Floods Are Increasingly Common. Our Water Infrastructure Is Unprepared

The deadly floods in Central Texas, which had killed more than 100 people as of Tuesday afternoon, have become a flashpoint for discussions of government preparedness for flood emergencies. Kerr County abandoned efforts to build a more robust warning system, reportedly due to budget issues; officials also appear not to have issued evacuation orders at the start of the flood.

But one expert tells Governing that local officials across the country should also be using this moment to reflect on the need for updated water infrastructure, the first line of defense for communities experiencing extreme rain events.

A 2024 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Value of Water Campaign estimated that the country is billions of dollars short in investments needed to update water infrastructure for 21st-century needs, including a new normal of extreme rainfall events.

Floods are the most common and expensive natural disaster, and the warmest years since record keeping began in 1850 are all in the last decade. Warmer air holds more moisture; higher temperatures increase evaporation.

Emily Simonson directs the Value of Water Campaign for the U.S. Water Alliance, a nonprofit organization that focuses on water challenges.

Water leaders are in Pittsburgh this week for the One Water Summit. The event gathers some of the brightest minds across disciplines and communities working to elevate needs, spread what works, and test new approaches, Simonson says.

The Texas disaster will be top of mind for attendees. Simonson spoke to Governing from Pittsburgh about the importance of keeping focus on infrastructure needs amid post-event controversies. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you hope people will take away from recent events?

Tragedies like these are moments where you want to not just ask what we can do better but to actually see lessons learned and implemented. We need to have that conversation in a way that can bring people together to get it done, rather than turn this into me versus you, Republican versus Democrat.

In our 2025 polling, we were surprised to see that 1 in 5 Americans reported experiencing an extreme weather event that affected them in a water-related way in the past five years.

We also asked whether they were concerned about weather-related water impacts in the future. Seventy-four percent of voters — red, blue, women, men, rural, urban — said yes, they are concerned. And 70 percent believe that it's extremely important for the federal government to reduce the likelihood of water challenges in future national disasters.



How do you account for a history of underinvestment in water infrastructure?

Water is often out of sight, out of mind until something goes wrong, until your basement floods, a water main breaks, until you get a “boil water” alert on your phone. Despite similar levels of need and complexity — perhaps even greater complexity — water receives so much less funding than things that we do see: roads and bridges, just to name a few.

There is a catch phrase in the community of people who are responsible for thinking about water, wastewater, stormwater and floods on a day-to-day basis. The shorthand is “value of water.”

The Value of Water Campaign seeks to build public and political will [for more investment] by elevating the needs and the consequences if we don't invest, if we don't get serious about water challenges.

Have recent federal decisions affected funding for water infrastructure?

Some pots of funding that were appropriated in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) have been targeted to be cut, and there are legal fights about whether that's allowed. But the primary programs that fund water and wastewater infrastructure were not affected by those attempted clawbacks.

But once that funding is gone, there's a huge cliff if Congress doesn't appropriate more. At the time that the IIJA passed, it was only about 5 percent of the federal funding we need to keep water systems in a good state of repair.

Are there signs of support for more investment?

You can see strong bipartisan support for trying to prevent flooding and address flooding among local and county elected officials. South Carolina just passed funding to expand data collection related to flooding and resilience. They passed about $1 million for that effort and another $5 million to coordinate resilience planning across watersheds.

One thing that gives me the sense that we might be able to succeed in that is we have voices across the political spectrum starting to speak up more about resilience as a strategy. If you're talking about the Texas Hill Country, the human toll is the thing that we're most concerned about.

But there are voices primarily in the business of supporting the economy who also see resilience as a really good investment. In 2025, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce increased its estimate of how much pre-disaster resilience funding saves in economic losses. A common rule of thumb used to be that each dollar spent before a disaster saves you six afterward. Their research found that it actually saves $13.

Anything else you would emphasize at this moment?

It's massively important to invest in data to know which communities are most at risk. It's not just about geographic risk and infrastructure quality — we need to look at population, age, income so that we can be more nuanced, not just about where flooding might occur, but what the impact will be and how we need to be ready.

When something does happen, you want everything you need in place for emergency response, professionals ready to go. But our front line of defense against flooding and extreme weather are our water and wastewater infrastructure systems. Those systems are increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters and extreme weather because we have so drastically under-resourced them for so long.

We also have inadequate systems for managing lands in collaboration with farmers and landowners, public or private. Making those collaborations work to better manage water across watersheds will require additional investments in nature-based solutions and approaches that aren't widespread at this point.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently announced it intends to end one of its only programs focused on helping with resilience before disaster, instead of after, the BRIC program. We see bipartisan support for continuing that program. [The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program was established by Congress in 2018 to fund disaster mitigation projects.]

When you see bipartisan support for pre-disaster resilience, when you see the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's economic analysis of why it makes business sense, and when you see what we saw over the weekend in the Texas Hill Country, the answer is that we have to step up now.