Floods are natural disasters that occur when a landscape is overwhelmed by intense rainfall and is too slow to absorb water. Picture your house plant. If you’re like me, you’ve forgotten to water it for the fifth time this week, so its soil is looking a bit parched. You finally quench its thirst, only to seemingly pour the water out too fast. The soil struggles to absorb the water and the pot overflows, water spilling down its sides. On the smallest scale, this is flooding.

Floods are the most common type of natural disaster, affecting communities across the world. In Texas alone, they’re becoming more frequent and more intense, with the most recent tragic flood event occurring in Kerr County on July 4. In less than an hour, parts of the county’s Guadalupe River rose by 26 feet, causing a wall of water to crash through the area and decimate its landscape.

This increasing intensification of floods and rainfall is primarily due to the continued impact of climate change. As global temperatures rise, the water cycle is accelerated; higher temperatures lead to more evaporation, which in turn results in heavier rainfall. This phenomenon creates more frequent and intense storms, and landscapes struggle to take in this rapid surge of water.

Urban areas are also more susceptible to floods due to the decrease in biodiversity and increase in hard surfaces. The Rio Grande Valley is one of the nation’s fastest-urbanizing regions. Urbanization is the transformation of natural environments into man-made ones, which reduces the amount of wildlife and replaces soils with paved roads, parking lots, and cement. These impenetrable surfaces keep rainwater from entering the ground, and with nowhere to go, the water continues to rise as the storm rages on.

Next door to Bequita’s Blooms, at Bandera Coffee Co., co-owner Ashley Garcia had been in the middle of her closing shift when she and her co-worker noticed water seeping through their front door.  

“The alerts were going off, but we could see it with our own eyes,” says Garcia. “It was too late.”  

Before she knew it, the store was flooding. Garcia and her co-worker moved quickly to close the shop and save what they could.

“Usually, it takes about an hour to close down the shop,” says Garcia, “but we said to just turn off the lights, unplug what we can, pick up what we can from the floors, and just get out.” 

This was the second flood that Bandera experienced, having opened almost seven years ago. Garcia recalls the damage and loss of inventory that followed Bandera’s first experience with flooding. 

“It definitely held us back,” she says, “and we learned to prepare in certain ways.” 

For the much newer storefront, Bequita’s Blooms, this flood was a first.   

“I never planned for it, but now I know,” says Rodriguez. “Moving forward, I’m going to think about a future, potential flood.”