Thomas: About a year ago, we had deadly floods in Texas that killed 139 people. A group of girls died at a summer camp. What I didn’t know when we recorded that segment was that I had cousins scheduled to be in the cabin where those girls died. They canceled at the last minute, going either a week early or a week late. They missed it by one week, and they were exactly the age of the girls in that cabin. This hit really close to home.
One of the things I talked about in that episode was that part of what makes flash floods so dangerous is that they’re just irregular enough that we discount them. If authors incorporate flash floods into their stories, we could make flash flooding less deadly. If readers are aware of flash floods, know what danger looks like, and know what to do when it starts raining, they can take action to stay safe. With that, I’ll kick it to Jonathan before I start ranting again.
Jonathan: Sure. According to the Texas Tribune, one year after the July 2025 Guadalupe River floods killed at least 139 people, a second round of major flooding hit the same region in mid-July 2026 and claimed only two lives.
In our July 12th, 2025 episode, we walked through the reality of flash floods. We talked about a toad strangler. We talked about the water rising six inches every minute. We talked about how many of the deaths came from people who didn’t grow up in Texas and had no mental model for how fast the water moves. They didn’t know what to be scared of.
We told novelists there was a dearth of knowledge because no one writes accurate flash flood scenes. You need to have them. Have a character run the mental checklist, physically run through it. I did this in my Semper Di series, and people loved it. They said, “I remember this checklist, and it put my brain in the same mode.” Get to high ground. Stay out of channels. Don’t treat it like a hurricane evacuation. The explicit goal was to encourage passive education. Readers who experience the danger periodically and consistently on the page are more likely to recognize it in real life and act.
Thomas: Here’s a good example of this. Sharks aren’t actually very dangerous. Very few people die from sharks each year. But we know what to do in a shark attack, and we have an almost irrational fear of sharks because of the stories we’ve consumed, particularly one very popular movie. When a lifeguard shouts “Shark,” everyone clears the beach because they’re thinking Jaws. That story makes the warning more powerful.
Any story can be amplified with a little man-versus-nature in the background. You don’t have to make the whole story about floods. Flash floods don’t make for a good standalone story because they’re so fast, but they’re a great element to bring into a story, particularly a fantasy. Your characters are fighting a dark lord who has magic. They’re camping by a river, and suddenly, a flash flood changes everything. If your second act is dragging, have it start raining. Have the characters shrug it off: “It’s just a little rain, how bad could it be?” Then a wall of water comes out of nowhere.
It doesn’t have to be raining where your characters are. It just has to be raining upstream or uphill. In hilly terrain, a flash flood can come through under a clear sky. “What are you talking about? It’s barely raining.” “No, we need to get to higher ground.” All of that can spice up any story, even a romance. One commenter pointed out: your couple goes hiking, they’re on the fritz, they’ve had a fight and aren’t speaking, then it starts raining, and suddenly they have to work together to survive.
Jonathan: Or maybe they realize the argument was stupid, so the boyfriend is running back out into the field to find her, because she doesn’t know enough about flash floods in the area.
Thomas: These stories write themselves. “Thank you for saving my life, but you still have to put the toilet seat down.”
The Guadalupe River is about the worst river for flash flooding there is. Central Texas is one of the worst regions in the world for it, because the soil doesn’t absorb water and because of the kind of rain the area gets. But you can go decades without a flood, and if that knowledge isn’t top of mind, it can be really deadly.
The most recent floods weren’t less deadly because of novelists. There wasn’t enough time for those novels to get written. But everyone remembered the girls from the year before. There were ribbons all over the state. So when the floods came again, a whole town evacuated. Everyone got to higher ground. People were boating through the streets, but they were alive because they listened and they acted.
Jonathan: Real quick: do you know what to do in a flash flood? Take a few seconds and think about it. Now, do you know what to do if you fall in quicksand? You do, and you know why. It keeps happening in movies and stories. Late 80s films gave us a completely disproportionate fear of quicksand.
Thomas: That’s a great illustration. Quicksand kills maybe one person a year. Lightning kills more people than quicksand. But it made for great narrative. And outside of this podcast, specifically Author Update and me saying “work this into your stories,” no authors are hearing that. We’re handing you so many competitive advantages. It’s those stories that help us take action. Unfortunately for Texas, real people had to die for us to take action and for the stories to have power. But fictional people dying in fictional floods can have the same impact.
Jonathan: If a kid dies in a flash flood in your novel, readers will remember what to do.
Thomas: It hurts, but better your fictional character die and a lesson be learned than real children have to.
Jonathan: And that’s especially true for middle grade and young adult. When I was a kid, I was into wilderness survival books. I read the one about the kid who ran away from home to live on a mountain for a while. I learned from him. I learned from Swiss Family Robinson. I was into that genre at that age, and I picked up survival techniques I’ve honestly never had to use, but I still know them.
Thomas: My phone is muted on all notifications because I’m a podcaster. It will not alert for anything. But somehow it still alerted me when the floods happened. Apple had a special get-to-high-ground notification.
Jonathan: And that’s a great point. You know more about what to do when zombies show up, and you’re actually looking forward to it, than you do if flash floods show up.
