Catastrophic flash flooding struck the Texas Hill Country over the July Fourth holiday, as torrential overnight rain sent rivers surging with astonishing speed. The human toll is heartbreaking, and entire communities along the waterways are beginning a long recovery. Power, water, and communications were knocked out across the hardest-hit areas at the moment they were needed most.

When Infrastructure Fails All at Once

Disasters like this one show how quickly the systems we rely on can disappear together. Electricity, cell service, and running water often fail as a group, and restoring them takes days. A resilient home keeps its own power source, stored water, and multiple ways to receive warnings, because the first hours of an emergency are the ones you must handle alone.

Building Household Resilience

• Inspect your standby generator and confirm automatic operation during an outage.
• Run a test cycle and keep maintenance current through the summer storm season.
• Ensure natural gas or propane supplies are connected, serviced, and protected from flooding.
• Consider whole-home backup from Generac or Kohler to keep communications and essential systems alive in an emergency.

Stay Informed

Never camp or park overnight in low-lying areas near rivers during flood watches, and treat every flash flood warning as an order to move to higher ground.