Why I Still Look at the Sky

On July 5th, 2025, as much of Texas woke to what should have been a hot and quiet long weekend, everything changed in a matter of hours. Flash flooding, violent, fast, and utterly unforgiving, tore through parts of Central and East Texas. Bridges collapsed. Homes were swept from foundations. At the time of writing, the death toll stands at 67. Dozens are missing. And I can’t stop thinking about the sky.

Let me explain. I was raised in a family business where aviation wasn’t just a profession, it was a way of life. And in aviation, especially before Foreflight and real-time radar apps, weather wasn’t a side topic. It was the topic. My father talked about pressure systems over breakfast. We learned to read clouds before we could parallel park. When your safety and livelihood depend on the weather, you don’t take it lightly.

Even now, decades later, I check five weather apps, scan radar, read METARs and TAFs, and still go outside to squint at the sky, just to be sure and that's just to do gardening. Some people think I’m overdoing it. I think I’m paying attention.

That brings me back to Texas. The storms that hit on July 5th weren’t a surprise to forecasters. Some parts of the state received flash flood watches the evening before. Others got warnings the morning of. But here’s the thing, "a warning” is only useful if it comes in time, if people understand what it means, and if systems are in place to act on it. In Texas, in some places, the water rose in minutes. Hardened ground from drought couldn’t absorb a drop, so the rain just ran, taking everything in its path.

Did people get warned? Some did. But too many didn’t get enough notice, or didn’t trust the alerts. And here's where it gets political, whether we want it to or not.

The U.S. National Weather Service has been under strain for years. Budget cuts, staff shortages, and now even a further reduction in weather balloon launches. Those cuts, furthered through DOGE have eroded the capacity to give the kind of hyper-local, real-time data that saves lives. A weather balloon costs about $300. They were among the “non-essential” items cut and those losses haven’t been reversed.

I don’t mean to be flippant, but how many weather balloons could you launch for the cost of one political parade or a golf weekend? What value do we place on knowing what the atmosphere is doing before it unleashes itself on us?

And I know people get tired of alerts. I do too. We get them constantly now, severe thunderstorms, tornado watches, snow squalls, extreme heat. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes the radar looks worse than what reaches the ground. But here's what I know from aviation: when something’s uncertain and potentially lethal, you plan for the worst and hope for the best.

I will always prefer a false alarm to a missed warning. Always.

We are lucky in Canada. Not perfect, but lucky. We still have meteorologists with funding, tools, and a weather service that issues alerts proactively. Sometimes they seem premature, or overblown. But when I see a red banner across my screen, I don't roll my eyes. I lean in.

Because I can still hear my dad muttering about “unstable air” as he watched the cloud bases lower. I can still feel the hum of tension before a storm when a decision was made to cancel a flight, not because the radar was dramatic, but because something didn’t feel right. I learned that you don’t ignore risk just because it’s inconvenient.

And as I looked at footage from Texas, roads turned into rivers, families clinging to rooftops, I couldn’t help but think: how much of this was preventable? Not the rain itself. But the death. The destruction. The disbelief.

We are in an age where weather is going to come at us faster, harder, and more unpredictably than we’re used to. And let’s be clear: climate change is not up for debate. It is real, it is here, and it is accelerating the frequency and severity of these events. This isn’t just “bad luck” or “Texas weather.” It’s what happens when a destabilized climate system collides with underfunded public infrastructure. Floods, fires, droughts, and storms, these aren’t isolated events anymore. They’re the new normal.

And so, we have a choice: to invest in knowledge, in alerts, in public systems that keep us aware and alive, or to spend money on things that look good on television but do nothing when the skies open.

As for Canada, we’ve had our share of wildfire seasons that stretched the limits of provincial response. The need for a coordinated national fire strategy, and yes, that applies to the U.S. too, is urgent. But I’ll leave that for another post.

For now, I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done. I’ll look at the increasingly detailed radar available to all of us. I’ll read METAR reports when someone in the family is flying. I’ll check multiple weather apps and still look out the window, because the sky is still the best indicator I know.

And I’ll never apologize for checking it one more time.