World Central Kitchen The flooding that hit Texas in July was catastrophically historic.
A deluge of rain – up to 20 inches in some areas – spurred deadly flash floods that quickly hit the news cycle. One story in particular – the loss of 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic, an all-girls summer camp – garnered strong attention from the media, launching conversations about flood prevention and response into the mainstream.
“Seeing that many children die tends to affect people in a very strong way,” said Shirley Clark, Ph.D., P.E., BC.WRE, F.EWRI, M.ASCE, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State Harrisburg and past president of ASCE’s Environmental and Water Resources Institute. “We look at them, and we look at a huge possibility of life.”
During the storm, the Guadalupe River rose about 26 feet in approximately 45 minutes, hitting Kerr County – site of Camp Mystic – the hardest. With a total death toll of around 140, the disaster stands as the 10th-deadliest flash flood event in U.S. history.
Among civil engineers, Clark hasn’t seen the conversation around flood infrastructure change much. But she has noticed a growing awareness of different aspects of flood prevention and response among the public.
“There was a lot of coverage around Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, but there was less discussion around where the floodplain was and where the river rise was compared to Texas,” she said.
Helene, which peaked as a Category 4 hurricane that hit parts of the southeastern United States and southern Appalachians in September 2024, was the deadliest hurricane in the contiguous U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, causing at least 250 fatalities.
Jennifer Sloan Ziegler, Ph.D., P.E., ENV SP, BC.WRE, M.ASCE, a senior environmental project manager at Neel-Schaffer Inc. and president of EWRI, said the event “reinforced” the flood infrastructure conversation in the civil engineering industry while shifting the public conversation to focus on how to prevent these events from happening again.
“That's a really tricky question because the answer is: You cannot out-design a 1,000-year, 2,000-year, 5,000-year storm. You cannot do it,” she said.
Risk comes from multiple angles
Civil engineers design for risk, Clark said. But the data they rely on for design has lagged. Current design data goes as far back as the 1970s and does not reflect changes in weather patterns and the increasing intensity of storms.
And on top of broad changes in climate since then, there are local weather variations to consider.
“Climate change reflects the long-term warming of the system, and superimposed on that is natural variability that can occur at a monthly time scale, an annual time scale, multiannual, or interannual time scales,” said Dan Walker, Ph.D., P.G., M.ASCE, a senior geologist at EA Engineering, Science, and Technology and co-chair of the ASCE-NOAA Task Force on Climate Resilience in Engineering Practice. “It's a sawtooth pattern going up a long-term curve.”
“The probability of these events is going to change over the entire system, but at any one location, we need to understand what the local conditions are that drive rainfall events, and we have to be very careful about appropriate attribution studies,” he continued.
By accounting for broad and local climate patterns, civil engineers will be able to better understand which natural disasters are abnormal events and which are here to stay.
“In some areas, you may see minor changes in rainfall. In other areas, you may see more extreme changes,” Walker said. “So, it goes back to this evidence-based analysis.”
In the short term, he sees climate-resilient infrastructure and public policy changes as the way forward.
A challenging policy landscape
Getting any new policy or infrastructure project off the ground requires communication, and civil engineers aren’t always at the forefront of public discussion.
“For a long time, there was an expectation to maintain our impartiality, to be seen as a neutral observer to provide good information,” Clark said. “There was encouragement for engineers to not necessarily be involved in politics.”
But not everyone in the policy space understands the engineering principles behind flood infrastructure design. And the concept of risk – especially when tied to deadly events – might not resonate with the public.
“When we have these conversations, I think we as engineers need to start pushing to shift the conversation from, ‘How can we eliminate risk?’ to ‘How can we minimize risk? How can we minimize loss of life?’” Sloan Ziegler said.
She also emphasized the technical definition of resiliency – how soon you can get back to normal after an event happens – as opposed to the idea of bringing risk to zero.
“I think a large part of that has to come from the engineering side, which is going to be changing that narrative and not playing into, ‘How can we eliminate our risk?’” she said.
Walker recommends civil engineers take the time to inform policymakers about what risk really means in the engineering world.
“Getting past this easy shorthand to try to describe risk is not working for us, so we have to find a way to educate people as to what these things really mean – especially the decision-makers,” he said.
Sometimes, people can view discussions about building codes or land ordinances as restrictive, so civil engineers need to “have confidence in the information we’re sharing with them” – which hasn’t always been successful.
“I would say the biggest thing that needs to change is that we have to find a way to break down local resistance to evidence-based decision-making,” Walker said.
Like “risk,” the term “climate change” can elicit a range of reactions. But there are ways civil engineers can have discussions about weather without it.
“There are people out there who will not talk about climate change but will say the weather is changing,” Clark said.
“It comes down to language,” she continued. “Can we have a conversation around them seeing the weather changing with storms getting more severe? If they don't want to talk about climate change, let's change the language to meet their perspective.”
Another part of the language component is tone. Carol Haddock, MPA, P.E., F.ASCE, a senior program adviser at Black & Veatch and 2026 president-elect of ASCE, said civil engineers should use their reputations to have “calm, data-driven discussions.”
“We need to talk about what we are measuring and how we have an obligation to plan and design for not only what we are measuring, but what those trends over time show us,” she said.
Getting the conversation about risk off the ground is just one piece of the puzzle. Once that is established, “we need to address what types of activities are acceptable in what areas,” Haddock said.
Haddock, a Texas native, grew up in flash flood alley and has seen tragedy strike along the Guadalupe River multiple times.
“When I was a very young child in the 1970s, more than 20 people perished from flooding along this same river,” she said. “Then again, in 1987 as I was preparing to go to college and start my path toward being a civil engineer, campers evacuating the Pot O’ Gold (Ranch) camp on this same river were lost.”
“The Wimberley floods (along the Blanco River, a tributary of the Guadalupe River) in 2015 was a similar overnight flash flood that washed houses down the river and resulted in deaths,” she continued. “Yet, even after all these examples, there was not action to fully understand the risks and take the actions to minimize the risks.”
Discussions around land use and zoning can be difficult, and finances present another hurdle to policy change.
“The other conversation that's come up has been on the flood-prevention side around what we do about buildings, locations, human development, and living spaces that we know under the new conditions are going to flood or be subject to other disasters,” Clark said.
New restrictions could result in buildings being removed from the tax base, and the loss of revenue could hinder government finances. If balanced correctly, though, the increase in public land – and its cheap maintenance costs – could also lead to more savings.
“We're going to have to have those hard conversations in local governments,” Clark said. “Do we talk about buying out? With the unfortunate loss of both life and property in Texas, governments are going to have a chance to rethink some of that.”
Sloan Ziegler sees zoning ordinances as a necessary component of future flood-risk mitigation.
“With more development, you're going to have more issues, you're going to have more runoff, and you're going to have faster runoff, and that's going to have a cumulative effect. Projects don't stand alone, and their impacts are not individual,” she said.
Haddock said that although the conversation around flood prevention is evolving, it is “still focused on the ability to stay in these high-risk areas and not as much on what the risks really are and how they are changing as extreme weather continues to change.”
“Can summer camps or RV parks exist along these amazing rivers and still keep people informed and safe? I wholeheartedly believe the answer to that question is yes, but it’s not the way we are currently doing it,” she said. “It will involve embracing data and projections that assume worst-case scenarios – the kids are worth that – and reorienting our activities, especially the physical location of buildings, to match those risks.”
Along with climate patterns, the extreme flooding in Texas called attention to inadequate warning systems, including the absence of sirens in the area. Former Kerr County Commissioner Tom Moser told NPR that a siren system would have saved lives.
Moser pushed for the system in 2016 but was unable to get the public support and state funding needed to move the project forward. He expects attitudes toward a siren system project to change after the deadly event.
“Obviously, the issue around early warning systems needs to be addressed,” Clark said.
In the case of the Texas flash floods, the problem wasn’t necessarily a lack of data, but communication gaps between the National Weather Service and localities. Warnings were issued via cellphone notifications, but not everyone has access to a cellphone or cell service, especially during a storm that can impact infrastructure functionality.
“We have now thought much more about places that are more isolated,” Clark said.
A path forward
Despite challenges, civil engineers are making progress on the technical side of flood infrastructure.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlas 15 – an updated spatially continuous National Precipitation Frequency Atlas of the U.S. – is one example. Still in its pilot phase, the database not only improves upon short-term rainfall predictions but accounts for climate trends through 2100.
The White House attempted to pause Atlas 15’s development shortly before the Texas floods, but “there was such an outcry from the engineering community” that advocates were able to get the project moving again, Sloan Ziegler said.
NOAA Atlas 15 is now expected to be released in 2026.
“I think one of the good things we have seen come out of this tragedy is a way to continue to push the needle forward,” she said.
Automated technologies offer another solution to gaps in the warning system by shortening the timeline between disaster detection and the issuance of warnings.
“I do think that smart technologies are going to allow us to get data in near real time and have action taken, mostly automated, so we don't have to rely on somebody waking up overnight or somebody being in the office,” Clark said.
Haddock noted that there are already systems in place that use existing measured data and combine real-time measurements with rainfall predictions that can “provide quite accurate projections of flood location and depth.”
“Combine this data with on-ground alert and evacuation systems, and you can reduce the risk of these devastating impacts,” she said.
Clark emphasized that the increasing frequency and intensity of flooding isn’t limited to Texas; it’s everywhere.
“The more we can do to get the data from NOAA, the more we can do to look at updated codes,” she said. “And the more we can do to be public advocates as engineers, the faster I think we can help our neighbors.”
