Hill Country flood hearings

Brutal.

Kerr County’s emergency management coordinator acknowledged Thursday that he was ill and asleep when rain inundated the Hill Country community early July 4.

Will Thomas told lawmakers during a legislative hearing in Kerrville that his wife woke him at 5:30 a.m. with a call from the city “requesting that I mobilize.” At that point, floodwaters had already torn through Kerrville.

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said he was also asleep in the early morning hours of July 4. Deputies on duty called him before dawn to notify him of the situation. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, who oversees emergency management, said he was out of town.

The officials’ testimony was part of the special hearing state lawmakers called in Kerrville to hear from residents and local officials about the state and local response to the flooding in Central Texas that killed at least 130 people. Gov. Greg Abbott has asked lawmakers to introduce legislation during the current special session to address concerns raised by the floods, including how residents were warned about the rising Guadalupe River and how quickly they received aid.

While acknowledging the surprising volume of rain that night, some lawmakers questioned what appeared to be confusion at the local level.

“The three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable,” said state Sen. Ann Johnson, a Democrat from Houston.

[…]

Johnson asked Thomas how the county warned Camp Mystic of the rising Guadalupe River. Twenty seven campers and staffers of the all-girls camp died in the flooding.

“It is my understanding that there were little girls with water around their feet at 2 a.m. that were told, ‘Stay in your cabin.’ And those little girls did what they were told. What was the protocol to warn people when that scenario comes up?” she asked Thomas after his testimony.

Thomas told Johnson the camp should have notified the sheriff’s office of flooding. But Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said he did not receive any such notification from Camp Mystic.

The complete absence of the top three officials during the critical period in Kerrville is just mind-boggling. My wife, upon reading this news, said to me “Have they never heard of delegation of authority?” As in, if you’re not available for whatever the reason – and it was a holiday weekend, people are allowed to go out of town – someone else is given the authority and responsibility to act on your behalf. However you look at this, it was a massive failure.

More from the Trib.

The Kerr County officials’ testimony was their first public statements about what they had been doing the morning of the disaster, and they revealed that key officials weren’t awake to react to flood warnings in the critical early morning hours of July 4.

“One of the problems that this process is showing is we have a lot of folks who have titles but when the time came to act, they did not do so in a timely fashion,” Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, said during the hearing.

“The three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable,” said Ann Johnson, D-Houston. “Am I hearing that right?”

When the flooding began, Kelly was at a house on Lake Travis outside of Austin, he said. Everything felt normal to him; he’d been getting ready for family to come over during the holiday weekend. He said Leitha, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd and Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice tried to contact him while he slept.

Kelly said he woke up around 5 a.m., or 5:30 a.m., or 6 a.m. — he wasn’t quite sure. In Kerr County, rain had been pounding the south fork of the Guadalupe River and a wall of water was raging down the river toward unsuspecting communities that had no idea what was headed their way.

“We now know that by that time the flooding had already overtaken Camp Mystic, Heart O’ the Hills and La Junta, and several other upriver camps,” Kelly said, “something that I could never have imagined.”

Thomas, the emergency management coordinator, told lawmakers that he was home sick. He hadn’t been feeling well since July 2 and didn’t work on July 3, which he’d previously requested to take off anyway for another reason, he said. He missed two regular state emergency management calls that day, but said other county leaders typically receive written summaries afterward to make sure information reaches them even when Thomas isn’t working.

Thomas said he woke up around 5:30 a.m. after the City of Kerrville Emergency Management Coordinator Jerremy Hughes called his wife, who roused him.

Both Kelly and Thomas told legislators that they’d had no idea what was coming.

But there were warnings: The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for the county on July 3, meaning flooding was possible, and pushed out increasingly dire flood warnings saying that flooding was happening or imminent starting at 1:14 a.m. July 4.

“Based on the data we had at the time, there was no clear indicator that a catastrophic flood was imminent,” Thomas said. “The rain fell in remote areas with limited gauge data; forecasts were not materially different from past events that did not result in flooding.”

Emphasis mine. The lack of imagination, the inability to conceive of worst-case scenarios, these are not attributes you want in people who are responsible for disaster readiness and response. The “we’ve gotten these warnings before and they were always nothing” stance is understandable to a point – overreacting has its costs as well – but the warnings were a lot more dire hours before the disaster hit, when all three of these guys were sound asleep. Honestly, given what we now know, I don’t understand why these guys haven’t resigned. I’m surprised there isn’t more pressure on them to do exactly that.

And wait, it gets worse.

A five-year-old emergency management plan, obtained by The Texas Tribune late Thursday, shows that Kerr County and Kerrville officials were operating from a generic disaster response template that, in some cases, officials failed to follow when 30-plus feet of floodwaters swamped the Guadalupe River banks on July 4.

The plan, which all counties must file with the Texas Division of Emergency Management, serves as a disaster playbook for local officials.

Emergency management plans spell out who is in charge of the entire response to a mass disaster that could result in serious injury and death, and designate which tasks — evacuations, medical treatment tents, sanitation and the recovery of bodies — go to which county and city administrative leaders to keep confusion at a minimum and bureaucratic bottlenecks from occurring.

It’s not known if Kerr County and Kerrville officials used the plan. A request for comment was not immediately returned late Thursday.

But if they had, there was a clear set of instructions on when to increase monitoring of weather once a flood watch was issued, the first sign that trouble may be approaching, and also at what point evacuations should begin. And the plan indicates that all of the top officials in the area considered flash flooding and flooding as the greatest threat to Kerrville and Kerr County.

“Our cities of Kerrville, Ingram and Kerr County is (SIC) exposed to many hazards, all of which have the potential for disrupting the community, causing casualties and damaging or destroying public or private property,” the November 2020 plan begins.

The plan puts the the county judge and the mayor in charge of offering general guidance to disaster response. It puts the emergency management coordinator or the city manager as the lead to direct the overall response. Initially city officials had to take lead because the top three county officials were out missing when the flooding began.

[…]

Local officials told lawmakers that they received little warning about the flood, that it came too quickly for an adequate response. Thomas admitted to state Sen. Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican, that Kerr County and Kerrville first responders had never conducted a countywide evacuation exercise ever.

“We have not done a full-scale evacuation exercise,” Thomas admitted.

But the 55-page plan, indicates that local officials should have been better prepared. The plan was released to the Tribune by the Texas Division of Emergency Management in response to a public records request. Kerr County officials have not responded to a similar request made earlier by the Tribune.

“Proper mitigation actions, such as floodplain management, and fire inspections, can prevent or reduce disaster-related losses,” the plan states. “Detailed emergency planning, training of emergency responders and other personnel, and conducting periodic emergency drills and exercises can improve our readiness to deal with emergency situations.”

Here’s a recent example of an emergency drill. In the cybersecurity world, we do stuff like this pretty regularly too. It’s a good way to make sure everyone knows what they’re supposed to do in an emergency, in a low-stakes environment where errors and goof-ups are learning opportunities and not reasons why people die.

The reason for these hearings is also to learn from what happened, which contrary to what certain people believe is good practice and not “loser behavior”, and make changes to prevent the things that went wrong from happening again. I must admit to a certain amount of queasiness here, because those changes will in some ways mandate behavior by local governments, perhaps with consequences for failure, and while in the abstract that’s the right thing to do, we’re talking about the Texas Legislature and Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick, and their track record on this matter is not just bad, it’s actively harmful. Maybe, in this case, with the focus of the failures being on dark red counties and conservative Republican officials, they’ll take a less punitive approach and do something constructive instead. That I’m thinking about it this way really says a lot about how our state government works these days.

There’s another avenue for improvement, but for various reasons it’s not likely to be taken in this session.

Although not specifically named in Gov. Greg Abbott’s list of directives for the current special legislative session, state lawmakers have filed several bills to shore up the safety of youth camps in the wake of the devastating Hill Country floods.

So far, nine bills have been proposed that would address everything from emergency plans and camper disaster drills, to better communication systems and life jackets inside every cabin. They are all in response to the July 4 floods that killed 137 people, including 27 campers and counselors at storied Camp Mystic. The camp’s longtime owner Dick Eastland was also among the victims.

“My hope is that these common sense reforms would help prevent confusion during floods and ensure every camper has the tools and information needed to act quickly when every second matters,” said state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, who has filed three of eight camp safety bills.

Realistically, it’s tough to see how any camp safety proposal will pass by Aug. 19, when the special session ends, when so much is vying for the Texas Legislature’s attention. Many flood-related proposals that will likely take priority over camps are aimed at fast-tracking disaster funding to businesses and improving emergency disaster response.

And there’s no guarantee that all camps will be on board with the proposed safety regulations.

While some camp industry representatives have told The Texas Tribune they welcome regulation as they grieve alongside their impacted peers, these businesses, particularly more profitable camps, have influenced legislation or circumvented certain mandates in the past. Two weeks after the flooding, the Associated Press reported that Camp Mystic had in recent years successfully appealed to FEMA to have several of its buildings removed from federal flood zone maps, which could have lowered Mystic’s insurance cost and made expansion of the camp easier to do.

“The youth camps don’t like regulation,” state Rep. Vikki Goodwin told The Texas Tribune when asked about concessions she had to make to certain camps on a 2023 safety bill.

Whether the camp safety bills make it, are re-filed in another special session or resurface in the 2027 regular legislative session, one thing is certain: The small but politically astute camp industry is expected to face a lot more questions from lawmakers and specifically, Texas parents, about how it keeps campers safe, particularly the large contingent of sleepaway camps along the state’s lakes and rivers.

“Whatever is coming out, especially from the Legislature or state law, we’re going to gladly take it and run with it,” said Dan Neal, the chair of the state’s camp advisory committee and whose family owns Georgetown-based Camp Doublecreek. “And the camps that I know that I work closely with are going to be happy to take what that is, and really, I would say, make it even better than what is just gonna be probably the base regulation.”

[…]

The youth camp industry is hardly different from other industries in Texas, a pro-business state famously allergic to strict regulation. Youth camps, like most private enterprises and even counties and cities, hire lobbyists to protect their interests via a trade association during legislative sessions.

This is where I remind you that while camps and Elon Musk are free to hire all the lobbyists they want to get what they want from the Legislature, Greg Abbott wants to make it illegal for cities and counties and school districts to be able to do that. Because reasons.

Anyway. Pertaining to the previous story, items like requiring camps to do safety drills and to file disaster readiness plans with the Texas Division of Emergency Management are in some of the bills that have been filed. Those seem like good ideas, along with a parent’s suggestion that camps be required to post their emergency plans on their websites; right now, parents can ask to see them but there is no requirement of disclosure. The camps have their lobbyists – the Camp Association for Mutual Progress is their trade association, which is a fancy way of saying their lobbying group – and the parents do not. You know how that tends to go.

One more thing.

A tiny agency that manages the Guadalupe River in Kerr County is promising to spend at least $1.5 million on flood protection and mitigation measures, weeks after more than 100 people — including 27 young campers and counselors at Camp Mystic — lost their lives in the area during devastating floods.

The pledge from the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, announced during a legislative hearing in Kerrville on Thursday, comes about a week after a Houston Chronicle investigation revealed that the authority delayed upgrading its flood warning system despite sitting on at least $3 million in reserve funds for more than a decade.

“You may wonder if one county river authority is too small to meet these challenges,” said Bill Rector, who was first appointed to the authority’s board by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2015 and now serves as its president. “I say no.”

But lawmakers appeared skeptical of his claims and criticized UGRA for failing to act earlier, continuing a pointed line of questioning they had launched against the river authority during a separate hearing last week.

“It was recognized through studies that you paid for that there was a need for an early warning system,” State Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, told Rector. “And yet you didn’t do anything about it.”

State Rep. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, said “you should be in the business of protecting people from the river.” As people in the audience began to applaud, she added, “I don’t see how the Upper Guadalupe River Authority helped in any way in this flood.”

Campbell suggested that the river authority wasn’t capable of performing adequately on its own and should instead combine with the much larger Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, which manages the waterway in 10 counties downstream of Kerr County.

“I could be wrong, but I think it’s something we need to look at,” said Campbell, whose district includes some of the rivershed that is handled by GBRA.

State Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, noted that UGRA’s entire board is appointed by Abbott, though it is one of very few river authorities in the state that has the power to levy taxes. Three of its nine board members lead summer camps along the Guadalupe, including Dick Eastland, the director of Camp Mystic who died during the floods.

“So you’re not accountable to the voters of Kerr County, even though you’re taxing them?” asked King, who chairs the House committee on flood recovery. “They couldn’t un-elect you and take you off the board, if they didn’t think you were doing a good job?”

“That’s correct,” Rector said.

[…]

During the Kerrville hearing, lawmakers repeatedly asked Rector why the UGRA did not overhaul its antiquated flood warning system earlier. In 1989, the river authority paid for the system with a 46% property tax hike. But in recent years, it chose to spend down its hefty reserves – which were set aside for a water supply project that leaders ultimately chose not to pursue – in part by decreasing the tax rate, which is now lower than it was decades ago.

Rector did not directly respond to requests to explain that decision. Instead, he said that some of the UGRA’s surplus money went to “several projects that we were funding at that time.”

Better late than never, of course. But boy was the cost of being late awfully steep.

Related Posts:

• The flood warning history of Kerr County
• Hill Country flood roundup
• So now the Lege will get involved