Thousands of people were affected by the floods that hit Texas last week. Now, a Texas-based artificial rain company has become the target of conspiracy theories.
It all started early last Friday, on the American holiday of July 4th, when heavy rains hit Kerr County, which is surrounded by the Guadalupe River.
According to reports, water levels rose more than 6 meters in just 1 hour. Over 100 deaths have been confirmed, and many people are still missing.
Now, a Texas-based climate tech startup is under attack on social media, with many accusing the company of being the cause of the tragedy, according to The Washington Post.
Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of Rainmaker, told the newspaper that the company has even become a target of public figures, influencers, and politicians. On social media, he stated that the company’s last mission was conducted on July 2nd.
Rainmaker uses a technology called “cloud seeding,” a climate modification method that involves introducing dust or aerosol particles into clouds in the atmosphere to trigger additional precipitation.
It is a “decades-long approach to climate modification that uses a variety of support technologies for research and operations,” explained the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a December 2024 report.
For this reason, Travis Herzog, a veteran meteorologist from Houston, stated that the theories about Rainmaker’s involvement in the tragedy are not scientifically grounded. “Cloud seeding cannot create a storm of this magnitude or size,” he explained in a post on Facebook.
“In fact, cloud seeding can’t even create a single cloud. All it can do is take an existing cloud and increase precipitation by up to 20%, but most estimates indicate that the increase in precipitation will be much smaller.”
Photo and video: Unsplash. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
