If there’s anything I know about summer camp it’s that everyone diligently follows the rules, especially those regarding contraband.
arp242 · 8h ago
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.
dmix · 8h ago
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.
arp242 · 7h ago
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.
Spooky23 · 7h ago
“Those people” probably live on the flood plain. Up on the hill, you don’t want to disturb your beauty sleep.
leereeves · 45m ago
Why do people live in the flood plain?
kiba · 6h ago
It's NIMBYism alright. After all, if they're in your backyard, it's an eyesore, or in this case, an earsore.
> “I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money.
> “We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
SkyLemon · 3h ago
> “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
Translation: Not in my back yard.
jandrewrogers · 6h ago
In fairness, a similar issue has traditionally existed with tornado warnings, which they likely have in that part of the US. Most of the people affected by the warning are not actually at risk because the warnings are poorly targeted or the risk doesn’t meaningfully materialize. Over time, people get warning fatigue and they start ignoring them. It becomes a “boy who cried wolf” situation which makes the loud sirens that much more of a nuisance.
The spam-y nature of many disaster warning systems is widely understood to be an issue. If these people have existing experience with other low hit-rate warning systems like for tornados, it isn’t surprising that they would find even more warnings to be a nuisance. The false positive rates that people experience is too high by an order of magnitude to be an effective system.
If they have warning sirens that are ineffective at conveying real risk, they stop being warnings and become background noise.
whartung · 5h ago
Several months ago, in Southern California, we had a cell phone earthquake alert.
Essentially it was “An earthquake is coming now, seek cover”.
I picked up my phone, read it, gave it a kind of WTH look, and, indeed, an earthquake hit. And it was a notable quake.
I rode out the quake at my desk.
And that’s the thing. Where I’m at, we get hit all the time. Rollers, shakers, slammers. We had a week or so last year where we got hit by a swarm of a dozen of them.
But they’re small. Close 3s. During the swarm, I felt for the folks about 2 miles away. All of them originated beneath them, so they were getting more than I was.
So, it’s hard to take an earthquake warning very seriously. First, I didn’t even know we had warnings. Second, we’re (I’m) used to just riding them out. With that kind of warning, all we can do is duck and cover, assume the worst, hope for the best.
I will say this, next time I get that warning, I’ll heed it. The quake that hit us was interesting enough to justify caution should they send another one, and, one way or another, it’s going to be over soon. So the overall precaution in response to the warning is quite low.
On the other hand, we also get the flash flood warnings. They’re broadcast over a huge area, 95+% of which is, honestly, not susceptible to the flooding.
These are long lasting warnings. With 12 hour durations. The most interesting one is the one for a local river basin. That warning goes off when crossing the river on the freeway.
There are certainly areas susceptible to flash floods. Lots of mountains and canyons. Especially in the foothills in the deserts. Down here in the greater LA, Orange, Inland Empire regions, it’s less of an issue. 100 years of development, dams, and flood control infrastructure actually do the job quite well.
Spamming us with flood alerts just numb us to alerts in general when things might really go bad.
gnat · 6h ago
I can't speak to tornado warnings, but here in NZ we've been getting tsunami warnings once every year or two and it didn't take long for people to go "yeah yeah yeah" instead of "oh crap".
vkou · 7h ago
Kerr county didn't balk at the cost of flood sirens. Biden sent them 10 million dollars for this exact purpose, and they refused to spend it, because it would have let the federal Democrats do something useful for their constituents. [1]
> "Accepting the ARPA money and putting our County under existing and future executive orders would federalize us and make us all slaves."
These people are certifiably insane.
The 10 million did eventually get spent on new police radios and bonuses for the sheriff's department. [2]
When a state like Texas is so gerrymandered that no political competition is really possible, and ignorance is celebrated, why would be surprised that ignorant people elect stupid people to govern them?
I’m sure that they claim to “back the blue” while refusing to put the communications tools that keep them safe in place as well.
What people of this ilk have done to our nation makes me sick.
ykonstant · 4h ago
This reads like an exaggerated parody. It is unfathomably depressing that it is the actual state of affairs :(
leptons · 7h ago
They would cut off their nose to spite their face. Look around, half the people in the country have this same level of brainrot.
DonHopkins · 7h ago
"Insane" is much too mild a word. "Sociopathic" is slightly better, but still not specific or intense enough.
duxup · 9h ago
>Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired.
Your classic manager who feels they are so important that hey HAVE TO be involved in X,Y,Z but they are not a responsible enough person to actually do the job.
bb88 · 8h ago
FEMA has "Emergency" in the name. Traditionally, it's supposed to come in when the normal rescue infrastructure has failed, due to earthquake, weather, etc. You're not optimizing for cost here. You're optimizing for reliable emergency management -- and that's going to cost money.
If you wanted a different agency, like one that prioritized "recovery after 6 months", well, it would help to inform the nation that FEMA is no longer the nationwide emergency management agency. It's up to the local and state governments.
scarface_74 · 8h ago
And Texas voters overwhelmingly voted for politicians who caused this and still make excuses for these same politicians. I am tired of caring for people who vote for people that harm them.
taormina · 6h ago
Not every person in the state voted for this. The dead children didn’t vote for anyone. Have an ounce of compassion or empathy.
XorNot · 2h ago
The people deserving of compassion and sympathy are dead. The people who killed them are busy explaining why despite the repeated warnings and tax payer funding, this actually wasn't their fault.
thephyber · 3h ago
The town that was flooded rejected _free funds_ from the federal government during Covid because they were choking on a red pill of conspiranoia. Destiny (the streamer) did a recent streaming session where he watched the video of the town feedback regarding accepting / rejecting federal government funds from the American Recovery Act (for sirens and standardized first responder comms systems). The short version of the plot is the people were propagandized to distrust the Biden Admin, so they rejected the free upgrades. The voters pressured the town council (one was an actual threat of violence, followed by threats of “consequences”) if the town council accepted the federal funds.
There are consequences to voters and representatives who no longer believe in our shared objective reality.
I don’t blame the little girls, but with freedom comes responsibility. Their parents were responsible for choosing the camp they went to. The camp owner and staff made the risk evaluations of allowing them to sleep in a flood plain during a storm. The local town voted for their representatives and those representatives rejected federal funds which would have given them a chance to survive without cell coverage.
Ultimately your parent comment wasn’t necessarily assigning individual blame. In a democratic republic, the voters / citizens / residents (in aggregate) are ultimately responsible for the actions that elected representatives take in their name.
cjohnson318 · 8h ago
I thought that there was a bar somewhere, a line that would not be crossed, but there isn't, it's just straight up identity politics, or owning the libs, whatever you want to call it.
mjevans · 7h ago
Please remember to take the statements posters make in the best possible light.
My interpretation of such is that they're sick of voters who expect a double standard. Don't do something ''I'' don't like when it helps other people, but when ''I'' need help godspeed.
DonHopkins · 7h ago
The best possible light is that he cares about the lives of the little girls and many others that Trump and Musk and Noem and DOGE killed more than owning the libs and canceling NOAA.
jfengel · 7h ago
And they are going to vote for them again. Next November is a million years from now. Though for that matter this will be forgotten by the November.
mulmen · 6h ago
Putting this out in the world doesn’t help.
longfingers · 2h ago
I think the political spectrum is dangerous because people expect the Paradox of Tolerance and similar correlations to silence the left in places where the right will happily speak.
DonHopkins · 7h ago
Kristi Noem is a DEI hire because her only qualification is that the first four letters of her gender are "FEMA".
That, and she's an expert at killing puppies and bragging about it by writing a book.
In her next book she'll brag about all the little girls she killed in Texas, reminiscing about her experience directing FEMA: "It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done."
Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book:
>“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
>“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
>Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
>“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Which directly led to her current unpleasant job at FEMA.
disposition2 · 1h ago
Noem is the head of DHS.
The (acting) head of FEMA, David Richardson [1], hasn’t visited the disaster area and apparently hasn’t made any public appearances for months [2].
I once worked for a company that had a founder who was cancelling all contracts on a yearly basis, including renting the office. They were proud of cutting costs that way. After two times, the property owner said, "Great! I have a company that asked me about the space and is willing to pay much more" and the company of several hundred people had to move on very short notice.
chris_wot · 8h ago
Did it survive?
KingOfCoders · 6h ago
Yes, it was very rich, but it did disrupt operations a lot and the new space wasn't as nice - we moved from team offices to an open layout, with my boss praising the open layout - we then found out he would get a private office.
There were some dogs that desperately needed shooting?
AtlasBarfed · 9h ago
Advocating for competent governance is partisan!
Heck of a job, Brownie
lenerdenator · 6h ago
Somehow, one of the least unhinged things that woman has ever done.
booleandilemma · 6h ago
I call people like this "octopuses". They need to have their tentacles everywhere, need to be involved in everything, no matter how little they're needed.
Animats · 7h ago
That's what's supposed to happen. The Trump administration is shutting down FEMA. Emergency response is now a state responsibility. The interim head of FEMA who told Congress this was a bad move was fired the next day.[1]
Federal disaster relief is now a gift to be given at the whim of the President. Usually, only red states get it. See the list of major disaster declarations here.[2] More details.[3]
Phrasing matters. using "didn't" puts a bad light on FEMA but if they used "couldn't" it changes things. no idea which it is but i'd bet it should read "couldn't"
> On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.
> That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.
> The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.
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/...
Might not have helped. Camp Mystic campers were not allowed cell phones.[1]
[1] https://www.campmystic.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FINAL-...
"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.
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.
> “I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money.
> “We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
Translation: Not in my back yard.
The spam-y nature of many disaster warning systems is widely understood to be an issue. If these people have existing experience with other low hit-rate warning systems like for tornados, it isn’t surprising that they would find even more warnings to be a nuisance. The false positive rates that people experience is too high by an order of magnitude to be an effective system.
If they have warning sirens that are ineffective at conveying real risk, they stop being warnings and become background noise.
Essentially it was “An earthquake is coming now, seek cover”.
I picked up my phone, read it, gave it a kind of WTH look, and, indeed, an earthquake hit. And it was a notable quake.
I rode out the quake at my desk.
And that’s the thing. Where I’m at, we get hit all the time. Rollers, shakers, slammers. We had a week or so last year where we got hit by a swarm of a dozen of them.
But they’re small. Close 3s. During the swarm, I felt for the folks about 2 miles away. All of them originated beneath them, so they were getting more than I was.
So, it’s hard to take an earthquake warning very seriously. First, I didn’t even know we had warnings. Second, we’re (I’m) used to just riding them out. With that kind of warning, all we can do is duck and cover, assume the worst, hope for the best.
I will say this, next time I get that warning, I’ll heed it. The quake that hit us was interesting enough to justify caution should they send another one, and, one way or another, it’s going to be over soon. So the overall precaution in response to the warning is quite low.
On the other hand, we also get the flash flood warnings. They’re broadcast over a huge area, 95+% of which is, honestly, not susceptible to the flooding.
These are long lasting warnings. With 12 hour durations. The most interesting one is the one for a local river basin. That warning goes off when crossing the river on the freeway.
There are certainly areas susceptible to flash floods. Lots of mountains and canyons. Especially in the foothills in the deserts. Down here in the greater LA, Orange, Inland Empire regions, it’s less of an issue. 100 years of development, dams, and flood control infrastructure actually do the job quite well.
Spamming us with flood alerts just numb us to alerts in general when things might really go bad.
> "Accepting the ARPA money and putting our County under existing and future executive orders would federalize us and make us all slaves."
These people are certifiably insane.
The 10 million did eventually get spent on new police radios and bonuses for the sheriff's department. [2]
[1] https://www.chron.com/news/article/kerr-county-flood-funds-2...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-kerr-county-co...
I’m sure that they claim to “back the blue” while refusing to put the communications tools that keep them safe in place as well.
What people of this ilk have done to our nation makes me sick.
Your classic manager who feels they are so important that hey HAVE TO be involved in X,Y,Z but they are not a responsible enough person to actually do the job.
If you wanted a different agency, like one that prioritized "recovery after 6 months", well, it would help to inform the nation that FEMA is no longer the nationwide emergency management agency. It's up to the local and state governments.
There are consequences to voters and representatives who no longer believe in our shared objective reality.
I don’t blame the little girls, but with freedom comes responsibility. Their parents were responsible for choosing the camp they went to. The camp owner and staff made the risk evaluations of allowing them to sleep in a flood plain during a storm. The local town voted for their representatives and those representatives rejected federal funds which would have given them a chance to survive without cell coverage.
Ultimately your parent comment wasn’t necessarily assigning individual blame. In a democratic republic, the voters / citizens / residents (in aggregate) are ultimately responsible for the actions that elected representatives take in their name.
My interpretation of such is that they're sick of voters who expect a double standard. Don't do something ''I'' don't like when it helps other people, but when ''I'' need help godspeed.
That, and she's an expert at killing puppies and bragging about it by writing a book.
In her next book she'll brag about all the little girls she killed in Texas, reminiscing about her experience directing FEMA: "It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done."
Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/26/trump-kristi-n...
>“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
>“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
>Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
>“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Which directly led to her current unpleasant job at FEMA.
The (acting) head of FEMA, David Richardson [1], hasn’t visited the disaster area and apparently hasn’t made any public appearances for months [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Richardson_(government_o...
2. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/10/fema-leader-texas-f...
https://www.instagram.com/p/DLyjaZ5s51o/
Heck of a job, Brownie
Federal disaster relief is now a gift to be given at the whim of the President. Usually, only red states get it. See the list of major disaster declarations here.[2] More details.[3]
[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/3405810/...
[2] https://www.fema.gov/
[3] https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/trump-disaster-policy-tr...
Yeah, there's reasons for that:
> On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.
> That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.
> The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.