Floods hit Texas, then came the cloud talk

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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

Transcript

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0:00.0	In the early hours of the 4th of July, torrential rain hit the hill country region in the U.S. state of Texas.
0:11.3	Central Texas is swamped by a summer's worth of rain in a matter of hours.
0:16.2	The Guadalupe River, which runs through the region, rose by 26 feet.
0:21.2	That's about the height of a two-story house.
0:23.7	It took everything in its path, even entire buildings.
0:28.0	So many people have been swept up into an extraordinary catastrophe.
0:34.2	More than 130 people were killed.
0:37.3	Some were children. Little girls at a summer camp in Kerr County.
0:42.3	The last message they got was, we're being washed away, and the phone went dead.
0:49.3	Texas is no stranger to flash floods, but few have been as deadly as those on the 4th of July.
0:56.6	Soon people started asking how it all came to be, and on social media, a theory was quickly spreading.
1:03.5	It didn't rain for months in Texas. Then they seeded clouds. And two days later, the state was underwater.
1:09.5	The claim that the extreme rainfall wasn't natural
1:12.8	and that a weather modification company in California was behind it.
1:16.8	They were clouds heating and then they get flooding.
1:18.8	And then all the things that happened around that and just the...
1:21.2	What started as a rumor became a full-blown social media frenzy.
1:26.2	Politicians and lots of people alike were calling for my arrest or worse for having
1:33.3	cloud-seated in the region and suggesting that that was the blame for the floods.
1:42.7	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
1:46.1	I'm Marco Silver.
1:47.8	For BBC trending, I've been investigating how deadly floods in Texas
	...

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