The US Department of Homeland Security responded to criticism of warning systems on Sunday on social media by saying mainstream media were “lying” and that the National Weather Service issued timely warnings.

Fuck Trump and everyone who still supports him.

Predicting “how much rain is going to fall out of a thunderstorm, that’s the hardest thing that a meteorologist can do,” Vagasky says. A number of unpredictable factors—including some element of chance—go into determining the amount of rainfall in a specific area, he says.

“The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event,” says Vagasky. “But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that.”

Flash floods in this part of Texas are nothing new. Eight inches of rainfall in the state “could be on a day that ends in Y,” says Matt Lanza, also a certified digital meteorologist based in Houston. It’s a challenge, he says, to balance forecasts that often show extreme amounts of rainfall with how to adequately prepare the public for these rare but serious storms.

“It’s so hard to warn on this—to get public officials who don’t know meteorology and aren’t looking at this every day to understand just how quickly this stuff can change,” Lanza says. “Really the biggest takeaway is that whenever there’s a risk for heavy rain in Texas, you have to be on guard.”

And meteorologists say that the NWS did send out adequate warnings as it got updated information. By Thursday afternoon, it had issued a flood watch for the area, and a flash flood warning was in effect by 1am Friday. The agency had issued a flash flood emergency alert by 4:30am.

The National Weather Service did stellar work with the tools that Trump's DOGE cuts have left them with. The tragically inept emergency managers in Texas that think posts on Facebook and Twitter are good enough for emergency alerts should be strung up by their feet and at the next county fair and used for target practice with rotten fruit. As should every politician who voted against a siren type alert system when it came up for a vote last year.