Flash floods have devastated communities across West Virginia, Texas and other regions of the United States this week, the latest in an accelerating series of extreme weather events unfolding as global temperatures continue to shatter records and federal disaster response agencies face deep cuts.  

In north central West Virginia, severe storms on Tuesday and Wednesday dumped up to seven inches of rain in a matter of hours, triggering flash floods that officials compared to the devastating Election Day floods of November 1985 when 10 inches fell in two days, washing away bridges, roads, homes and killing 47 people.  

Governor Patrick Morrisey declared a state of emergency and more than 300 National Guard members were deployed. Emergency workers carried out 85 water rescues. In Buckhannon, a shelter-in-place order remained in effect into Wednesday afternoon and Lewis County opened a shelter at its high school for displaced residents. Two people are known to have died in the flooding while an unknown number of people remained unaccounted for.

Only last year flash flooding killed six people—including a 3-year-old child—with two others missing while leaving a trail of destruction in the northern part of the state in June. Another system battered southern counties, washing out roads and rivers and causing a three-story apartment building to collapse.

Nicolas Zegre, associate professor of forest hydrology at West Virginia University happened to be on the West Fork River when the storm hit last week. He described the moment when “very intense, heavy, explosive rains dropped a lot of water” on the region.

According to Zegre, the weather station in Huntington has documented a 28 percent increase in the amount of water in hourly rainfall since 1970. “Our current infrastructure is inadequate to handle the kind of weather and flood events that we are having, that arguably are going to get more intense in the future,” noting, “Each year we seem to have these unprecedented events, which kind of mean they’re no longer unprecedented and means that this is our new normal.”

Three people are dead in Texas after catastrophic flooding struck the same region where floods killed more than two dozen children at Camp  Mystic just over a year ago this month. A total of 135 perished last July when the area received up to 15 inches of rain in just a few hours.

Two weeks ago, the Guadalupe River rose 37 feet at Comfort, Texas, about 1.5 feet higher than the crest during the tragic July 2025 flood. Nearly 1 trillion gallons of water fell on the three hardest-hit counties in Texas over three days according to Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Rescuers in boats and helicopters saved more than 200 people, including stranded drivers and people trapped in homes where the Nueces River had burst its banks and inundated communities across La Salle County. Hundreds of homes and businesses have been destroyed across South Texas. Officials report they are still unable to access several areas because they are still under water.

The floods in West Virginia and Texas are part of a worldwide eruption of extreme weather. Earlier this month, monsoon floods and landslides in Bangladesh have killed more than 50 people and affected over 1 million, while hundreds of thousands remain stranded. Rohingya refugees living in makeshift shelters were among the dead, and the government’s relief allocation for 750,000 people in Chattogram amounted to only about nine cents per person.

Last week, storms killed at least 10 people and cut more than 99,000 off from basic services in Chile. In parts of the Coquimbo region, a month’s rain fell in a single hour, inundating communities that had endured a 15-year megadrought.

The same intensification of the climate catastrophe is unfolding across Europe in the form of record heat and wildfires. The continent is experiencing its third major heatwave of the summer, with temperatures reaching 48.4 degrees Celsius in Sicily. Heat and drought have fueled wildfires that forced roughly 375,000 people to evacuate in France and Spain, while an estimated 14,000 excess deaths occurred across six countries during the June heat wave alone.

These floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires mark a further intensification of the global climate catastrophe, driven by decades of fossil-fuel emissions, the destruction of natural carbon sinks and the refusal of capitalist governments to undertake the internationally coordinated measures required to protect human life.

The scientific connection between these disasters is well established. The burning of fossil fuels has warmed the atmosphere, oceans and land, increasing the intensity of heavy precipitation while accelerating evaporation, drying soils and vegetation, and worsening heat waves and conditions conducive to wildfires. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that human-induced warming is already affecting weather and climate extremes in every region of the world. Events once described as exceptional are becoming more frequent, more destructive and increasingly simultaneous.

The obstacle is not a lack of scientific knowledge or productive capacity. It is the capitalist system, which subordinates every aspect of social life to private profit and divides the world among rival nation-states. Energy conglomerates continue expanding oil, gas and coal production, while governments proclaim climate targets they have no intention of meeting. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) found that governments plan to produce 110 percent more fossil fuels in 2030 than would be compatible with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The accelerating climate catastrophe is exposing the class priorities that make every extreme weather event more deadly. Even as floods, fires and heatwaves intensify, governments are cutting funding for protective infrastructure, emergency response and rebuilding while directing vast resources toward imperialist war.

In the United States alone, FEMA’s active workforce fell by 9.5 percent between January and June 2025. The Trump administration attempted to eliminate the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which funds flood control and other disaster-mitigation projects, and has proposed quadrupling the damage threshold for federal assistance, excluding many smaller and poorer communities.

At the same time, Democrats and Republicans have authorized a military budget approaching $1 trillion. The same priorities prevail internationally: unlimited resources are available for war and corporate profit, while infrastructure, disaster preparedness and relief for the working population are starved of funding. 

But the climate crisis cannot be resolved through national pledges, carbon markets or appeals to the corporations responsible for it. It requires the international unification of the working class to take the energy conglomerates and major industries into public ownership, reorganize production through democratic socialist planning, and direct the world’s scientific and material resources toward human need rather than private profit and war.