Flash Flood Alley
Monumentality and memories of disasters
In the aftermath of the Central Texas floods, there emerged a pattern of conflict which is tragically familiar to anyone paying attention to natural disasters these days. There was the usual back and forth on which authority should be blamed – should the state and county have been better prepared? Did the DOGE cuts to the NWS make a difference to the weather alerts? There are also lengthy Wikipedia discussions on how much attribution should be given to climate change, and then there are the camp of people who blame this on God and want to move on with life (until God strikes again). It also re-emerged into common knowledge that the worst affected area is known as Flash Flood Alley – a corridor of the Guadalupe River that is affected by flash floods often.
I was not familiar with the term but I live an hour from the area and I'm no true Texan by any means. There is a Wikipedia page for Flash Flood Alley but all the references are from articles written in 2025. The oldest reference I could find is an article from Texas Water Resources Institute, which published a report in 2016 titled Do You Live in Flash Flood Alley? in the aftermath of a catastrophic flash flood in roughly the same Central Texas region affected by the 2025 floods. The report quotes a professor saying “The region has some of the highest flood discharge per unit area of a drainage basin in the country.” Then the phrase Flash Flood Alley disappears for another few years before appearing in some articles in 2021, during yet another rainy summer in Texas. The phrase disappeared, once again, from everyone's mind like some kind of antimeme only to re-appear after over 200 lives were lost in the most recent flood.
In light of natural disasters, it is typical, almost quotidian at this point, for some forgotten common knowledge to re-emerge and occupy everyone's mind space for a few weeks and then be forgotten until the next disaster—be it Flash Flood Alley or knowledge about houses being too close to the urban-forest interface in the case of the Los Angeles fire. While a lot can be said about preparedness of governments, warning systems etc., one of the reasons why such common knowledge does not persist may have to do with how we remember such catastrophic events.
We tend to discuss and remember natural disasters with a sense of monumentality—static events to be remembered and recounted for future generations. There is little emphasis on preservation of knowledge gained in light of the disaster. If the disaster happened in an area often visited by tourists, as is the case with Central Texas, then additional care is taken to erase any memory of what happened. I've visited Central Texas several times and while there is a lot of information about animal species and random settlers who owned ranches in the 1800s, there is very little in the built environment to remind you that you are in a region prone to disasters, particularly one that gives little warning or time to react.
The sense of monumentality also extends to online archives like Wikipedia, which is used as historical reference for these disasters by the common public. Even though the information presented on Wikipedia is just rough consensus of Wikipedia editors and sources, culturally and visually, we see Wikipedia as a reference. The perception of Wikipedia as reference has become more contested in recent years, But it still remains the only place to read the rough consensus on events like natural disasters.
Now that people are accessing a lot of the information on Wikipedia through LLMs, perhaps it would be a good time to rethink how information is presented. Currently the talk pages that show how rough consensus has been achieved do not have much affordance or legible design. If I were to redesign Wikipedia for an age of LLMs, it would be designed around these talk pages that present the rough consensus and how it was arrived – making the process of browsing wikipedia more active rather than passive and static. The design of information in an online library like Wikipedia should reflect an open space where universal access is guaranteed but not universal consensus. This, I think, would persuade people to see and contribute to common knowledge regarding natural disasters, and not treat the text as a dead narrative to be consumed.
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The reason why the southern coast of United States has gotten reasonably adept at dealing with hurricanes is primarily because it happens every year, but also perhaps in part because hurricanes are disasters that have a sense of monumentality—they are given dramatic names, they can be anticipated, news channels spend breathless days reporting the arrival of the hurricane like it's a carnival, and there is a lot of centralized response that can be planned ahead. But, the same region is susceptible to disasters that leave a trail of destruction with little warning—hail, flash floods, tornadoes etc. Sustaining common knowledge to prepare for these disasters requires an anti-monumental thinking, where knowledge about these disasters becomes part of everyday life. What does this look like? I can think of a simple speculative example
One of the striking features of Texas roads are the yellow flood gauges that you find on bridges, in low-lying areas in parks etc. I remember walking through a park in Houston that is part of a reservoir overflow. The park had several flood gauges, and one of them had a mark made by someone using spray paint; it showed the height to which the park was flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Maybe all flood gauges in Central Texas should show the highest point the water reached during the floods of 2025. Or, would being reminded of our mortality and lack of power over nature make us feel too weak and not Texan enough?
More on Knowledge Preservation
I’ve been writing a series of science fiction stories based on scenarios developed in a workshop hosted by
and at , along with The Long Now Foundation. Participants in the workshop imagined the trajectory of a knowledge systems (such as Wikipedia in one of the scenarios) across a 1000 year timeline. In each scenario, the knowledge systems were threatened by multiple crises at different time scales, and got re-imagined. The effect of this structure is that the systems imagined feel dynamic and lived in, which made the stories fun to write.
I lived in Austin for 10 years and now in Houston for another 11. I have come to the conclusion that the cities that are used to getting lashed by nature are safer than those that appear safe. Safety in the absolute is very dangerous - makes one very fragile. The only way to be 'prepped' is to put yourself in difficult places, work with people who deal with difficulty and build up resiliency and anti-fragility.