We forget what we don’t want to remember. While I understand that impulse, there are dangers embedded in our forgetfulness. This is especially true for anyone living in Flash Flood Alley, or what we like to call the Hill Country (a concept that softens the nature of this flood-sculpted and -scoured terrain). So I have come to believe after nearly 30 years of thinking, researching, and writing about the September 1921 flood which ravaged Central and South Texas; it killed at least 224 people, and, in its devastated epicenter, San Antonio, 80 or more perished. Yet those who survived that flood were surprised to learn that the Alamo City endured an even larger-in-size (though less fatal) inundation in 1819. There was little to no public memory. People did not die solely because of forgetfulness but because this amnesia allowed succeeding generations to erase the past and their responsibilities to the future. When they could have enacted post-flood, life-saving interventions, they chose not to act on their progeny’s behalf.
Here’s hoping that does not hold true for the most recent disaster, the swift and punishing rise of the Guadalupe River over the July Fourth weekend. It swept away well more than 100 children and adults, a horrific tally which may never be known in full. As with the 1921 flood, when public officials admitted that some bodies might not be recovered, interred as they were beneath tons of silt, gravel, rock, and other debris, so, too, with the Guadalupe. “We don’t know where they are,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly acknowledged. We don’t know how many we’ve lost.” That uncertainty intensifies the anguish even as it testifies to this flood’s catastrophic impact. (Mercifully, the official missing persons count was reduced over the past weekend from around 100 to three largely due to individuals being confirmed safe.)
But there is nothing unknown about what triggered the brutal 2025 flood and so many others dating back to the nineteenth century (when the first, if spotty, records were kept). Some of the explanation results from where the Guadalupe — like the Colorado and San Gabriel rivers to its north, and the San Antonio to its south — originate. Their tributaries rise in the rugged Edwards Plateau, the massive landform whose 24-million acres dominate and define Central Texas. Although the plateau’s elevation is modest, with its eastern sectors varying from 800 to 1200 feet above sea level, this range in height is less important than its relation to the very gulf waters against which the plateau is measured…