Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Texas newspapers:

Houston Chronicle. Oct. 2, 2017.

Before anything else, Johnstown needed coffins and undertakers. There were simply too many dead for the Pennsylvania city to handle.

More than 2,000 had been killed, and thousands more injured and homeless, after a catastrophic dam collapse sent a wall of water careening toward the Gilded Age mill town. The deluge picked up barbed wire, petroleum products and everything else in its path, transforming into an avalanche of sludge. Local poet Isaac G. Reed described the event as, “A week of corpses by the mile.”

At the time, the Johnstown Flood was the deadliest disaster in U.S history - a gruesome event eclipsed 11 years later by the 1900 Galveston hurricane.

A 21st century Johnstown is in the making just 19 miles west of downtown, at the Addicks and Barker dams. Congress must act immediately to shore up the earthen berms that stand between Houston and our own week of corpses.

More than a month has passed since Hurricane Harvey turned our lives upside-down. Nearly 100,000 homes took on water, more than 15,000 were totally submerged and the death toll has hit 70. Yet as we rebuild and dry out, part of Harvey still looms ominously on Houston’s west end. The twin reservoirs hold back billions of gallons of Harvey floodwaters, the Texas Tribune reported this week, which will be slowly released into Buffalo Bayou over the next several months. The dams were not designed for this kind of long-term discharge, nor are they guaranteed to safely detain such a massive hulk of liquid.

A breach would send forth a half-mile-wide wall of water powerful enough to knock homes off their foundations, Precinct 3 County Commissioner Steve Radack told the editorial board. Imagine an inland tsunami sweeping east along the Energy Corridor toward the central business district, killing upward of 7,000 people.

“It’s next to impossible to get people to believe the unbelievable,” Radack said.

If modern prose lacks the language necessary to explain the kind of hellscape a dam failure could unleash upon our city, then perhaps Mayor Sylvester Turner or County Judge Ed Emmett should consider, like Johnstown, soliciting a poet to goad Congress into action. Because that’s the body responsible for funding and overseeing the Army Corps of Engineers, which built and maintains the dams.

A bipartisan delegation of Houston representatives, including Republicans Ted Poe, Brian Babin, John Culberson, Pete Olson, and Democrats Al Green and Gene Green, have already responded to Harvey by proposing The Texas Flood Accountability Act of 2017, which will compel the Corps to submit a report assessing the conditions and needs of Houston-area dams and reservoirs.

This is the sort of bill that should have been written back in 2009, when the Corps first designated Addicks and Barker with the worst possible safety rating and stated they were at “extremely high risk of catastrophic failure.”

It is too late for studies and delays - Houston needs action. Any Harvey recovery bill must include the funding necessary to bolster our two existing reservoirs and construct a third on Cypress Creek. Experts have pegged the bill at $500 million. That project is priority No. 1. Following close behind are $300 million to update bayou infrastructure and a whopping $15 billion for coastal storm surge protection.

The cost of a new reservoir may seem hefty, but the price of a worst-case scenario on Houston’s west side would be incalculable. After all, we’re already paying the penalty for not investing on Houston’s east side. The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced that Harvey damaged the San Jacinto waste pits, washing carcinogenic dioxin and other deadly chemicals into the river. A dive team collected samples at 2,300 times the level necessary to trigger a cleanup.

Environmentalists and activists have long warned that the Superfund site was vulnerable to a hurricane. If only Washington had listened.

“For years we’ve told the EPA it’s not a matter of if this area is struck by a hurricane but when,” Jackie Young, executive director of Texas Health and Environment Alliance, was quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times.

Consider that our poem about the Addicks and Barker dams: Not if. But when.

___

Amarillo Globe-News. Oct. 2, 2017.

A teenager who is accused of a horrific shooting in a public library in Clovis, New Mexico, in August, killing two people and wounding four others, used two handguns he took from his family home.

In 2012, a 20-year-old killed more than 25 people, including children, at a elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The weapons the killer used did not belong to him but to his mother, whom he also killed. The firearms were purchased legally by the mother.

In other words, there was no failure of a gun control law that could have prevented these acts of insanity and/or evil. There was no failure of a background check that could have stopped the carnage or the horror.

The nation needs to remember this as the facts continue to emerge from Las Vegas after a 64-year-old man opened fire Sunday at an outdoor concert, murdering at least 59 people and injuring hundreds.

As of this writing, it is not officially known how the individual in Las Vegas obtained the firearms used in this act of insanity. Were the firearms purchased legally? Were they registered? Was there any reason this individual should not have had firearms? Or, as in the other aforementioned acts of insanity, were the firearms more or less stolen? (According to various media reports Monday afternoon, the individual had stockpiled an arsenal of weapons in a hotel room from which he opened fire on a nearby outdoor concert.)

As of this writing, we don’t know. However, a lack of knowledge of the facts did not stop the knee-jerk reactions and premature blame-game, primarily by those who want to put restrictions on the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

While there is no shortage of finger-pointing on social media, the source has to be considered. Social media is often not a haven for logic or rational thought and discussion. Social media does what social media does. However, when a U.S. senator wastes little time in jumping on Congress for a perceived lack of adequate gun laws, as Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., did Monday, that is different.

It is simply not practical, reasonable or just to immediately criticize Congress, the National Rifle Association or to throw the millions of law-abiding and responsible gun owners in America under the bus when the facts related to an act of insanity are not yet known.

As of today, we prefer to pray for those who lost their lives at the hands of a person who misused firearms in a grotesque and evil way. We pray for those who are injured, and may still be battling for their lives. We pray for those who responded to this despicable act, and who risked their lives to help others.

As for playing the blame game, for those who want to participate, there is time for this later.

___

The Dallas Morning News. Oct. 2, 2017.

The Pandora’s box of evil that has increasingly defined America this past decade cracked open once again Sunday night, leaving the nation to grieve the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

One of the terrified survivors, the back of his shirt marked with footprints from fellow concertgoers trying to flee the sniper’s aim, spoke what’s in the hearts of many of us today. Mike McGarry said his only thought was to protect his children: “They’re 20. I’m 53. I lived a good life.”

We all want to safeguard those around us, whether it’s our family, friends or the strangers standing anxiously alongside us in line for coffee, all of us in shock that yet another madman has been at work.

The “whys” that would settle our minds are in short supply today. Perhaps that is unsurprising, given the senselessness of the act. But this grim fact is clear: The bad guys just don’t seem to take a day off.

This time the toll is already more than 50 dead. And with at least 500 injured, it’s probably naïve to think the body count won’t rise. Already the debates - over gun control, over “which side” this killer was on, over the definition of “a terrorist” - are raging.

Can we just take a breath from the politics and focus instead on the countless fellow Americans whose lives will never be the same? Ordinary folks who set out to attend a country music festival and wound up in a fish-in-a-barrel horror show.

The shots that spun out in repeated spurts late Sunday came from the 32nd floor of a hotel adjacent to the concert venue near the Vegas Strip. As the gunman picked off victims from his towering perch, he looked down on confused targets struggling to make life-and-death decisions to flee or huddle among one another for cover.

The still-unfolding grim scenes are enough to make us all want to just hunker down at home with our loved ones. #PrayForVegas is the latest of a too-many-to-count march of #prayfor(fillintheblank) hashtags that Americans have awakened to on Twitter.

But we can’t let killers win. Not 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, who took his own life surrounded by a cache of weaponry as law enforcement approached his hotel room. And not any of those evil men who came before him.

Focus not on Paddock’s cowardice, but on the bravery of so many: The off-duty police officers who stood up amid the barrage of gunfire, directing people on what to do. The concertgoers, some trained and some not, plugging bullet holes in fellow concertgoers with their fingers while they awaited first responders. Fathers such as Philadelphia native McGarry, who were determined that their children would survive.

Brave. Selfless. Heroic. If only the opportunities to show those fine traits weren’t so many.

___

The Monitor. Oct. 3, 2017.

We join the nation in trying to absorb the magnitude of the tragedy that happened in Las Vegas. We agree with President Donald Trump that this is an example of pure evil and that love will help us get through this.

We pray that victims of this senseless act achieve some notion of peace after an incident that forever tarnishes all that it has touched.

But we would be remiss in not noting that these sentiments overtake us each time our country has a mass shooting - and each mass shooting seems to bring a more dastardly and clever way to increase the carnage and establish it as the worst in modern U.S. history.

We are mindful of the concerns that are raised by having factions politicize such tragedy. But we must all declare that enough is enough.

This is not a call for gun control, although we should not shy away from the topic. This is not a call for the unmitigated preservation of the Second Amendment, although our constitutional rights must be part of any discussion.

This is a call for leadership.

Since the millennium, there have been almost 60 mass shootings involving nearly 1,400 casualties, including nearly 500 deaths, according to a comprehensive database by Mother Jones magazine.

Such numbers suggest this country has a problem.

Yet, as unfathomable as the notion of at least 59 more deaths and more than 500 wounded or injured after Sunday’s open air concert in Las Vegas, the more unfathomable notion is that we, as a nation, cannot engage in any civil discourse about this problem.

We need to get beyond this public policy paralysis. We need to get beyond the notion that a discussion about gun control equates to the obliteration of the Second Amendment.

Just as President Trump has engaged our country about the appropriateness of NFL players and coaches taking a knee during the National Anthem without any threat to the First Amendment, we as a nation must begin a dialog about gun safety with the full knowledge that such a discussion does not spell the end of the Second Amendment.

We commend President Trump for forcefully condemning this latest act of mass violence and we hope during his visit Wednesday to Las Vegas that he offers more than just condolences to the victims and their families. We hope he brings a plan to present to our nation to begin dealing with this issue.

We call on President Trump to not allow this pattern of mass shootings, condemnation and inaction that plagued his predecessors to plague him, as well.

We also call on Congress - which has had several missed chances over the past decade - to engage in a meaningful discussion on gun laws, as well.

Our Constitution guarantees Americans the right to live in a land safe from harm from foreign invaders, and from each other.

___

Beaumont Enterprise. Oct. 3, 2017.

Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp, state czar for Harvey recovery, is wearing many hats in his new role. He’s a problem-solver, a prioritizer, a comforter. Apparently, he’s also going to be someone who prods insurance companies to pay out more claims, and pay them out faster. That is good for Texans.

Sharp recently ruffled some feathers in the insurance industry by demanding that companies “should pay claims now!” Most companies believe they’re doing that - as appropriate, under their timetable.

The underlying problem is that the process involving insurance claims, assessment and payout will not be speedy. Insurers didn’t design it to be. Even under the best of circumstances, it would take some time, and Harvey produced the worst of circumstances. Companies have thousands upon thousands of claims to handle - and unsurprisingly don’t want to pay them all if they can help it.

Also unsurprisingly, most Texans, including many forced from their homes, are growing impatient.

Insurers need to do everything they can to process claims as quickly as possible, whether transferring in personnel from other states to Texas, setting up more mobile help centers or adding extra telephone lines. They must understand that people are hurting and don’t want to wait for the usual process to slowly play out. They want action, as soon as possible, and insurers must deliver it.

It’s important to remember that insurance companies are licensed by the state and required to meet certain standards. The Legislature and Department of Insurance have been anything but stern task-masters in recent years, but now would be a good time that change that business-friendly approach. Consumers need special assistance, and their state-regulated insurance companies must provide it.

If they do that, the state’s Harvey czar will stop hectoring them to “pay claims now!” Until that happens, however, Sharp should stay on these companies so that our recovery from this storm takes no longer than necessary.