FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors

Here's some local and national reporting I found interesting.

1. Kerr county balked at the cost of flood sirens. [0]

2. Kerr county didn't alert all cell phones of the emergency. [1]

3. Kerr county repeatedly asked the State of Texas for flood help and the state said no. [2]

4. Kerr county was in the bottom half of property taxes in the state of Texas in 2017. [3]

[0] https://www.wowt.com/2025/07/11/small-texas-community-where-...

[1] https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/fema-records-kerr-coun...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/us/politics/texas-flood-a...

[3] https://www.uttyler.edu/academics/colleges-schools/business/...

From that NYT article:

"Some residents argued that outdoor sirens blaring warnings in the event of a flash flood would ruin the natural feel of the area that many prized. “The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of the night,” one county commissioner at the time, Buster Baldwin, said during a 2016 meeting. “I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.” (Mr. Baldwin died in 2022.)"

I'm thinking hard here, but I'm reasonably sure this is at least in the top-5 most moronic short-sighted, selfish, brain-dead things I've ever seen in my life. Possibly even top-3. Yeah, I'd join Buster in the bar to drink ourselves in a coma.

NIMBY is the most powerful political force in every western country.

It's far easier killing off any new economic and public development at the local level than any national level environmentalist or small government movement could ever dream for.

This is not "NIMBY". Warning systems need to be where they're needed, and if that's your backyard then that's your backyard. Complaining about "damn sirens going off in the middle of the night" during a life and death scenario is on an entirely different level.

“Those people” probably live on the flood plain. Up on the hill, you don’t want to disturb your beauty sleep.

Why do people live in the flood plain?