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.”

There are many camps in the Hill Country and several on the Guadulupe, the Blanco, and the Medina. The late great Kinky Freidman lived at a camp that his parents had run on the Medina. All of the camps evacuated at the first sign of a storm front. All of them except Camp Mystic, which prohibited cell phones and had no warning system.

Due to global warming, the FEMA 500-year flood plain is now the 50-year flood plain, going to the 5-year. The Guadalupe rose almost 30 feet in less than an hour. That would be like the Susquehanna flooding River Street and cresting the Main Street bridge.

Predictably, storms are getting more extreme. We owe it to the children that died there to do something about it. Something other than “thoughts and prayers”—because actions speak louder than words and public prayers without action is nothing but political theater.

Chip Northrup
Cooperstown