And the freshly anointed king is off to play golf.
“It’s terrible. The floods? It’s shocking. They don’t know the answer yet as to how many people, but it looks like some young people have died,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he traveled to his New Jersey golf club.
Best place for him. The victims do not need a special “presidential visit” which only diverts resources from the support teams.
P.S. “Air Force One” is not an aircraft, it is a flight number.
You keep saying that and we know it is true that but, in practice, and according to the Official US government website:
Technically, “Air Force One” is used to designate any Air Force aircraft carrying the President, but it is now standard practice to use the term to refer to specific planes that are equipped to transport the Commander-in-Chief.
Today, this name refers to one of two highly customized Boeing 747-200B series aircraft, which carry the tail codes 28000 and 29000. The Air Force designation for the aircraft is VC-25A.
So Air Force One is two aircraft but only depending if a certain person is aboard.
There are literally thousands of terms misused in everyday written and verbal communication.
I thought I was a pedant but I’m obviously far from it.
We all understand the term is a call sign and not a flight number as you wrote (see, we can all play at being the ultimate pedant!) but in common usage, it refers to the President’s 747 planes.
Everyone understands that.
Not to mention that toilet-paper probably comes from China and is too expensive to throw at people there now.
On the rain starts it’s not possible to do much. Only way to avoid events like this is to keep people out of the river floodplain. So, this is a flood hazard assessment + land use + permitting issue.
But, this is “private property trespassers will be shot” country. The government will not tell land owners what the can or can’t build on their PRIVATE PROPERTY and how many children they can host on those buildings.
FEMA stands for Federal Emergency Management Agency.
It is a US government agency that is part of the Department of Homeland Security and is responsible for coordinating responses to disasters in the United States.
There is probably quite a lot they could do to help people whose homes were flood damaged.
Flood damage to homes is like broken windows after a school shooting massacre. Yeah, it’s related to the event and I guess it matters too. But, really?
I’d love to punch Trump’s admins but whatever FEMA does is not going to fix the 43 confirmed dead and at least 27 missing (probably more) in a region known for this kind of hydrometeorological events.
The protection of the population is other people’s jobs:
Pointing at Trump and making noise only allows to all these people to avoid any liability and consequences.
Blaming the president for everything is exactly what happens in a 3rd world country where nothing improves ever. Even the local authorities hide behind the president.
Note, I wrote “help people whose homes were flood damaged”
About 850 people have been rescued so far.
Estimates of homeless range from 5,000 to 10,000 but just broken windows
Multiple flash flood warnings remain in place over the weekend in central Texas.
Current estimates of Texas flood damage are in the billions.
A better comparison would be to helping families of the children killed in a school massacre
From NYTs
Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.
Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation.
The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.
Sorry, not a great day this Sunday.
I understand people temporally displaced need a roof and food. But, that can be done by almost everyone. Civil protection, land management, evacuations, aid delivery…that can only be done people in the right positions.
Back to the topic of climate change, there was a tropical storm a few days ago in Nuevo León (my home) and Tamaulipas in Mexico. Some of that very humid air moved north to Texas. Combined with the warm Gulf of Mexico, the air had a lot of water. Add a few ingredients and intense rainfall comes out.
A quick summary from a real meteorologist BalancedWx Special: Tragic flash flooding in the Texas Hill Country
In the end, is this climate change? Yes and no.
Yes, because the frequency of intense rainfall events may have increased.
No, because if the catastrophic flood happens every 20 years instead of 50, humans should still be smart to not put themselves in the way of harm, regardless of return period. I’m thinking today about tsunami stones, there should be something similar for flooding around the world.
Someone smarter than me once wrote " All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to et back to where it was". We can get meta and think it’s about trauma or the cyclic nature or life. Or we can look at rivers and see that rivers don’t overflow the riverbed. The floodplain IS the riverbed because the river has been there before and will occupy it again once we’re long gone.
Why is there no mention that Big Macs are also required?
If one want to put the blame anyone, than blame the big oil companies and all the politicians who have ignored it for the past 50 years. And it is still business as usual! Drill baby drill!
I tend to agree, but humans do it all over the world. We see catastrophic flooding pretty regularly in the USA, and we see hurricanes and tornadoes destroy the same homes over and over. But Americans don’t want legislation to prevent losses, because that’s expensive for building. Better to have the government bail you out every time. Except this time, I can’t help but wonder if mandatory shelters at higher ground (along with camp bosses having phones set to receive emergency alerts) would have saved some lives.
I was watching “Just have a Think” about the two models of thought. One American and one British. Both accept a warming world, only one suggests short term profiting from the catastophic events unfolding and one is saying that the a warming world will collape our civilization by the end of the century.
Guess who suggests what.
On the Texas floods
Trump: That water situation that all is and that was really the Biden setup. That was not our setup.
It happened in such an area where it’s probably one of the easier places in the country for them to be convinced it was “God’s will” and they probably didn’t pray hard enough. Trump’s off the hook.
So they’ll be fine with the usual thoughts and prayers from the other states?