by T.J. Muscaro
08 July 2025
from TheEpochTimes Website





Debris following flooding on the Guadalupe River,

 in Kerrville, Texas, on July 8, 2025.

Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times



'Rainmaker did not operate

in the affected area on the 3rd or 4th

or contribute to

the floods that occurred over the region,'

said CEO Augustus Doricko.

Employees at a cloud seeding company have received death threats and calls for vandalism after the firm's chief executive officer tried to show how its rainmaking operations had nothing to do with the recent flooding disaster in Central Texas.

Augustus Doricko, 25, CEO of Rainmaker Technology Corporation, took to X on July 8, tagging the social media's safety account and head of product, Nikita Bier, stating,

"our address and pictures of our office were doxxed yesterday and the posts are still up despite being reported. Who can I talk to in order to remove this?"

Several hours later, that question appeared to remain unanswered.

"Rainmaker is still receiving threats despite my explanation on X," Doricko told The Epoch Times in an email received just before 6:30 p.m. ET on July 8.

 

"We have asked the platform to intervene on certain posts and will continue to explain the truth behind our operations in Texas to clear up any misunderstandings with the facts."

Rainmaker conducted a scheduled cloud seeding operation on the afternoon of July 2 in Karnes County, Texas, which is more than 150 miles southeast of Kerr County and downstream of the Guadalupe River and all other affected rivers.

However, accusations quickly arose across social media, attempting to connect Rainmaker's activity with the floods, including one inquiry from Gen. Mike Flynn.

"The natural disaster in the Texan Hill Country is a tragedy," Doricko said in response to the general on X on July 5.

 

"My prayers are with Texas. Rainmaker did not operate in the affected area on the 3^rd or 4^th or contribute to the floods that occurred over the region. Rainmaker will always be fully transparent."

Doricko's company suspended all cloud seeding operations once its forecasters identified the moist remnants of Tropical Storm Barry making their way into the state.

He has repeated multiple times that weather modification had nothing to do with the disaster, and that stance has been echoed by politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and weather experts.

"The claim that cloud seeding played a role in this tragic event is complete nonsense," said Andrew Dessler, director of Texas A&M University's Texas Center for Extreme Weather.

Cloud seeding technology has been around since the 1940s and has been used frequently to increase snowpacks in the winter, refill aquifers, and water farmland when other methods like pumping groundwater or piping desalinated seawater from the coast are either impractical or impossible.

"There are counties and farms in Texas that pay us for cloud seeding, because without it, they would have even less water and be more at risk of going away and being put out of business due to drought," Doricko said during a Spaces chat held on X on July 7.

However, a growing political push against weather modification practices has continued to grow at the state and federal levels.

The state of Florida recently passed a bill that banned all forms of weather modification from operating within its borders, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is pushing for a federal ban.

"I want clean air, clean skies, clean rain water, clean ground water, and sunshine just like God created it," she declared in a post on X on July 5.

 

"No person, company, entity, or government should ever be allowed to modify our weather by any means possible!!"

Rainmaker's Timeline

According to Doricko, an estimated 4 trillion gallons of precipitation fell on central Texas during the storm.

His team's operation in Karnes County produced only a few hundred acre-feet of precipitation across hundreds of square miles.

It was done at the request of the South Texas Weather Modification Association to refill local aquifers.

"Two clouds were seeded," he said on X.

 

"These clouds persisted for about two hours after seeding before dissipating between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. CDT."

Speaking on X and through multiple interview opportunities, the young CEO explained that cloud seeding works by dispensing silver iodide and table salt into the clouds that would not naturally precipitate over land, giving the water droplets that would have otherwise been cycled back into the ocean something to latch onto and rain down over land.

"We use a couple of Skittles' worth of silver iodide in each of our operations," he explained on X Spaces.

 

"Over hundreds of square miles, there are about two parts per million of silver naturally occurring in American soil already."

The exact measurements released into the clouds on July 2 amounted to about 70 grams of silver iodide - roughly 10 skittles - and 500 grams of table salt.

The operation was a 19-minute flight, and upon its completion, all weather modification operations were suspended.

"Our meteorologists saw on the afternoon of the second that there was an inflow of moisture from the Gulf," he said.

 

"If ever there is any risk of flooding, a natural large precipitation event inbound, or too much saturation of the soil, all weather modification projects are required to suspend operations, in accordance with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation of law."

Doricko said those rainmaking particles only remain suspended in the clouds for a maximum of 20 hours, which would still put it well before the onset of Tropical Storm Barry's remnants came through.

But even after 20 hours, he said,

"they would be so diffused that they would almost be immeasurable and have no consequence on any cloud that they interacted with, because they'd be lower in concentration than the natural dust that gets kicked up from Texas."

In a separate post on X, Doricko added that the lifespan of natural clouds typically lasts half an hour to a few hours, with the most persistent storms holding the same cloud structure for 12-18 hours.

More Research Needed

Doricko went on to emphasize that,

there was still a lot to learn about weather modification and the ultimate impact humans can have by harvesting more precipitation from the clouds and even deterring extreme weather events.

He argued for more funding and regulation from the federal government rather than a ban like Greene hopes to see.

He cited,

communist China's $1.4 billion annual investment in weather modification for matters like supplementing the snowpack on the Tibetan plateau, transforming desert land near Mongolia into farmland, removing pollution from its major cities, and mitigating extreme weather events.

He also cited,

the needs of desert-threatened California farmland, drought-prone cities like Phoenix, the depleting Ogallala aquifer in the Great Plains, the recently depleting Colorado River, and the recent wildfire in South Florida,

...as examples of why more focus on the uses of cloud seeding is needed.

"Inquiring about weather modification is great, the federal government should be regulating it stringently," he said on X.

 

"Banning it and depriving American farmers of water, while other nations invest in the technology, is wrong."

In the meantime, Doricko told The Epoch Times that Rainmaker's Texas operations will remain suspended until the flood waters have cleared and emergency responders stop their work.

It remains committed to being transparent and ready to explain the truth of its Texas operations while providing aid and prayers to those affected by the floods.

"This is a terrible 'natural' disaster, and we remain committed to doing everything we can to help those affected," he said.