Water and Sticky Messes

It's Time for Government Action

I’m sure most of you have heard about the flooding and loss of life in the Texas Hill Country. It’s simply unimaginable and while this sort of tragedy is not 100% avoidable, many of us are shaken by the failure of local and national governments to upgrade alarm systems (a local decision) and the removal of staff that might have provided earlier warnings and mitigated the loss of life (a Trump administration/DOGE decision).

Yesterday afternoon, there was a break in the rain and I managed to get out on the cargo bike with our dog Woody. It was a welcomed chance to stretch my legs—and all four of Woody’s—after a week of non-stop rain in Austin. Woody and I took the Southern Walnut Creek trail. My usual route covers about 20 miles, round trip, and sixteen of those miles are on a paved greenbelt that’s completely off-road and free of cars. Hooray local government!

Remnants of mud on my front tire. This picture was taken 10 miles of riding after we encountered the mud.

I braked to a stop at the MLK underpass because I saw a thick coating of sticky mud covering the bike path. It decided it didn’t look too bad so I dismounted to walk my bike through it. It was more difficult than I predicted. The mud was 3-4” deep and VERY sticky. My cargo bike is six feet long with a small 20” wheel in front, it weighs about seventy pounds with Woody in the cargo basket. I could only move the bike forward by lifting it up and heaving it forward a few feet at a time. My shoes kept coming off in the mud (the ONLY drawback to slip-on Converse All-Stars). We fought our way across twenty feet of muddy path and made it to the other side with both shoes; I found an alternate route home that avoided the underpass.

Now imagine that same sticky mess is 30 feet deep and covers miles of your town.

A map of my ride with Woody.

Flooding has been a regular part of our experience here in the US and also our time in Europe. We have friends who were impacted by the Wimberley, TX floods of 2015 (Carolyn has been working on a novel that centers around the aftermath of those horrific floods).

When Carolyn and I were browsing apartments (early in our plan to move abroad) she sent me a link to an apartment that was large, well-located, and very appealing, but she thought something looked “off” in the photos. I took one look and said “that place flooded.” Anyone who has worked construction would have spotted it easily, new floors everywhere and new wallboard up to four feet above the floor, doors that open directly onto the street level. Montpellier suffered terrible flooding in 2014 and we have observed small-scale localized flooding of streets in our brief time as residents.

Carolyn and I were in Spain for a very rainy visit with friends in November last year (2024). We didn’t realize at the time that our rainy weekend in Barcelona was part of the storm that caused major flooding in southern Spain. Those floods claimed over 200 lives and devastated several small towns, including Valencia. In Spain too, warning systems and infrastructure projects that might have saved lives and property were shelved, largely due to cost and climate change denial. In 2023 a flood warning system that protected Valencia was abandoned as a “superfluous expense” by the newly elected Valencian government. That system had been put in place after flooding in 2019 claimed several lives. A meteorologist working for the Spanish government gave advance warnings about the possiblity of extreme rain and flooding in advance of the 2024 Spanish floods. His concerns were dismissed by climate change denialists as “alarmism”.

I’m dumbstruck that so many people still refuse to accept the reality of climate change. Even if one rejects the idea that the change is human-caused, the physics of what’s happening are simple and incontrovertible:

• the earth is warmer—that’s not controversial, we have data, the warmest 10 years on record occurred in the last ten years

• warm air holds more water vapor than colder air

• more vapor in the air means heavier rain and stronger storms, which means more flooding.

These problems aren’t things individuals can solve, and they’re probably too big for local governments as well. These problems require national governments and international organizations to lead the way. It reminds me of a post from Heather Cox Richardson’s excellent Substack:

“…But Lincoln had watched his town of New Salem die because its settlers—hard workers, eager to make the town succeed—could not dredge the Sangamon River to promote trade by themselves.

Lincoln later mused, “The legitimate object of government is ‘to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves,’… as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.”

I leave you with some good news about water and government action. I was happy to read this article about Paris opening swimming sites in the Seine after a major cleanup of the river.

This is the first time in a century that people have been invited to swim in the Seine.

à la prochaine,

Roberto & Carolyn