For grieving communities, the kinds of public memorials familiar from history — stone cenotaphs, bronze monuments and statues — feel inadequate to the demands of the present. Implacable and stolid, they can seem more about their own physical grandeur than the lives they honor.

Unfounded rumors linking an extreme weather event to human attempts at weather modification are again spreading on social media. It is not plausible that available weather modification techniques caused or influenced the July 4 flash flooding along the Guadalupe River in Texas.

Search and rescue teams in Texas are pushing through one final day of heavy rain as they search for over 170 people still missing after the devastating July Fourth weekend floods. With at least 129 confirmed dead — including 36 children — families across Central Texas are mourning and waiting for answers.

Texas officials and Hill Country leaders knew the risks of flooding along the Guadalupe. Warnings went unheeded, flood warnings, river gauges and sirens unfunded — and more than 130 Texans died.

A large percentage of people still unaccounted for were probably visiting the area, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said.

After a tragedy, records from local archives can help us understand how a community understands itself. Here’s some of what we learned following the devastating July 4 flooding in Texas.

A flash flood warning was issued by the NWS Fort Worth TX on Monday at 2:30 a.m. in effect until 5:30 a.m. The warning is for Johnson, Bosque and Hill counties.

Even in areas that are mapped, like the Camp Mystic site in Kerr County, Texas, that was hit by a deadly flash flood on July 4, 2025, the maps may underestimate their risk because of a reliance on historic data and outdated risk assessments.