Vikki Goodwin was the only invited candidate at the Kerrville meeting
Members of Extreme Weather Survivors gathered in a community hall in Kerrville, Texas, in October 2026, near where flash floods killed 136 people in 2025. Oliver Milman reported from Kerrville for The Guardian on October 21, and a Brenda Bazan/The Guardian photograph showed the meeting. The Guardian described the gathering as evidence that the growing number of Americans affected by extreme weather disasters are starting to organize into a political force.
Severe wildfires, floods, storms and other calamities now touch the lives of about half of all Americans by one estimate, The Guardian reported, as the climate crisis supercharges extreme events. Some survivors are coalescing to push for improved disaster response and even action on the politically contentious issue of global heating, the outlet said.
All Texas gubernatorial and Senate candidates were invited to speak to survivors, but only Vikki Goodwin, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, showed up. “We are seeing more extreme weather in Texas and we need to do more for survivors,” Goodwin told the group. A Brenda Bazán/The Guardian photograph showed Texas state representative Vikki Goodwin speaking with reporters in Kerrville.
Survivors at the meeting pressed for a federal agency that responds faster and for disaster aid that stays outside partisan politics. Sierra Kos, who co-founded Extreme Weather Survivors, said survivors overwhelmingly feel the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be more responsive and that disaster aid should not be politicized.
The limited candidate attendance suggested that politicians do not yet feel overwhelming political pressure to engage with those affected by extreme weather, The Guardian reported.
Survivors organize across party lines and seek a political role
Sierra Kos, a film-maker who co-founded Extreme Weather Survivors after being caught in a pall of toxic smoke from wildfires in rural Oregon in 2020 as she attempted to take her son to receive medical care, said the network now spans around 2,500 people across the US. “The group has grown, sadly, quite rapidly,” she said. “I think you’d be hard pressed to find a group of people that are more united on the core issues,” Kos said of the survivor network. A Kathryn Elsesser/AFP/Getty Images photograph showed a charred vehicle in the parking lot of the burned Oak Park Motel after the Santiam fire in Gates, Oregon, in September 2020.
Kos expects the network to move beyond policy advocacy into electoral politics. “I am positive though that survivors of extreme weather will not just shape political outcomes and policies moving forward but also look to run for office,” she said. “This is going to be a constituency that policymakers and politicians need to listen to.” The shock of extreme weather helps bond people in an unusually bipartisan way, Kos said, with politically diverse delegations of survivors making several trips to press lawmakers in Washington.
Several of those who spoke at the event said they had not expected to become advocates. Kylie Nidever, a former pre-school teacher whose childhood home in Hunt, Texas, was one of the few in the neighborhood to survive inundation from the floods, said: “I just didn’t care about politics. I never thought I’d be doing this.” “It radicalized me to see my community devastated, and there was some survivors’ guilt, too. So that was initially how I dealt with the trauma,” she said. A Brenda Bazan/The Guardian photograph portrayed Nidever as a flood survivor.
Mike Malcolm, a 70-year-old Republican voter from Leander, Texas, once thought global warming was indoctrination until muddy water from the 2025 floods filled his home and convinced him that he might die. He wrote his Social Security number on his hands and feet in case his body had to be identified. “I used to think global warming was just indoctrination, then I lived through a flood where I genuinely thought I was going to die,” he said. Malcolm’s children helped him understand the link between the floods and global heating, he said. “We have to be willing to have difficult conversations and look for solutions,” he added. “I keep asking myself: what do we want to teach our children, and what kind of future do we want to leave them?”
The Guardian reported that these common problems were helping pull together survivors from different parts of America and were also helping foster a greater appreciation of the role of the climate crisis in disasters among people who had previously been skeptical of such links. Scientists have been clear, the outlet reported, that global heating likely worsened the floods in Texas and elsewhere, as well as recent heatwaves and wildfires.
The dispute over climate change also shapes the language of survivor groups. The Guardian reported that the “political toxicity” around climate change — which Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “bullshit” — keeps the “C” word from being prominent in survivor groups, which use names such as Extreme Weather Survivors and Rebuild: the National Disaster Survivors Association. “It’s crazy to me that the term climate change can be divisive, but it can be,” Nidever said. “That’s why we just say extreme weather. We use that instead of going there with climate because it’s more inclusive and it’s not a hot-button term.”
The electoral weight of the movement remains limited for now. The Guardian reported that campaigns for the upcoming midterm elections have barely mentioned the climate crisis or major disasters, despite American voters wanting politicians to speak more about these issues in the wake of the hottest summer on record in the US and the onset of one of the strongest ever El Niño events, which is already bringing flooding to the west coast and is set to spur even worse heat next year. Survivors may not make a major impact at the election, the outlet said, but many expect that to change as warping weather continues to raise home insurance rates and other costs and pockmark large chunks of the year with toxic wildfire smoke, flooding and heat.
Federal aid cuts and the demand for flood warnings
Many survivors complain about the lack of preparation and response to major disasters, Kos said. “There’s this sense of ‘we are American, we should have the best possible evacuation notifications’ – and the fact that all of that funding has been cut really infuriates people,” she added.
The Guardian reported that Donald Trump has enacted deep cuts to FEMA, stressing that states should take more responsibility for disaster relief, and has been accused of withholding resources from states that did not vote for him.
Nidever has spoken to a committee of Texas lawmakers and said she was shocked by the lack of FEMA response during similar, less deadly floods that struck the region again in 2026. “We need more authority, we need more guidance, we need more support,” she said. “And seeing that not happen even after this second flood has lit a fire under me. I guess I knew it would flood again, I just didn’t think it would happen so soon.”
Georgia Bishop, 19, joined Extreme Weather Survivors events after her best friend, Felicity Jarmon, died in the 2025 floods, and the disaster caused “devastating” damage to her own home. She still finds the flood difficult to talk about. In June, she traveled to Washington to speak to members of Congress about the need for better flood warnings, such as sirens, for communities like hers. Bishop said the reception she received was mixed, with some lawmakers appearing uninterested while some promised to do more. “My only thing is that you say you’re trying, you say you’re working, and I will believe you on that, but will it be in time before something really is going to happen again?” she said. “I just want to help make sure that this never happens again, because I never want that to happen again to anybody.” A Brenda Bazan/The Guardian photograph identified Bishop as a flood survivor.
Housing, insurance and the long recovery
Survivor groups routinely share tales of frustration with the “labyrinthine and often fruitless process” of dealing with insurance companies, FEMA and a catalogue of other local, state and federal government agencies to obtain the resources needed to piece back together shattered homes and lives, The Guardian reported. Several people at the Texas meeting said they would soon be evicted from temporary housing, with no payments from FEMA or other bodies to help make their ruined homes habitable again. Others said they had been rejected multiple times for FEMA assistance, under this and previous administrations.
Elisabeth Anderson’s home in Atlanta, Georgia, was hit by Hurricane Helene in 2025. “Fema is terrible, they are awful, they are so inefficient and antiquated that people give up, it’s not worth your stress,” Anderson said. After several rejected applications, she had to take out a loan covering the $400,000 needed to repair her home from flooding that had forced her, her husband, child and two dogs to sit on top of their car to escape the rising waters. “It was insane, like something out of a movie,” she said of the floodwater. “I definitely thought we’d die at one point.”
Alex Webber, a medical journal illustrator who evacuated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, only to relocate to Asheville, North Carolina ahead of Hurricane Helene, which tore through the city two years ago, described the continuing gap in federal assistance. “More and more people know someone affected by this. I was in shock when this happened to me again but I’m not the only one affected by multiple events,” he said. “The money for the region from Fema just hasn’t showed up,” Webber said, adding that much of Asheville remains “moribund” two years after the flooding. “A lot of politicians were paraded downtown, it was like disaster tourism and we felt like zoo animals. Then they disappeared and we are just old news now.” Webber also said: “You can’t combat climate change unless you accept it exists; it feels our pigeons are clearly coming home to roost. We can’t keep delaying. We have to solve this, it has to stop being a partisan issue. But there’s nowhere safe now. No-one is immune from this.”
A Jim Vondruska/Getty Images photograph showed a destroyed motor home on the riverbank in Louise Hays Park beside the Guadalupe River in Kerrville in July 2025; the caption said heavy rainfall caused flooding along the Guadalupe River in central Texas, with multiple fatalities reported. A Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images photograph showed Roberto Marquez continuing to build a memorial to honor the victims of the Hill Country floods.