As Texas Flood Deaths Rise, Officials Blast Faulty Forecast by National Weather Service

essentialsaltes said:

Conspiracy Theories About the Texas Floods Lead to Death Threats​

Disinformation around a “weather weapon” and cloud seeding is being widely promoted by everyone from anti-government extremists to GOP influencers—leading to real-world consequences.

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How a California cloud-seeding company became the center of a Texas flood conspiracy​

Two days before the waters of the Guadalupe River swelled into a deadly and devastating Fourth of July flood in Kerr County, Texas, engineers with a California-based company called Rainmaker took off in an airplane about 100 miles away and dispersed 70 grams of silver iodide into a cloud.

Their goal? To make it rain over Texas — part of a weather modification practice known as cloud seeding, which uses chemical compounds to augment water droplets inside clouds, making the drops large enough and heavy enough to fall to the ground.

Soon after the flight, Rainmaker’s meteorologists identified an inflow of moisture to the region and advised the team to suspend operations, which they did, Doricko said. Around 1 a.m. the next day, the National Weather Service issued its first flash flood watch for the Kerr County region.

“The biggest and best cloud seeding operations we’ve seen to date have produced tens of millions — and maximally like 100 million — gallons of precipitation,” he said. “We saw in excess of a trillion gallons of precipitation from that flood. Not only could cloud seeding not have caused this, but the aerosols that we dispersed days prior could not have persisted in the atmosphere long enough to have had any consequence on the storm.”

But in the hours after the flood swept through the greater Kerrville area and killed at least 135 people, including three dozen children, conspiracy theories began swirling among a small but vocal group of fringe figures.

“I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS … WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?” wrote Pete Chambers, a former U.S. special forces commander and prominent far-right activist, on the social media platform X.

Within hours of the deadly flood, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she was introducing a bill to make all forms of weather modification — such as cloud seeding — a felony.

That same week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched two newwebsites to “address public questions and concerns “ about weather modification, geoengineering, and contrails, or the thin clouds that form behind aircraft at high altitudes.

Doricko, Rainmaker’s CEO, said he was disappointed to see cloud seeding politicized in the wake of the Texas flood. He was taken aback when he saw that Rep. Greene had posted a picture of his face on X — “insinuating somewhat that cloud seeding, or I, was responsible for the natural disaster in Texas, when any meteorologist or atmospheric scientist could tell you otherwise,” he said.

essentialsaltes said:

FEMA’s response to Texas flood slowed by Noem’s cost controls​

...officials at FEMA leapt into action, preparing to deploy critical search and rescue teams and life-saving resources
But almost instantly, FEMA ran into bureaucratic obstacles, four officials inside the agency told CNN.
Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.

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FEMA official quits after Trump cuts hobble Texas flood response​

The Federal Emergency Management Agency chief in charge of Urban Search and Rescue has quit the agency following a lackluster response to the recent flooding in Texas that killed more than 100 people.

Ken Pagurek resigned on Monday, reportedly in response to efforts by the Trump administration to hobble the agency, part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing policies against funding and properly staffing branches of the federal government. Previously, Pagurek worked for more than a decade at FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue branch and led multiple teams responding to natural disasters.

CNN reported that “Pagurek told colleagues at FEMA that the delay was the tipping point that led to his voluntary departure after months of frustration with the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency, according to two sources familiar with his thinking.”

Texas county’s emergency management coordinator was likely asleep in critical morning hours of deadly floods, sheriff says​

When asked if he knew whether Kerr County Emergency Management Coordinator W.B. "Dub" Thomas was working the night before the early morning July 4 flooding that killed at least 136 people in the state, Sheriff Larry Leitha said: "I'm sure he was at home asleep at that time," and added that he was also asleep.