The Texas Floods: Warnings, Staffing Cuts, Climate Change, & How to Protect Ourselves from Extreme Weather

Episode Notes

Transcript

Professor Jim Blackburn:

The idea that you could have a wall of water coming after three hours of rainfall, that would be so powerful. It could take RVs and trucks and cars and trees and just plow ’em all over and push ’em down the river. That’s climate change.

Announcer:

Welcome to the award-winning podcast, Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You are listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:

Welcome to the Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams coming to you from Southern California. I occasionally write a blog named May It please the court and have three books out titled How To Get Sued the Sled and My newest book. How would You Decide 10 Famous Trials That Changed History? You can find all three on Amazon. In addition, our new podcast miniseries in Dispute, 10 famous trials that changed history is currently featured here on the Legal Talk Network and on your favorite podcasting app. Please listen and subscribe. On the 4th of July, extreme rainfall ripped through Central Texas causing catastrophic flash flooding leaving 119 or more dead over 160 or more missing with numbers climbing a National weather service, which has recently experienced staffing cuts under Doge and the Trump administration came under fire from local Texas officials who criticized what they described as inadequate forecast ahead of the extreme weather in response to the impact of staffing cuts at the National Weather Service.

The White House Press secretary Caroline Levitt said that was an act of God. It’s not the administration’s fault that the flood hit when it did, but there were early and consistent warnings and again, the National Weather Service did its job. Questions though have arisen about what local authorities have done and what they didn’t do in the hours that came after the flood. Well, today on Lawyer 2 Lawyer will spotlight the recent floods in Texas. We will discuss warnings, the impacts of staffing cuts, climate change policy, and how we can protect ourselves from extreme weather. And to help us better understand today’s topic, we’re joined by our special guest, Jim Blackburn, Jim and his environmental lawyer and planner and professor in the practice of environmental law and the co-director of the severe storm prevention education and evacuation from Disaster Center at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He’s also a faculty scholar at the Baker Institute and director of the undergraduate minor in Energy and Water Sustainability. Jim set aside his active environmental litigation practice to concentrate on research and teaching to expand his planning practice through his firm sustainable Planning and Design. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Thank you, Craig. It’s a pleasure to be here.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Jim, let’s just dive right into our discussion. How did you become interested in environmental law?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, I hated law school, told my wife that about halfway through law school and of course we were both working to get through law school and she was horrified at that thought and came back the next day and said she’d been talking to a girlfriend of a close friend of ours and she was talking about her boyfriend going to get a master’s in environmental science and being an environmental lawyer and she goes, you like to hunt and fish. Why don’t you become an environmental lawyer? And I said, boy, that sounds good. And that’s literally kind of how it happened. And then after law school I got a fellowship to come to Rice University and got a master’s degree in environmental science In 1974 I got the degree back when very few people had environmental science degrees, so it really served me very well to get the science training as well as to get out of law school.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, you’ve since turned into a leader into your field, so let’s talk about these floods in Texas. What happened and what’s your reaction to the kind of circumstances that have risen afterward?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, I think that we experienced an incredibly intense rainfall event in Kerrville, Texas. We had four inches an hour over a three hour period in the middle of the night. It started about one o’clock. I think the flood really showed up about four o’clock in the morning and the flow went from eight cubic feet per second to over a hundred thousand cubic feet per second in about three hour time period. And then 2025 foot rise, almost an unprecedented amount of rain falling in such a short period of time and it caught a lot of people unaware. It was the 4th of July weekend, there were campers up and down the river. There were RVs up and down the river and of course there was the girls camps and boys camps for that matter that exist in that area and one of ’em had horrible tragedy occur.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. I kind like to start with those camps and the people along the river along with the RVs along the river that were swept away. It sounds just kind of a basic planning mechanism for cities and planning commissions and zoning and so forth to recognize the flood zone. It was known as flash flood alley. What’s the thought process that went into the planning in the local area to locate those facilities right at the river’s edge?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, we live in Texas and Texas is very much I think against regulation as a general proposition. We are very much private landowners and private land ownership, and so there is a real bias in Texas regulation. The federal government was really kind of the sponsor, if you will, of both the federal flood insurance program and the regulatory process that comes with that. It has been resented throughout much of Texas, many Texas counties. Were either slow to join the federal flood insurance program or refuse to, and we really don’t enforce the regulations as stringently as many other states and many other counties do. I think we treat floodplains more as environmental red tape than is a true hazard, and I think that is kind of in a way that’s the background behind the tragedy.

J. Craig Williams:

Do you think this tragedy is going to have any effect on that mindset?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, I think we’ll probably get a flood warning system. I think flood warning systems had been discussed in the past and the problem had been funding. The Kirk County is not a wealthy county. It’s a rural county without a huge population density and certainly without the industrial development say of Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Texas Coast. So funding has always been an issue with warning systems. I think we’ll see the Texas legislature take action now. The governor has called a special session really for other reasons and we will add consideration of probably warning systems. I would say probably generically across Texas, but certainly up in the hill country as part of that special legislative session. So I think we will see state funding there. As for the regulatory attitude, I don’t think that we’re going to see a lot of change in that. I also think that the attitude about climate change is really at the center here as well, and I don’t think we’re talking enough about the risk that our changing climate poses, particularly from a flooding standpoint, both with regard to rainfall and with hurricanes on the coast.

J. Craig Williams:

How do you balance that kind of anti-regulation mindset against the kind of out there theories that some people think that climate change is?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, I think in Texas what we have is almost a, you hate to call it almost a running gun battle in a way between is trying to find the right way to approach anti-regulation people with what’s happening. Climate is treated as a belief structure by a lot of people and it’s not a belief structure. This is about science and I think we’re living in a time period when people generally are very either resentful or suspicious of science. I think perhaps scientists have done a very poor job of conveying their information. I’m not sure if it’s the messenger or the message, but there is a real disconnect in a lot of Texas, particularly rural Texas between climate change advocates, if you will, and the reality of climate change. I think you talk to most farmers and ranchers and they know the climate is changing. I think there is fear associated with the government response to climate change and it’s almost fear of government. That is the larger problem here, which I think you see carried over into the Trump administration and some of the changes they are trying to make, many of which I don’t agree with personally, but I understand the sentiment behind it and that sentiment is very real in Texas.

J. Craig Williams:

Less regulation, no government involvement every man for himself, cowboy attitude. Right.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, I mean I think that’s kind of the background against which a lot of this unfolded and I had spent my whole career trying to bring, if you will, the message of regulation. I guess I would call myself a true regulatory believer. I was in law school when the Clean Air Act, deep up Clean Water Act were initially passed. I practiced under all of those statutes as well as the others that came along afterwards. Regulation was incredibly important in the seventies, it was absolutely necessary. We have made great progress climate. There is no regulation, there is no master statute on climate and I don’t see one coming anytime soon. So with climate, we’re in a very, very different place and I think the reality of today is in many respects, the corporations are the adults in the room. Government is in many respects, lagging tremendously and I think with flooding in Texas, we’re going to have a lot more tragedies before we get in front of this issue.

J. Craig Williams:

Do you think that this flood was a result of climate change?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Oh yeah. Well, I think the rainfall that intense over that short of a period of time, I think that is definitely climate change related. The fact that that low pressure didn’t move, I mean that rain was coming straight down, incredibly intense and really didn’t move. I was in the hill country maybe about 80 miles away from there and we barely got any rain at all. I mean it was a tremendous amount downpour not only on the Guadalupe but on the Ano River, on the San Saba River, on the San Gabriel River, but not on the Blanco, not on the Colorado necessarily, meaning it was very, very intense and very spotty, very, very kind of reminiscent in a way of tropical storm Harvey where essentially the low pressure just stopped and just in the case of Harvey dumped rain for five days and this dumped rain for three hours, but it is very steep topography there certainly by Texas standards, and the rain just ran off. It had nowhere to go but to the river and the river rose tremendously fast.

J. Craig Williams:

What do you think about Texas’s ability to be able to respond to this flood in the sense of not having assistance from FEMA and not having assistance from the federal government? Do you think Texas is capable of handling this on its own?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, I think Texas is going to have to be able to handle it, and I think we’re going to see a lot of adaptations made almost piecemeal in response to, in this case the tragedy. I think every state is going to be facing this where we really won’t be able to depend on the federal government. Now, FEMA has never been the first responders. FEMA has always come in behind and has provided, if you will, the longterm if you will, restoration repair. I think that function, I’m not sure yet that FEMA has been totally stripped of that responsibility. They’re certainly talking in terms of eliminating fema, which I don’t think should happen. There’s a lot of changes that should be made in FEMA and I think that we could all benefit from trying to streamline and make much more efficient our government responses, but I don’t think Texas or any state is going to be able to substitute for FEMA in the near term over a five to 10 year period perhaps, but it’ll cost more money and right now there’s pushback at the state level on almost any expenditure because they don’t want to raise tax rates, and so we’re going to get squeezed more and more and climate change is a huge piece of this because our flooding problems will worsen.

Our rainfall amounts are increasing. The a hundred year flood is increasing, our floodplains are getting larger. That is just a reality of what is coming and ultimately I think we’re going to have to change a lot of philosophies about how we view flooding and particularly how we view floodplains.

J. Craig Williams:

It’s just kind of a crass question, but will it take more deaths to get there?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

That’s generally been the case. We find that response to human tragedy probably causes more change in this area than anything. I hate to say that we’re talking now in the Galveston Houston area about hurricane protection and the price of that is significant. It’s very high and getting the will, if you will, to spend that money versus the problem I guess realization. I think a lot of people have trouble conceptualizing really the threat that we are experiencing today because we don’t talk about it honestly in Texas, there’s no public discussion of climate change. I can’t speak to other parts of the country, but we really don’t talk about it publicly in Texas and it is probably the biggest threat we’ve got in the foreseeable future, both the heat that we’re going to experience. We have experienced devastating droughts and we’re going to experience incredibly intense flood events, but we’re not educating our people about these risks and I think that would’ve helped probably more than anything if all of those campers had known, not that not the girls camp, that’s a different, but I’m talking about the people that were up there in RV vehicles, the people that were camping out on the riverbank for the 4th of July.

The more we know about the risks of climate change, I think at least the more realistic we’ll be about kind of how we should think about our outdoor adventures, if you will. These experiences in the hill country are some of the most important memories that most of my friends have. That water is awfully cool and attractive on a hot summer day. 4th of July is the perfect place to be, but the risk posed by these intense storms just not appreciated like it will be in the future.

J. Craig Williams:

Let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m back with Professor Jim Blackburn, environmental lawyer and co-director of the severe storm prevention education and evacuation from Disaster Center at Rice University. Scientists write peer to peer papers for being reviewed by others, but they really don’t spend a whole lot of time putting it into what newspapers do, fourth grade education level to get it out to the public. How are scientists ever going to change that?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

I think that’s one of the real deficiencies of science and scientists is their communication skills. I think a lot of times scientists and particularly university educators don’t think it’s their role to be a public interpreter of these issues, and I really think that that has been a major failing. I think a lot of times scientists don’t think about how to transmit important information that will turn into policy. I think lawyers are very deficient as well with lawyering. My memory of law school is that we’re really not taught right and wrong so much as we’re taught to argue sides of an issue. The scientists are really about trying to determine truth, if you will, but they feel that that’s sort of an absolute and there’s nobody in the middle that’s trying to convey, if you will, truth about our current situation. There’s no arbiter that is believable to some extent. I think the press was at one time perhaps our modern communication devices have really diminished the role of dependable voices, but I think we really have a credibility gap between the scientists and the public perception of science. There’s a huge gap there that I’m afraid is a part of the problem.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, half the country believes one thing and half the country believes another. That’s I think basically the big problem.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, belief is the word you used and that’s really the interesting word. My favorite climate scientist is Kathryn Hayhoe from Texas Tech University does some work with the Nature Conservancy and she starts off her lectures and she’s an evangelical Christian and she starts off her lectures by saying, I don’t believe in climate change, and everybody in the audience kind of go, whoa, she’s climate scientist. What’s this about? She goes, I believe in my Christian faith science is fact. The stuff I’m talking about is science. It’s real. It is not belief. So much of this has been turned into belief structure. Anyone can write on the internet, anyone can be on Instagram and Facebook and whatever saying whatever they wish. I think we have lost a connection to truth and I think lawyers are part of that problem as well, but we need agents of truth in a time when there is no one to believe, and I think that’s what I’m probably most frustrated about.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, let’s talk about some of those authoritative voices. One of them is the National Weather Service, and apparently it’s come out that they have issued warnings periodically, but in terms of the administration’s cutbacks, the one person in that office that was cut back was the person that communicates with local officials and communication, as you just pointed out, seems to be key and it looks like it was key here. Do you think that’s the case?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Yeah, I do think that’s the case. I mean, there were warnings that were issued the warning system. There was a breakdown at the Kerr County level. They had a very unofficial kind of, I think they called it the red call or red button notification system, that there was no one that was reached that had authority to authorize the use. A call was made about one o’clock saying We need to issue the red button call, and that didn’t go out until 10 o’clock in the morning because there was nobody available that had the authority to authorize the issuance that was at the local level. The weather service did issue warnings, but I would tell you that generally speaking, the type of storm, the type of rainfall event was a surprise. The storm was supposed to have dissipated, I think it was hurricane tropical storm berry came in to Tampa, went into the mountains of Mexico, was supposed to quote, supposed to dissipate over the mountains, and a low pressure ends up in the Texas Hill country that just all of a sudden was stopped.

I’m not sure anyone distinguished themselves on this, but if anything, we need much more emphasis on forecasting on understanding these events. There’s some phenomena called blocking phenomena that would keep a low pressure from moving. We don’t understand those systems particularly well, but that was also behind Tropical Storm Harvey and the huge flooding we had that actually flooded everything from the Louisiana border almost all the way down to Corpus Christi. Huge amount of real estate covered by that, and it had to do with the way the high pressures and the low pressures come together, and all of a sudden there’s no movement and it’s that absence of movement that has to be much better. Understood. We’re at a time when we should not be cutting back those budgets. NOAA has issued National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued Noaha Atlas 14 in the Houston region that redefined our a hundred year rainfall event. We increased it from 13 inches in 24 hours to 17 inches in 24 hours. Many of us think that’s not even enough, but there is now a effort called NOAA Atlas 15 to kind study the larger storm events around the country. I’m very concerned that budget cuts will keep that NOAA Atlas 15 from ever being published. It’s going to be horrible if that happens.

J. Craig Williams:

There have been cuts and articles about the modeling systems of the National Weather Service that are being cut back and eliminated that could have helped with this situation. Even alerts that exist. I mean, here in California we have an Amber Alert system and I’ve been places like in a mall where everybody’s phone goes off all at once and it makes noise.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

I’ve seen that

J. Craig Williams:

You can’t miss it. Does Texas have anything like that? Can they afford something like that?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

We’ve got an Amber Alert system, but we don’t have anything like that with regard to flooding, and I think we all should have those types of warning systems. I’ve looked at the Japanese on the way they undertake tsunami warnings, and I mean it’s the most incredibly wonderful complicated system. They do everything from sending trucks out with loudspeakers to alarms, to electronic devices, to the weather stations, the tv, radio, everybody is mobilized.

J. Craig Williams:

I hate to say it, but it may be that Japan values life more than Texas does.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, I think that may well be the case. I mean, there are those that have suggested in the past that Texas was not a particularly good place to live, and these are some of the realities of Texas, but it’s not just Texas. I mean, there’s a lot of the country that is, I think lost a lot of their interest in science, their belief in science, and I think there’s almost a fear of what science has in store for us, and I just think that’s an attitude that has really occurred over my lifetime and it’s I think a very bad development and I think we’re all to blame on that to some extent, and a lot of what I’m trying to do these days is to work on communication, to work on reaching out to people and trying to bring the human side of this forward. It is not about wanting a landowner to develop their land so much. It’s dangerous to put people right next to a river in the Texas Hill country.

J. Craig Williams:

Let’s talk a little bit about liability for this. I mean, obviously we have government immunity, which is going to be claimed for the people that didn’t push the red button, but what about the landowners that chose to be there? What liability do they have?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

That’s a very interesting question. I am not sure, and in Texas there is no, I don’t think comprehensive requirement to regulate the floodplains. I think that’s really pretty much up to the individual counties. I don’t know when Kerr County started regulating the a hundred year floodplain and floodway. I have not found that information yet, but one of the real questions is were the floodway and floodplain regulations in effect at the time that, for example, an RV camp was built, were those regulations one in effect two, were they followed? There’s going to be both the kind of the nuisance reasonable care standard, but there’s going to be also be the more general, I think probably more important standard of were there requirements that were skipped over somehow? Either did landowners seek exemptions from regulatory structures? I mean, generally speaking, if there was an enforceable floodplain program in effect under the National Flood Insurance program, development in the floodway is something that should not happen. Flow impeding development is not allowed in the floodway. I mean, all of those developments were flow impeding. Certainly by my understanding of the term, whether there’s liability associated with that will be determined in court, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see litigation on these issues. That’s not where my head is these days, and I’m not a pining about liability per se, but I’m sure you’re going to see certainly litigation about it.

J. Craig Williams:

Let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m joined by Jim Blackburn, environmental lawyer and co-director of the severe storm prevention education and evacuation from Disaster Center at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Well, you said that Texas has this rugged individualism. Do you think that if these cases get brought that people on the jury are going to sit there and say It was your own fault, too bad, you just chose to put your RV next to the river and too bad you chose to camp a camp Mystic?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, it’s the jury system. I mean, it’s a jury of Texans that would be from Kerr County, and they may be very sympathetic to the fact that, look, anybody should know if you’re put parking next to the river rivers flood. There is the question of individual responsibility. I think a lot of times people put that out of their head. They think that what they’re doing is safe. We make assumptions like that. I think part of that is though I’m not sure anybody had any concept that that river could rise that fast and become that treacherous in really three hours, and that had to do with the rate of rainfall, and that’s the wild card in all of this that I think is the climate change piece, and I think it’s the piece that we don’t conceive. If it had been raining for 24 hours, I think people would’ve said, okay, sure, it’s going to flood. The idea that you could have a wall of water coming after three hours of rainfall, that would be so powerful. It could take RVs and trucks and cars and trees and just plow ’em all over and push ’em down the river. That’s climate change,

J. Craig Williams:

And it’s not the first time we’ve seen it. I mean, we’ve seen houses fall into the ocean. We’ve seen houses traveling down rivers because of flooding. This is not new.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, but what’s new is it happened so fast. I think it was the speed of this one that I would argue was new, not the flash flood alley has been known for a long time, but I honestly think that this type of flood, I think it’s the four inches of rain in three consecutive hours, that it’s the type of thing that if I had conceived of that and wrote a paper about it even, I think a lot of people would say, that’s crazy. That just can’t happen. I’ve had people tell me that Hurricane Ike had a windfield that was much larger than should have been with a category two storm hurricane. Ike led the National Weather Service to reclassifying hurricanes. They’re now dividing the category of the storm, which is wind speed. They’re dividing that from the surge prediction, which has to do really with the breadth of the storm. As much as anything I’ve had people tell me it was impossible that a category two storm would have a surge like that. Well, not impossible, it happened. I think that we’re seeing examples after example after example of these high intensity rainfall events that just catch everybody just kind of astounded. I think we had that happen in rural North Carolina with, what is it, Helene, I think that we had last year?

J. Craig Williams:

Lake Pon train.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Yeah, we’re going to see, I think more of these events and more of them. That’s what probably concerns me the most, and I think it’s because we don’t talk honestly about climate change. People just don’t have it in their head that we’ve got to think about weather differently certainly than our grandparents did. Our parents did, and I mean, I’m old enough now where my age group doesn’t think about storms the way I think the kids growing up today will think of them in their lifetime.

J. Craig Williams:

Exactly. So well, let’s talk about what those rugged individuals can do to protect themselves. Since it appears we can’t really rely on the National Weather Service, we’re not going to be able to really rely on FEMA much longer. What can we do on our own as individuals to protect ourselves?

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, I think first of all, you try to get your best information. There is good information out there. Just start with floodplain maps. I mean, in Texas, in Houston, we’re going to have in Harris County new floodplain maps coming out soon, but even the existing floodplain maps, our government is saying, well, our a hundred year floodplains obsolete, go ahead and just use the 500 year floodplain. So the first thing I would do is say, if I’m buying a house, I’m going to eliminate anything within the 500 year floodplain. Now that is something I can do as a consumer. Now, I’ll tell you an interesting story down in Clear Lake, down in where NASA is down on the Galveston Bay part of Houston, there was a marker that was put up after Hurricane Ike that showed how high the surge would be with a category four storm and with a category five storm, and that surge ultimately would be about say 20 feet in elevation.

Much of that area is five to 10 feet of elevation. So the marker rose maybe 10 feet above the intersection. It was next to that marker was taken down after two months and it was taken down because it interfered with home cells. So I would tell you in Texas, and particularly in Harris County, we value home sales more than we value telling people the truth about flooding. Now, that to me almost illustrates the problem more than anything. As a government system, we’re more about making sure we don’t interfere with the business transaction, then we are about getting our best information to the people, and that’s an attitudinal issue that has to change, and I think that will change as an individual. I want to get the best information I can. It’s just not always easy to get that information, and you have to know what to ask for.

If I’m moving to Houston from Iowa, I don’t know anything about hurricanes by moving to the Hill country from somewhere else, same thing, and we don’t make it easy. So I think first of all, just to try to become, as an individual skilled at parsing through the information and finding what I need to make a good decision. I think people can make good decisions with the right information. I just think getting the good information is what’s really difficult these days. That’s what I’m working a lot on over at Rice and with the speed center work we’re doing, a lot of that is putting out better information about risk. We do talk about climate change. It is not always well received in our part of the world, and a lot of doors get closed to us because of it, but that’s the truth. We have to talk.

J. Craig Williams:

It’s a sad state of affairs. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from people, younger people that say nobody told me, so that’s why I didn’t know.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, what particularly, and I think as a lawyer, you’re trained to think in terms of intent and intentionality, and there’s a lot of intent to conceal important information. It’s not that it is necessarily wrongfully presented, it’s just not presented, and the absence of information to me is almost the most important part of change. We’re going to have to address that. We’re going to have to get the message out better. We’re going to need better messengers, we’re going to need better prepared professionals, and so much of this requires multidisciplinary thinking and understanding. The academics generally are trained in their own ivory tower, not a lot of communication. We work very hard at Rise, and I know a lot of other universities are as well, trying to bridge between the various disciplines because so much of this involves not only does it involve climatology and atmospheric science, but also computer modeling. It involves perhaps artificial intelligence on some of this may be helpful that the computer is not necessarily as biased as some of our individuals are, so who knows? It might be a positive space for ai, but I’m just looking for change to occur here mainly on information availability. We’ve got so much information available, yet it is almost in a worthless form. We don’t have that trusted messenger, and that’s going to be a necessary element of the future, I think.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. Well, it comes at you like a fire hose sometimes. Well, Jim, we’ve just about reached the end of our programs. It’s time to wrap up and get your final thoughts about this and sounds like a sad state of affairs in Texas, but let us know what you think.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, no. What I think is there’s a lot of opportunity for change. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to come in and bring good information. I think that we’ve certainly had the tragedy that has focused attention. I think that there is going to be a lot of opportunity to talk with legislators in a little different tone, a little different sense. I think if there’s a bright side of the tragedy, I think it will open conversations in a way they haven’t been opened previously, and I’m hoping we’re wise enough to be able to take advantage of that.

J. Craig Williams:

Me too. Well, Jim, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you very much.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Well, Craig, thanks for reaching out and hope our audience family. Yeah, I wish it were more uplifting, but it is what it is.

J. Craig Williams:

There we are. Thank you, Jim.

Professor Jim Blackburn:

Okay,

J. Craig Williams:

Well, here are a few of my thoughts about today’s topic. I am definitely not a Texan and frankly shocked at listening to Jim describe how is so anti-regulatory to the point that they’re willing to sacrifice human lives. That’s really all I have to say. You can draw your own conclusions. Well, that’s it from my ran about today’s topic. Let me know what you think, and if you like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcast, your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit [email protected], where you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember, when you want legal think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

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