Letter from Chip Northrup

Flooding Must Be Addressed

I went to summer camp in the Texas Hill Country, as did my stepmother, our children and our grandchildren. We know several of the families that lost a daughter or granddaughter in the recent flooding. There are memorial ribbons to the dead tied to the fence around my grade school. Our daughter’s house overlooks the Guadalupe River from a high bluff. Her family has been searching the river for the dead.

Flooding is common in the Hill Country due to the topography and the monsoon rains that come up from the Gulf of Mexico. When it starts to rain hard, you move to higher ground. Most Texas towns have storm warning sirens—like the firehouse in Cooperstown—that signal an approaching tornado or flash flood. Kerrville, where the worst of the flooding occurred, voted against a storm warning siren system out of concern that “it might spook the tourists.”