Even before the Central Texas floods that killed more than 100 peopl
e, the state was by far the leader in U.S. flood deaths due partly to geography that can funnel rainwater into deadly deluges, according to a study spanning decades.
From 1959 to 2019, 1,069 people died in Texas in flooding, which is ne
arly one-fifth of the total 5,724 flood fatalities in the Lower 48 states in t
hat time, according to a 2021 study in the journal Water. That’s about 370 more than the next closest state, Louisiana.
Flooding is the second leading weather cause of death in the country, after heat, both in 2024 and the last 30 years, a
veraging 145 deaths a year in the last decade, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Other floods have turned deadly this year: Last month in San Antonio, 13 people died including 11 people who drove into water thinking they could get through, a
ccording to study author Hatim Sharif, a professor of civil and environmental e
ngineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio who studies why people die in floods.
For several years Sharif has urged state and local officials to integrat
e better emergency action programs to use flood forecasts and save lives by alerting people and closing off vulnerable intersections where roads and water meet.
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“I think in Kerr County, if they had an integrated warning system that uses rainfall forecasts to forecast real-time i
mpacts on the ground, that could have saved many lives and could have also helped emergency crews to know which location would be flooded, which roads
would be impassable,” Sharif said. “They could have taken action.”
The role of geography and terrain
Texas has so many deaths because of its geography, popula
tion and size, experts say. The area where the most recent deadly floods struck is known as flash flood alley because of hills and valleys.
“Steep, hilly terrain produces rapid runoff and quick stream rises, since the water will travel downhill at great
er speed into rivers and over land,” said Kate Abshire, lead of NOAA’s flash flood services. “Rocky terrain can exacerbate the development of flash floods and ragi
ng waters, since rocks and clay soils do not allow as much water to infiltrate the ground.”