Floods hit Texas, then came the cloud talk

洪水袭击德克萨斯,继之而来的是云端的讨论

The Documentary Podcast

2025-09-03

20 分钟
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单集简介 ...

BBC Trending: Why are some Americans yelling at clouds? On 4 July, just hours after flash floods hit the US state of Texas, killing more than 130 people, social media was inundated with unfounded theories about the causes of this tragedy. The main allegation was that the extreme rainfall was somehow man-made, with many users blaming Rainmaker, a weather modification company based in California. These baseless claims were quickly debunked by scientists. And yet, online, calls for the company’s CEO, Augustus Doricko, to be arrested, punished - or, more sinisterly, executed - continued to multiply. Suggestions that sinister forces may be controlling the weather by spraying chemicals in the atmosphere may have once been the preserve of niche websites and forums. Not anymore. As several US states consider banning weather modification and geoengineering, BBC Trending investigates how fringe conspiracy theories have gone mainstream. Reporter: Marco Silva Editor: Flora Carmichael
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  • This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

  • In the early hours of the Fourth of July,

  • torrential rain hit the hill country region in the U.S. state of Texas.

  • Central Texas is swamped by a summer's worth of rain in a matter of hours.

  • The Guadalupe River, which runs through the region, rose by 26 feet.

  • That's about the height of a two-story house.

  • It took everything in its path, even entire buildings.

  • So many people have been swept up into...

  • An extraordinary catastrophe.

  • More than 130 people were killed.

  • Some were children.

  • Little girls at a summer camp in Kerr County.

  • The last message they got was, we're being washed away, and the phone went dead.

  • Texas is no stranger to flash floods, but few have been as deadly as those on the 4th of July.

  • Soon, people started asking how it all came to be.

  • And on social media, a theory was quickly spreading.

  • It didn't rain for months in Texas.

  • Then they seeded clouds.

  • And two days later, the state was underwater.

  • The claim?