On July 4th, a flash flood in Kerr County, Texas killed 27 young girls and counselors at Camp Mystic , a Christian girls' summer camp whose staff alumni included former first lady Laura Bush. The campers and more than one hundred other local residents who also perished in the flood reacted too late, or not at all, to the National Weather Service's flash flood warning and emergency text alerts issued at 1:14 and 4:30 A.M., respectively. According to an article in the New Yorker , "many people simply ignored the warnings, or had their phones silenced or turned off." The article mentioned that after a flood in 2015 that killed 13 people, Kerr County officials decided against installing a $1 million siren system that would have warned upriver towns when a flood was coming. In Vermont, which also experienced devastating flash floods in 2023 and 2024, the political response was different. In order to reduce the risk of recurrent floods, legislators passed a Flood Safety A...