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Power, Money, Politics, History, Bureaucracy, and Tragedy
David Richardson was the senior political appointee at FEMA when the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes on the morning of July 4th, 2025. He had been sent to the agency only weeks earlier — to nurse it through hurricane season, then shrink it or shut it down.
This is his firsthand account of that night and what followed: the stalled Gulf storm over parched Hill Country limestone, the camps and towns in the floodplain, the search-and-rescue teams he cleared when headquarters would not, and the deeper argument that the real cause was not only weather, but building where the water always comes.
There is no invented plot. “History has no plot,” he writes. The theme is leadership under friction — go to the point of failure, or get out of the way.
Power, Money, Politics, History, Bureaucracy, and Tragedy
David Richardson was the senior political appointee at FEMA when the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes on the morning of July 4th, 2025. He had been sent to the agency only weeks earlier — to nurse it through hurricane season, then shrink it or shut it down.
This is his firsthand account of that night and what followed: the stalled Gulf storm over parched Hill Country limestone, the camps and towns in the floodplain, the search-and-rescue teams he cleared when headquarters would not, and the deeper argument that the real cause was not only weather, but building where the water always comes.
There is no invented plot. “History has no plot,” he writes. The theme is leadership under friction — go to the point of failure, or get out of the way.