They’ve tried for awhile to get some funding for a flood warning system. They’ve failed every time.
Nearly a decade before catastrophic flash flooding killed at least 75 people in Kerr County, including 27 children, several local officials were hard at work convincing their peers to buy into a new early flood warning system.
The once “state of the art” program installed along the Guadalupe River back in the 1980s was in desperate need of an upgrade, they argued. It wasn’t good enough for Kerr County, which sits at the heart of “flash flood alley,” a portion of the Texas Hill Country whose climate and terrain make it uniquely susceptible to sudden and catastrophic floods.
“I’m not trying to put a dollar on a life or a flood, but the fact of the matter [is] floods do happen, and we need to be prepared for them,” then-Kerr County Commissioner Bob Reeves noted during a series of public meetings that began in 2016. And, his former colleague Tom Moser pointed out, “We also have more summer camps than anybody else along the Guadalupe River.”
The wide-ranging discussions back then — captured in transcripts archived online — proved to be a chilling precursor to the disaster that unfolded early on July 4. That’s when a slow-moving, massive rainstorm caused the Guadalupe River to rise by 22 feet in just three hours, catching those living and camping on its banks off-guard in the middle of the night.
But the new warning system never became reality. Though local officials agreed to spend $50,000 on an engineering study, which made specific recommendations for such a project in 2016, they never secured the $1 million they estimated would be needed to implement it – despite asking for help from state officials at least three separate times.
“We never were successful in getting that funding, or putting the matching funding with it to do anything,” said Moser, who retired in 2021, in a phone interview. He said he hopes the county can “go back to the drawing board on this, and hopefully it’ll be a model that could be used all over the United States.”
In 2017, Kerr County and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority asked the state to give them federal disaster relief dollars, but their application was denied. They tried a second time after Hurricane Harvey, when more federal funds became available and Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged local entities to submit applications. They were rejected again.
Both applications would have been handled by the Texas Department of Emergency Management, whose spokesman, Wes Rapaport, said the agency could not immediately respond to specific questions because “we are in the middle of ongoing response operations.”
The governor’s office did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Abbott said in a news conference that flood response will be handled during the state’s upcoming legislative session, which starts on Monday, July 21.
The river authority, UGRA, also applied for state funding through the Texas Water Development Board. But the agency only agreed to chip in 5% of the estimated $1 million cost, according to documents from the river authority and the water board. The remaining price tag was too steep for Kerr County, whose annual budget in 2016 was about $30 million. UGRA has far fewer resources; last fall, the authority approved spending about $2.3 million.
“At that point we sort of dropped it,” said William Rector, president of the board of UGRA, which has supported the effort for years and paid for a portion of the 2016 study. Abbott appointed Rector to the board in 2016 and named him president two years ago.
[…]
In recent days, other local officials have bristled at the suggestion that a warning system could have made a difference, pointing out that even national weather forecasters underestimated how much rain could fall in such a short period of time. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s highest-ranking elected official, told reporters over the weekend that “nobody saw this coming.”
Phil Bedient, who has spent decades designing flood protection and prediction systems as director of Rice University’s SSPEED Center, disagreed.
“We have radar, and we have cell phones, and we have sirens, and those three things together can be used to create a pretty good system,” he said. “It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, but what’s that versus 80 or 100 people dying in a flash flood?”
Rector said UGRA is continuing to move forward with a flood warning system plan. Documents show the river authority agreed to pay an environmental firm about $73,000 to once again assess what new infrastructure Kerr County might need to implement an early flood warning system – though that’s likely a tiny fraction of the total cost of putting one in place.
“This storm has told us we just can’t wait anymore,” he said.
I agree with the decision for them to not get Hurricane Harvey relief funds. Let’s just say that remains an extremely sore subject and move on. Why all the other attempts failed I couldn’t say. The area around the Guadalupe River is called “Flash Flood Alley” and its history is long and well known. I don’t know why Kerr County never found the money for this.
Now compare that experience to that of nearby Comfort, Texas.
As heavy rain triggered flash flood warnings along the Guadalupe River in Texas Hill Country early Friday, the small unincorporated town of Comfort had something its neighbors upriver in Kerr County didn’t: wailing sirens urging residents to flee before the water could swallow them.
Comfort had recently updated its disaster alert system, installing a new siren in the volunteer fire department’s headquarters and moving the old one to a low-lying area of town along Cypress Creek, a tributary of the Guadalupe that is prone to flooding. Friday was the first time the new two-siren system had been used outside of tests, providing a last-minute alarm for anyone who hadn’t responded to previous warnings on their cellphones or evacuation announcements from firefighters driving around town.
“People knew that if they heard the siren, they gotta get out,” said Danny Morales, assistant chief of the Comfort Volunteer Fire Department.
Morales said that no one died in Comfort, a town of about 2,300 people in Kendall County. But in Kerr County about 20 miles away, dozens of people, including young girls staying at Camp Mystic, a riverside Christian summer camp, were washed away when the Guadalupe surged over its banks and swamped the surrounding countryside. As of Monday evening, officials said, 104 people had been confirmed dead, 84 of them in Kerr County, including dozens of children. Kerr County has no siren system despite years of debate, in part because some local officials felt it was too expensive to install.
[…]
It is impossible to know whether a siren system in Kerr County would have saved lives; they are meant to alert people who are outdoors, not in bed indoors, as many of Kerr County’s victims were when the river rose overnight — at one point by 26 feet in just 45 minutes.
The weather service issued a flood watch for the area Thursday afternoon and an urgent flash flood warning for Kerr County at 1:14 a.m. Friday, a move that triggers the wireless emergency alerts on cellphones.
By the time flooding inundated low-lying parts of Kendall County, where Comfort is located, it was later Friday morning. The first weather service flash flood alert for Kendall came at 7:24 a.m. When the sirens went off, many residents were already awake and aware of the dangerous flooding. A Facebook video recorded by Jeff Flinn, the managing editor of The Boerne Star, shows the emergency sirens in Comfort sounding at 10:52 a.m.; he said the alert lasted for about 30 seconds.
Kerr County was relying on the emergency alerts that blare on cellphones. Those alerts may not get through, particularly in rural areas with bad service or in the night when phones are off or when there are no phones around; the girls at the summer camp weren’t allowed to bring them. And some may choose to ignore them, because they’re bombarded by phone alerts.
[…]
Cruz Newberry, who owns Table Rock Alerting Systems, a Missouri company, installed Comfort’s new computer-backed system last year at a cost of about $60,000. Morales said a local nonprofit group provided most of the money, with Kendall County kicking in a smaller amount.
The system, linked to the National Weather Service by a satellite dish that can withstand violent weather, can be set up to automatically trigger sirens when the agency declares flash flood emergencies for the area. But Comfort opts to trigger its sirens manually, when officials notice flood waters have risen past a certain point.
Newberry stressed that sirens are a piece of a broader warning apparatus that also includes the news media, social media and cellphone alerts. Sirens, he said, are a measure of last resort.
“The nice thing with an outdoor warning system is it’s one of the few methods that local officials have at their disposal where they can literally press a button and warn citizens themselves,” Newberry said. “It’s difficult to ignore a siren blaring for three minutes straight.”
The story also touches on Kerr County’s experience trying to get funds for an alert system there, as well as the failed legislative effort from this year. Sixty grand doesn’t sound like a lot of money to me, but Kerrville has ten times the population of Comfort, so that may not be a good comparison. At this point, the bigger issue is trying to learn all we can about what the options are.
That first article mentioned Phil Bedient, of Ike Dike and SSPEED fame, and here he is expanding on his assertion about a proper flood warning system.
The Guadalupe River needs more flood gauges. The Guadalupe River is 230 miles long. Its river basin is 6,700 square miles — meaning that the rain that falls on all that land drains toward the river.
Right now, there are only about five rain gauges on the Guadalupe River, and not all of those worked. That leaves far too much of the river unmonitored.
The Rice University SPEED Center recommends that 20 or more gauges be installed and maintained, and that a radar rainfall system be implemented for the region.
The State of Texas needs an alert system along the Guadalupe River. There were no warning sirens in those vulnerable towns along the Guadalupe or at certain critical river sections. We need a comprehensive alert system that would protect not just the towns, but also rural and remote sections of the river.
Summer camps must have excellent flood escape plans. For the summer camps along the Guadalupe’s banks, there are few established escape routes. Each camp must work with local authorities to establish robust escape routes and develop flood risk responses.
We need a modern flood warning system. Finally, the Guadalupe River requires a modern computer model such as the FIRST model (Flood Information & Response System), developed by the SSPEED Center, that the city of Houston has used since 2020. FIRST is an advanced, radar-based flood assessment, mapping and early-warning system that provides emergency managers with near-instantaneous flood predictions — showing, for instance, whether a hospital or nursing home is likely to be inundated.
We need to address San Antonio too. Flooding in this part of Texas isn’t isolated to rural areas. Less than one month earlier, San Antonio experienced severe floods in which 13 people died in cars swept off of roadways. That city, too, needs alerts, escape plans and an improved flood warning system.
Those all seem like good ideas, and things that the Lege could address in a special session, if Greg Abbott wants to include that. Which he seems inclined to do at this point. One can certainly wonder why some of this stuff had never been addressed before, and one can certainly wonder if Abbott would have actually called a special session – which as we know he did not do after Harvey – if one to deal with his THC ban veto wasn’t already on the calendar.
Back to Kerr County and its emergency alerts:
In his first press conference after the deadly floods last weekend, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said unequivocally that the area did not have an emergency alert system.
“We have no warning system,” he said on the morning of July 4, just hours after the Guadalupe River topped its banks. When pushed about why evacuations did not occur earlier, Kelly doubled down. “We didn’t know this flood was coming. Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming. …This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.”
And when asked Tuesday at what time warnings were issued, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said he was focused on search and rescue.
“It’s not that easy, and you just push a button. Okay? There’s a lot more to that, and we’ve told you several times,” he said. A reporter then asked, “Did it happen?” to which Leitha responded, “I can’t tell you at this time.”
But The Texas Newsroom has learned that not only does the county have a mass-alert system for public emergencies, first responders asked that it be triggered early Friday morning.
The Guadalupe River rose as much as 26 feet in 45 minutes around 4 a.m., said Lt Gov. Dan Patrick.
According to emergency radio transmissions The Texas Newsroom reviewed, volunteer firefighters asked for what’s called a “CodeRED” alert to be sent as early as 4:22 a.m. Dispatchers delayed, saying they needed special authorization.
Some residents received flood warnings from CodeRED within an hour. Others told The Texas Newsroom they did not receive their first alert until after 10 a.m., raising questions about why the messages that residents received were sporadic and inconsistent.
[…]
According to information on the Kerr County website, CodeRED “has the ability to notify the entire county or only the affected areas of the county about emergency situations in a matter of minutes.” The system was approved by county commissioners in 2009 for $25,000 a year.
“The system delivers pre-recorded emergency telephone messages, such as during instances of severe weather,” the site adds, “and other emergency situations where rapid and accurate notification is essential for life safety.”
Historically, the Kerr County sheriff has had the ultimate authority on sending an alert out to the public. The department did not respond to questions about whether this authority has changed under the current sheriff or why the CodeRED alerts appeared to be inconsistent.
But CodeRED has some drawbacks.
It uses publicly available phone numbers and voluntary sign ups to send text messages, voicemails, and emails to people in the area specified by government officials sending the alert.
This means its warnings may not go out to all residents or visitors in a disaster area.
Seems like there’s more than just technology and funding to address. Kerr County voters ought to be asking their elected officials some pointed questions.
Sadly, the death toll keeps rising.
The death toll in Kerr County due to deadly floods is now at 94 people, with 161 people still missing in that county, Gov. Greg Abbott said in a Tuesday news conference.
The number of known fatalities in Kerr County as a result of the Hill Country flooding on July 4, increased by seven since Tuesday morning, when the death toll was at 87. Gov. Greg Abbott and state officials held a news conference Tuesday afternoon in Hunt on the continued response to severe flooding in Hill Country.
Abbott said at least 161 people are still missing after the state’s catastrophic floods, with a total death toll of 109 across the state.
Abbott said state lawmakers will consider better allocating resources for those impacted in Central Texas, including Kerr and Kendall County during a pre-planned special session in Austin later this month.
“We want to make sure that when we end that session, we end it making sure these communities are better, more resilient and have the resources they need for the next chapter of their lives,” House Speaker Dustin Burrows said.
Abbott said lawmakers will also consider legislation during that special session that will prevent flooding disasters in the future.
As noted above, we’ll see what that means.
Throughout the day yesterday, the deaths of several of the previously missing Camp Mystic girls were confirmed by their families. Five of them still remain among the 161 people named above. This is going to get so much worse. I wish them all peace and comfort.
Finally, a tale of heroism.
It was his first rescue operation.
Scott Ruskan, a 26-year-old Coast Guard rescue swimmer based in Corpus Christi, Texas, woke up to banging on his door in the early hours of July 4. There was flooding around San Antonio and he was being deployed, he was told. Did he have a chain saw?
Mr. Ruskan was part of a crew that was tasked with evacuating hundreds of people at Camp Mystic, an all-girls’ Christian summer camp along the Guadalupe River that has become a hub of loss in the catastrophic floods that killed more than 80 people across Central Texas. About 750 girls were at the camp this session, officials said.
Mr. Ruskan and his team took off on a helicopter around 7 a.m. Central on Friday to the camp, near Hunt, Texas. It took them nearly six hours to reach San Antonio because of poor visibility and challenging weather conditions. “A white-knuckle experience,” he said.
By the end of their operations, Mr. Ruskan was credited with saving 165 people from Camp Mystic.
Thank you, Scott Ruskan. Thank you very much.
Go ahead and refer to the governor as an asshole, no need to use it only on finger pointers. I am 100% sure that Abbott has pointed fingers before—immigration for one.
Meme, Abbott can murder school children and still get elected. Texans are a special brand of stupid.