffering there is, and how brave it is to be going out and speaking about this, you know, when when the pain is so raw.

Tell us a little bit about just what you were hearing from parents, what lawmakers were hearing from parents in these hearings about, you know, how they're feeling and what they want to see coming out of this.

Mm hmm.

It's an interesting one because it wasn't a part of the first special session.

These bills kind of came in more recent weeks as the parents got organized and you know, really pushed to get this as part of the agenda.

They saw there was like really a gap in kind of comprehensive legislation.

Looking at the camps where several dozen kids die to can't mistic you know.

So, I don't know what struck me the most from the hearing with the parents was the details like this dad talking about the countless hands of go fish and uno he played with his kid, the many pages of books they read before he put her to sleep every night, and kind of like this morning of the futures that their kids weren't going to get.

You know, now we're in fall almost and it's back to school time, and so parents were remembering.

You know, for one, it was thinking that their daughter was going to be there to hold the hand of the other kid as they went to school, or the daughter who poured the bowl of cheerios for the younger child so they could get extra sleep, the daughter who was supposed to be going to college moving into college right now.

So a lot of it was just kind of this raw emotion of you send your kid to camp what for many is like a generational experience, and they think they're going to be having fun riding horses and shooting archery, and then, you know, one woman said, I never could I have dreamed that my kid was going to come home in a in a coffin.

So it was sort of this grappling with guilt, like they felt like they should have protected their kids in some cases, and they felt as parents that they let them down, a grappling with grief and loss of the past and of the future, and then you know, a very forceful call basically to say make this right.

You know, don't let any parent be gripped by the trauma that we are feeling right now.

And is would you say, the main focus of what they were asking for, the main focus of sort of where they were directing there for a lack of a better term, blame for what happened, was the location of the cabins in the floodplain.

Is that what they're focus was in terms of trying to enact change by showing up at these hearings.

Right, getting cabins out of the floodplane is a big piece.

Also the fact that, as they told the story, the plan, the emergency plan for the kids was to stay in the cabin, and several of them expressed the sentiment that they raise their kids to follow rules and to follow orders, and in this case doing so got them killed.

So these bills House Built one and Senate Bill one both have components of requiring the camps to have these emergency plans for what to do in the case of flooding.

You know, when do you evacuate and when do you shelter in place?

Because different you know, different disasters have different requirements with them.

And the Senate bill goes even further to say, you know, if there is a flash flood warning and kids are in the floodplane, you need to move them out.

No more.

Is this going to be a subjective question about whether and what to do in the case of a warning, but it will be required under that bill.

Yeah.

I mean it's so like are the Texas munto a story?

Looking at how like there was a similar disaster right in the eighties and people died, children died because they were evacuating.

Like it seems like these camps, you know, they're built on the water, they're built to like engage with the with the river and with the water.

But are It's like a damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of situation in terms of knowing how to and like putting so much of this on like teenagers, to know how to respond to get younger kids out is just like one of those things again like reactive.

But you look back and you think, like who could have ever let this happen?

Who could have ever let this get to this point.

Right, And and that's where I think the the you know, failure of imagination kind of comes in, right of what could happen and what do we react?

How do we react when it does happen?

I mean, you know you, I'm sort of reading directly from your story here.

But House Bill one, which is the bill that particularly pertains to camps, would require operators to develop emergency plans, including for disasters.

They would have to be submitted by the state.

They would include information on when to shelter or evacuate, and you know, campers need to know, like be taught how to react to that.

And then another one I think is important.

We talked a little about this in the immediate aftermath of just like putting evacuation routes on the on the doors of the cabins, right of this is where you go to get to higher ground.

Right, If you're evacuating through a low lying area, that's going to be dangerous.

But if you can identify ahead of time where you're going to be most safe from floodwaters, even for a short period of time, that that can make a big difference.

And sorry, would any of these bills and if you said this make it like, like, are we saying like you just can't put cabins in floodplains anymore?

I mean, are we going that far?

Right?

The state won't license a camp if they have a cabin in okay, But the big caveat here is it's not going to apply to camps that are on lakes, so that would be you know, a camp like Camp Longhorn.

I think they're they're trying to make this very specifically for camps that are along rivers, which is something I'm trying to understand.

More right, So it's sort of again very reactive.

I mean, I'm also curious how this.

Like I was out in Kerville right after the floods and like obviously like so much attention correctly on these camps and just like the horrors of what happened there.

But you know, we also saw like r V parks get washed away.

We saw these like a lot of other development in low lying areas that also you know are like sometimes vacationers, but sometimes a lot of people I talk to were like vulnerable people who had an r V and thewhere else to live or things like that.

Does any of this like address that?

Not that I have seen I mean, you know, insofar as the emergency response would address how you respond to emergencies anywhere, but there anytime floodplain regulation has come up in the hearings.

You know, there was a moment I think it was Senator Menendez who had said, you know, wouldn't it be better if the kids will let me back this up.

So before the camp bill came up, the plan was to require camps to evacuate kids from cabins if they were in the floodplane and if that failed, require the cabins to have a ladder so the kids could climb on the roof of the cabin if for some reason the water started coming and they hadn't evacuated.

And I think it was Senator Menendez who said, you know, wouldn't it be better for the cabins not to be there in the first place.

And Senator Perry said, you know, something to the effects of like we're not gonna go down the road of floodplain regulation, that that has been discussed in the past, that if we take that up, you know, all of Houston needs to be redesigned.

So kind of like that's just political resistance has poked up time and again about looking holistically at floodplains, and I'm curious to see if that's going to change at all in the next you know, six months to a year as they continue to look at this.

But it's definitely sort of the big piece to me is these decisions about where we build and how we build.

But it's been explained to me it's like Texas is a property rights state.

You know, there's a huge respect for letting people make choices about how they use their property.

So that seems to be sort of politically what's that play here?

It right?

I mean, I think that's right.

It bears just sort of emphasizing though that what happened at Can't Mistick was horrible and you know, should steps should be taken to prevent it.

But even if you take Can't miss It out of the equation, another one hundred and eleven people died in these floods, and they were not at camps.

They were at like you said, RVs, they were in cabins, many of them from out of town presumably had no idea, you know, where the floodplaine was or anything like that.

I mean, it feels to me like if it were ever going to happen.

If the state were ever going to take steps to you know, make more rules about what goes on in the floodplane or what can be built in the floodplane, it would be right now after you know, over one hundred and thirty people died.

And if we're not doing it now, Like how how what is the political path of that happening in twenty twenty seven?

I just I just don't see it.

No.

I mean, it's like it's different, right, but it's like after uv All Day, where it's like, if you're not going to do gun restrictions now, you're not going to do it.

If you're not going to do floodplain restrictions now.

You know, maybe that's just the way it is in Texas, But I mean, what about just I mean, you could require evacuation routes and evacuation processes for airbnbs or hotels or RV areas.

I mean, is is there any of that in the legislation?

Emily, I'm really curious what's going to happen with the with the siren legislation, because that, I think is where I've had a lot of conversations around this education component.

You know, experts who study warning systems, say, you can't just put a siren up and expect that when it blairs, people are going to know what that means or what to do.

Like if you're from a tornado prone place, you might stay put, which is exactly what you shouldn't do if there's a flash flood.

So the legislation is really kind of leaves a lot of the details to rule making.

You know, it's the Texas Water Development Board that's going to put in place the real specific rules about what these warning system look like.

But I've talked to people who have said, you know, it could be that you check in at a hotel or you check in at your campsite and they pass you a piece of paper that says, here's the risk you are facing, and when the siren goes off, here is what to do and where to go.

And so that's kind of where I will be looking to see what the education components look like there, because you're right, I mean, some of this is people who live or have second homes on the river, but a lot of it is tourism.

Especially because this disaster happened on July fourth, there were a lot of people there who just may not have known, you know what flash flaw Daley is what that river you know that normally looks pretty peaceful, Like the rage that it can kind of bear down on these locations is something that could be communicated when you when you check in.

Yeah, yeah, I mean I've said this on this podcast before, but my family, my wife's has family up on the Oregon coast and you know, there is a constant threat of tsunami there, including what they call like the Big one that is, you know, they know, going to wipe out a ton of property and things like that.

And if when you check in to the Airbnb or wherever there's a there's there is something on the door, and there is something telling you where to go, and there's supply kits you know that are already stationed in high ground, and there's signs everywhere that's like tsunami evacuation route, follow these things.

It doesn't feel like it would be that onerous or expensive to require those kinds of disclosures and things along those lines.

Yeah, we have so many disasters here, I mean, what are you gonna do?

Like a wildfire warning and a hurricane warning and the you know, like we've got a lot of crises to manage, like, yeah, it's a higher bar here than one tsunami.

Yeah, Emily, what are you just watching as this plays out in the coming days, Like what's what do you think is still sort of at stake or up in the air or are you curious to see how it plays out?

Definitely curious.

I mean a lot of these bills have made it through both chambers and now they're kind of at this like agreeing on the little changes that are being made back and forth.

So we're kind of just following to see if some argument appears that you know, we didn't know about or didn't expect.

But yeah, it's it'll be It'll be interesting to see where it lands.

And then my understanding is these committees, I think at least one of them, they've said they will keep going after this.

So what those hearings take up, you know, with a little more breathing room, I think will be important.

As you said, I mean, if these bills pass sort of in their like the form they kind of are now and go into effect, do you feel like, big picture, we will be more protected from this happening again and being as horrific as we were before.

July fourth, I'm like, are you asking me an opinion?

Illinois?

I'll you what you know, I can't have those you've talked, you have told you.

I think on many of these bills, experts who follow these issues have said these are good first steps.

Right, No, we're just going to say that the steps the legislature is taking are not going to help in some incremental way.

So yes, I think people are seeing some positive change come out of this.

Again, there is an interest in these big picture issues and big picture conversations that you know, as I said, in disaster after disaster, it's really really difficult to get people to take a step back and like look holistically at the problems.

So yes, I think this should again like kind of pending.

There's a lot of rulemaking that has to happen along this stuff.

So the devil in the details maybe to how successful this will be, but they definitely took steps to address some problems.

I just think, you know, I guess I should say this is the climate reporter.

The thing that people really have barely touched on is climate change and how these disasters are.

You know, rain is more likely to be heavier, wildfire seasons are now longer, so what the state is facing today is not the same as what the state faced in the past, so that maybe even puts more pressure on these big picture questions.

But did the state fix everything?

I don't think anyone thinks that is the case.

Did they fix some things, Yes, some people do feel like, you know, sirens will help in a region without cell service that's rural, and these emergency problems seem to have been long standing and they're taking steps, So I think that's where I would leave that.

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, what the state is engaging in right now through is political process is a question whether they want to frame it this way or not of how much risk are we going to be comfortable with?

Right, you can't eliminate all risk.

You can't eliminate all risk.

And you know, if we didn't want to risk any kind of like terrible accidents, we wouldn't have streets, and we wouldn't have cars, and we wouldn't have all those different types of things.

Right, But like, what steps are we willing to take to intervene in the like free market and the choices of individuals in order to prevent them from something like this happening?

And how far can you even go in a world where the climate is getting warmer, where extreme weather is a reality, to prevent these things from happening, you know, I think we're not going to change the political nature of this state where people like often want to air on the side of freedom and low regulation and allowing sort of the private sector to you know, fill the needs and desires of the people of the state.

Yeah.

I think that's perfectly put.

How much risk are we willing to accept?

And another piece of this is always how much are we willing to pay to lower that risk?

Right?

Okay, well, thank you Emily for talking this through.

Thank you Eleanor, and thank you to our producers Rob and Chris.

We will be back next week.