In the early morning hours of Friday, July the 4th, the Texas Hill Country was inundated with rain causing massive flooding. The Guadalupe River rose over 20 feet in less than 45 minutes. As a result, there have been more than 120 deaths and there are still over 160 people still missing.
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These floods captivated the nation, but there is a question that I want to know the answer to. Are Black communities threatened by this kind of disaster? Well, let’s lay some groundwork to get to that answer.
If you’ve not heard of environmental racism (The disproportionate exposure of marginalized groups, particularly Black people, to environmental hazards and pollution.), I encourage you to read up on it. Put simply, if white people did not want to live in a certain area, they pushed Black people into it. History is full of examples of this. The formal term for it is called redlining.
Because of practices like these, predominately Black communities are overly located in areas susceptible to things like natural disasters. Two examples of this are The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 where hundreds of thousands of Black families were forced to flee their homes and move to other parts of the country. And, of course, Hurricane Katrina.
But those natural disasters are in the past. Surely things are better now, right? Wrong. But we have to talk science for a second to understand why.
Scientists have been sounding the alarm about climate change for decades. And if you’ve been paying attention, what they are saying makes sense.
When the atmosphere is warmer, it can hold more water. That is not science fiction, that is simple physics. So, when you combine an atmosphere that is holding more water with normal weather patterns what you get is more extreme weather.
Flooding has gotten worse. As have hurricanes and tornadoes. So now let us put this all together and answer the question asked above.
How likely is it that flooding like what we see in Texas will impact Black communities? Well, the answer is simple.
By 2050, the risk of a major flood to Black communities disaster will increase by 20%. One of the reasons for this are rising sea levels that will result in stronger storm surges. There will be higher levels of water that reach inland because of these surges. And this will impact “communities with large African American populations on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts,” scientists warn.
They call for more money to be invested in meteorology to help predict these storms before they arrive. They also insist that there be better flood warning measures implemented in these communities. However, with DOGE’s recent cuts to the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that ain’t happening.
Let’s just tell the truth and shame the devil. It is not a question of if something like what happened in the Texas Hill Country will happen to a Black community. It is a matter of when.
Straight From 
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