Razlin Mieske is right about her hand being broken, by the looks of it. The base of her palm is blue and swollen, and she is holding it against her chest like a little bird she hopes to keep alive. It is July 6, and she is crying, sitting on the curb of a parking lot at the top of a hill waiting for another storm.
She says she didn’t feel it break. Maybe that was the adrenaline. On July 4, the Guadalupe River that runs through her home of Hunt, Texas, swelled due to the kind of sudden deluge increasingly characteristic of storms on a warming planet. The river rose more than 25 feet, swept away and killed more than 100 people, and made Mieske’s road impassable.
July 5, Mieske and a ragtag team of neighbors were moving debris out of the road so people could get into town and buy medical supplies.
July 6, Mieske woke up in pain. She says she could wiggle her fingers, but they wouldn’t extend.
It still wasn’t possible to drive from her home, so Mieske decided to go by foot. It would be an hour and a half walk to the Dollar Tree through mud and fallen trees that snapped like toothpicks under the force of the flood.
Dollar Tree was closed. That’s what she was explaining to the state troopers on the bridge on her way back.
“All I can do is go back home,” she said. “That’s all I can do.”
A helicopter passed overhead. Twenty-seven little girls were still missing from the Christian summer camp caught in the flash flood July 4. A line of at least 50 cars and pickups stood still, consulting with troopers one by one, some passing over the bridge and some turning back.
Mieske pleaded with the troopers. She said she would run if she had to. Her house was only a mile away. Her kids and her mother with a heart condition were waiting for her to get home safe. The troopers hadn’t made a decision about her crossing when one of their walkie-talkies sparked up: “Everybody to higher ground now.”
A speaker in the sky said to move, said there was a “wall of water” coming, locals said. Mieske says she just started running, yelling, “Please, anybody.” A man in a pickup with little kids in the backseat let her in.
Hierarchy of Needs
From up here at the top of the hill, everyone can see the gray-brown storm clouds gathering upstream. It’s loud – thunder, beating helicopter blades, and the Texas and U.S. flags thrashing in hot gusts of wind. It’s not too loud to hear every phone siren-sound at once with emergency alerts: First, “Move to higher ground.” Second, “This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation. Do not attempt to travel unless you are fleeing.”
Dozens of people stand outside their cars watching the sky, asking each other how they’re holding up.
A man emerges from a pickup with a box of bananas, his son following behind with a case of water bottles, and they pass them out.
A mom – a nurse who says she’s shaking when her kids aren’t listening – combs her son’s hair with her fingers: “Buddy, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to bake you your birthday cake today.”
Her husband chuckles: “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, honey.”
When a double-bladed, 12-ton military helicopter rips by low to the ground, the father tells his sons: “Look at that. Isn’t that cool? That’s a Chinook.”
One of the boys climbs into the bed of the truck and yells: “Mom, look! They’re searching for people.”
Mieske is not with her kids. She is sitting at the far corner of the parking lot away from everybody else, wiping tears from her cheeks with her good hand.
When the nurse finds out, she says Mieske needs ice. An older woman who hasn’t left her car offers up a cup of water from a drive-through and two plastic grocery bags to put the ice in. It’s just a few cubes, but Mieske thanks her profusely. When a man leaning against the hood of his truck with a wad of tobacco in his bottom lip sees Mieske holding the plastic bag to her palm, he says he has a whole bunch of ice in the back of his truck. She says it’s okay, but he insists.
Bracing for More
Feeding and nursing each other is only the first step for residents of the Central Texas towns hit hardest. The search for the missing continues. Camp Mystic has confirmed 27 missing girls dead. Meanwhile, cleanup has just begun, with pride. In Hunt, a gray Tacoma with the bed full of branches hangs a 7-foot, soaked Texas flag from the tailgate to the backdoor.
As searchers wearing neon yellow were paddling in lifeboats in Kerrville Sunday, people leaving church stopped on the side of a road that runs along the river. They stood speechless. One woman’s flowered church dress whipped in the wind. “That’s sheet metal,” she said. She didn’t need to point it out – it was suspended at eye level, wrapped around a tree trunk. “It looks just like paper.”
A lot of things hang suspended in the tree branches – big things, like kayaks. Two-foot-wide, 20-foot-tall tree trunks snapped, or their roots tore out of the ground in a clump like mere garden weeds. Some copses of trees held on, but now lean so far sideways they’re kissing the ground. Their branches are paranormally bent, like they’re still under rushing water.
We don’t have a complete count of the dead, or of the homes wrecked by the floods. In Ingram, an entire RV park was destroyed – more than 20 homes. A San Antonio news station drone captured an entire house floating down the Guadalupe River in Kerrville, torn from its foundation. Many more cars are totaled – smashed against trees, or flipped upside down in the flood.
To help with recovery, Donald Trump has declared a major disaster, freeing up individual payments for people in Kerr County through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
But at FEMA and the federal agency that predicts severe storms, upheaval from Trump’s budget cuts raises questions about how much federal support Central Texas will get, and how much destruction could’ve been avoided.
On the recovery side, FEMA not only delivers individual assistance. It also provides grants that states rely on to provide basic emergency management services, and billions of dollars are in limbo. Applications for a massive suite of these grants haven’t been opened, after FEMA blew through a mid-May deadline to start accepting requests for funding, ProPublica reports. And before that, FEMA clawed back hundreds of millions of dollars from a grant program that county and local governments were expecting to use for natural disaster mitigation projects.
The inundated Texas Division of Emergency Management and Kerr County have not yet answered the Chronicle’s questions about lost or imperiled FEMA funding. But just south of Austin, Hays County’s emergency department confirmed they are still waiting to hear back about federal disaster recovery funds they applied for through the state eight months ago.
Cuts and unfilled positions at the federal agency that predicts severe weather – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – might have contributed to bungled crisis communication with Central Texans before the flood, and could contribute to future fumbles.
Key roles at local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as crushing rainfall struck Texas July 4, The New York Times reported Sunday. Those vacancies included a meteorologist in charge at the San Angelo office, and a San Antonio warning coordination meteorologist who accepted the early retirement package the Trump administration used to cut federal employees.
More cutbacks loom. Starting July 1, federal hurricane forecasters will be “blinded” as the Trump administration cuts off their access to military satellites, New York Magazine reports. Meteorologists rely on data from these satellites as one of the major tools to determine hurricanes’ paths and intensity.
That’s bad timing as the U.S. heads into a hurricane season meteorologists predict will be more severe than average, with as many as 19 storms strong enough to earn names. NOAA language is always very measured and steeped in probabilities. The director of the National Weather Service didn’t use the word “climate” when he briefed the public on this prediction in May – that word has been systematically removed from the federal lexicon – but he made clear that these storms are characteristic of climate change. “When you have a planet that’s warmer, you look at the ocean temperatures that could be impacted by that,” he said. “Warm sea surface temperatures are probably the number one contributor to the whole thing.”
It’s early days yet, but an international team of climate experts published findings Monday that Central Texas’ crushing floods were intensified by human-driven climate change – data shows the downpour was so far outside the norm that “natural variability alone cannot explain the increase.”
Raising questions about the country’s ability to prepare for future climate change-fueled disasters, the Trump administration now aims to axe funding to NOAA’s climate research in its entirety. A newly released budget document calls for the elimination of all funding to NOAA’s climate laboratories, as well as a complete dismantling of research at NOAA’s weather research program and weather laboratories.
In Central Texas, neighbors continued to support each other as the week wore on. Mieske says her hand is still hurting, “The finger I believe is broken,” she says. But she won’t be going to a doctor anytime soon. She says she wouldn’t want to take attention from the patients who need it more.
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This article appears in July 11 • 2025.
