Guadalupe River

wildfires in eastern Oregon burned through 140,000 acres, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate and stretching federal fire resources thin as fire also burned in Colorado, Washington, and elsewhere.

Smoke from those blazes and others in Canada worsened air quality for millions across the country by mid-july chicago was reporting the worst air quality in the world in northern minnesota the boundary waters canoe area wilderness shut down for almost two weeks as some americans found themselves digging out n95 masks to walk their pets or commute to work others saw their homes destroyed from july 13th to july 17th more than 28 inches of rain fell in central texas a deluge that brought flash floods along the guadalupe river killing two people climate change is increasingly both the news and the weather called the view the future of redlining by Derek Johnson.

A home has never been just four walls and a roof.

It has helped send children to college, start businesses, and create opportunities that last for generations, particularly for black and brown communities.

It began to rain, and it began to rain hard.

And the Guadalupe River, uh, runs the, the, the, the foothills, uh, or, or the, the, the origin of the Guadalupe River is in Hill Country.

So all that water ran off into tributaries to the Guadalupe, piled up, and caused a major, major flash flood.

When I flew over it a week later, I saw t- huge cypress trees that were dragged down.

So that's the connection there.

But what it's done is it's encouraged building in the floodplains.

If my uncle, whose, whose, whose house got ruined when the Black River in Arkansas overflowed because he lived w- he lived on the wrong side of the levee, had he ever seen Camp Mystic or many of the places along the Guadalupe River that got destroyed, he would have said something to the effect of, "David, it might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but I know a lot about rivers, and someday there's going to be a flash flood here and a lot of people are going to suffer." But instead, we've built all these communities on the artificial back of National Flood Insurance Policy because it's a federal program and it causes us to feel some type of top cover from the federal government.

It's not top cover at all.

Um, it says on this website that it is one of the oldest towns in Texas.

In 1838, a group of frontier rangers laid out a settlement among beautiful live oaks beside Walnut Springs and the Guadalupe River.

They soon named the town for Colonel Juan Seguin, a Tejano who fought beside the Anglo settlers against the brutal Mexican dictator Santa Ana.

Okay.

And the National Weather Service showed that they have an, a densified weather forecasting system as well, which they move around the country when there's severe storms, but it was not deployed in Texas during the July 4th flooding.

And if it had been, the, uh, center of the storm over the South Fork of the Guadalupe River was calculated correctly with the densified model that the Weather Service had when they did it in retrospect, but it wasn't being run live.

So that's an impressive effort, and I admire the capacity of Texas Tech to build and operate an operational system.

They call it the Texas Weather Prediction and Measurement System, I think.

You don't have to wait for a couple of years to get a rating curve developed, because if you've got a surface velocity, you can get a ratio of that to get the average velocity in the cross-section, and if you survey the cross-section, then you get the discharge right away as soon as the instrument gets put in.

And so eventually we got another project, and that number from 20 was expanded to 80 gauges, and that's the largest network of radar stream flow measurement in the country.

And we had one of our gauges installed on the Guadalupe River at Comfort, which is downstream of Kerrville, um, during the July 4th flooding, and it was just a remarkable signal was came out of there.

At 9:00 o'clock in the morning, the velocity was two feet per second.

Larson says my numbers are strong, whatever that means." I kept the informal evaluation conversational.

He described the transit, his friends aboard, San Marcos, his mother's catering business, his younger brother in the Navy, a camping trip on the Guadalupe River.

His account matched the files and the other men's descriptions of transit, but it was cleaner.

He didn't contradict himself.

Crime Raiders On is the original true crime review podcast that digs into true crime, pop culture, other podcasts.

And on this episode, he lost his nephew when a flash flood swept him and his family down the Guadalupe River.

Now he explores what happened that night to himself, his loved ones and his community.

We'll talk about the podcast Where the River Took Us from Texas Monthly.

Joining me to get that done and more is true crime author, TV journalist, and host of These Are Their Stories podcast, My Husband, Love of My Life.

It's Kevin Flynn.

I got up before dawn and drove across town to a quiet neighborhood in Austin.

It's my favorite place to go jogging, but I hadn't been on a run since the flood, since our river house was swept away by the Guadalupe.