Matt Dowd: Tragedy of Texas Flooding Was ‘Totally Preventable’; ‘This Is Not Every 100 Years, This Is Every Few Years’

Wallace: “Matt Dowd, let me bring you in on this and let me just pull back the curtain. Our last conversation about your next appearance on this show was about a piece you wrote about trauma, and now you are in the middle of the state you love, with neighbors you love, suffering this extraordinary heartbreak. Where are your thoughts today?”

DOWD: “Well, I’m glad to be here to talk about this. And I’m — I mean, I’d just like to put some context to follow up something what Ryan said. I mean, this is incredibly tragic, incredibly sad. All of us know this who visited this area, spent time on the Guadalupe, had — you know, I’ve spent a lot of time in Center Point. I had a cabin on the Guadalupe and understand the flood risk that exists there. But these camps, and especially a place like Camp Mystic, just so people understand, this is a tradition that everyone in Texas, central Texas, Houston, Dallas, knows of, of these kids spending time, boys and girls, on these camps. And this camp specifically, I’ve talked to people whose grandmothers went to this camp, whose mothers went to this camp, and then their daughters have gone to this camp. And so, this is a tradition that’s in Texas, it’s now been completely shattered in a very traumatic way in this. I so disagree with this idea of like, oh, there’s no way to know this thing was going to come. There was no way to know, you know, this was going to happen. It was, as Donald Trump said, it’s a 100-year event. How would we know? This is flash flood alley. As the senator, who I’m sure we’ll talk about, this is something that we know about, that we should have been prepared for, that we should have been doing something about for decades and decades and decades locally and at the state level and at the federal level. The fact that we didn’t and now we’re sort of sort of dealing with this immense tragedy is so, and so incredibly disturbing in this because this was, in my view, the tragedy of this, and the extent of the tragedy of this was totally preventable because we’ve known on the Guadalupe River and that river basin, this kind of thing can happen. Maybe not as bad as what happened, and it’s tragic it did, but this is — this is not every 100 years. This is every few years where these flood events happen. And the fact that people weren’t prepared, that all levels of government in this, is just so, so incredibly disturbing.”