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More than 130 people died in Texas Hill Country floods in 2025. Newly installed warning sirens held the death toll during July 2026 flooding in the same region to three.
Alice Hill, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, calls the outcome an example of Republican-led states adapting after disaster.
Texas: the before-and-after Texas responded to the 2025 catastrophe by expanding flood-warning systems and floodplain buyouts. Houston had already tightened building codes following Hurricane Harvey.
Hill, who served as a senior resilience policy official on President Obama's National Security Council, offered a direct summary: "Building to the last disaster is like preparing for the last war." Mikhail Chester, director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University, says the infrastructure industry has shifted its internal math.
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