Texas Hill Country is no stranger to flash floods. Why were so many caught off guard?

Washington Post

13 hours ago

The deluge that killed nearly 80 people along fast-surging Texas rivers early Friday struck a region that has grappled with deadly floods before. And yet, the magnitude of the disaster exposed gaps in its ability to warn people, including a delayed flood risk alert from Kerr County and stalled development of a flood monitoring system.
This swath of Central Texas is the most flash-flood prone region in the country, and officials know the Hill Country's terrain can turn slow, shallow rivers into walls of water. But even as weather forecasts began to hint at the potential for heavy rain on Thursday, the response exposed a disconnect: Few, including local authorities, prepared for anything but their normal Fourth of July. When the precipitation intensified in the early morning hours Friday, many people failed to receive or respond to flood warnings at riverside campsites and cabins that were known to be in the floodplain.
A review of wireless emergency and data from a public database that pulls in Federal Emergency Management Agency's Integrated Public Alert & Warning System shows that the county did not send its first Amber Alert-style push until Sunday. Days after the state had launched a full-scale rescue effort, continued rains appeared to prompt an alert sent to much of Kerr County urging people to 'move to higher ground' because of 'high confidence of river flooding.' The county has sent such alerts in past emergencies.
Up until then, most cellphone alerts were coming from the National Weather Service's Austin/San Antonio station. But some alerts about life-threatening flooding didn't come until the predawn hours, and to areas where cellular reception may have been spotty.
The disaster has prompted renewed emphasis on a years-long push for a comprehensive flood monitoring system in Kerr County. And it has raised questions about whether anything could be enough to prepare and protect communities in places like this, where cellphone-based alerts can be unreliable, emergency managers have limited resources and the potential for disaster is high.
'That's the part that hurts,' said Rosalie Castro of Kerrville, Texas. 'We had no warning.'
For hours on Friday, the 60-year-old waited for word from her nephew who lived in a trailer home park near the Guadalupe River. The first alert Castro received on her phone came around 7:58 a.m., but her nephew was caught off guard.
'If it wasn't for his dogs barking, he wouldn't have awakened on time,' Castro said.
He survived. But his neighbor, Julian Ryan, cut an artery while rushing to save his family.
Melinda Cortez had never been to Kerrville before. She, her family, and some good friends rented a few cabins at the HTR campground along the Guadalupe River for the big Fourth of July river festival. After dinner at Howdy's, they sat on the porch, talking and laughing until around midnight. It was lightly raining. At 4:45 a.m., she awoke to another camper banging on the cabin door, yelling to get out, now. Water was everywhere.
A minute later, the camp sent a text to guests that 'we have just received notice from the fire department that we need to evacuate the park due to flooding,' according to a message reviewed by The Washington Post.
Water from the river, which had been about a football field away from her cabin steps, was up to the porch. A Ford F-150 truck and trailer floated by.
Glancing at her phone, she noticed two new alerts: one was a flash-flood warning, the other was from the campground, sent five minutes before the man pounded on their cabin, telling them to evacuate. By then, the water was up to their waist.
Cortez, like many people who were in town or visiting that weekend, didn't know the area could flood.
There are more than a dozen camps in the Guadalupe River region — and many are adjacent or are partially inside high-risk flood zones, according to maps from FEMA .
But Cortez lives in Austin, a few hours away, and didn't know about the risk, or its history. While enjoying the river that day, she had not seen warnings, and 'the camp didn't say anything,' she said.
'I never thought that whole area could flood,' she said.
For emergencies and disasters, leaders often use a patchwork of alerts and warnings to try to get to different populations. The National Weather Service, which had been warning about the coming rains and potential for flash floods for days, has stations across the state. Its Austin/San Antonio office sent alerts on social media as well as using wireless emergency alerts, which use cellphone towers to target people in a specific area. Local authorities, including the police, office often post updates to their Facebook pages and websites. Kerrville and the county use a web-based notification system called CodeRED, which people have to sign up for.
The holes in this warning system are not new, and highlight the challenge of urgently communicating weather risks as a warming climate drives more atmospheric moisture, which can come down in sudden bursts. And in remote areas, with fewer resources for emergency management operations, the breakdown can be even worse.
Kerrville police, the Kerr County sheriff and other official pages did not mention looming weather and its risks on their social media profiles, posting on July 3 about the upcoming Fourth of July river festival. Officials from those agencies, county government and the county judge did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a Friday news conference day, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said he couldn't say why areas including Camp Mystic, where dozens of people died or were still missing, weren't evacuated — they hadn't seen this disaster coming.
'Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming,' Kelly said. 'We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States and we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what's happened here. None whatsoever.'
Meteorologists in this region of Texas are acutely aware of the most flood-prone areas in a region that has been known as 'flash flood alley' for decades, said Steven Lyons, who retired four years ago after a decade as the meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service's San Angelo office.
When preparing to issue flash-flood warnings in the midst of the storm, lists of dozens of areas in jeopardy would pop up automatically. It's up to the meteorologists to decide which to send, or deselect.
Central Texas, specifically Kerr County and the surrounding areas, is made of undulating hills and steep canyons filled with thin, drought-stricken soil and slick limestone. Normally, the rivers and streams run clear, tranquil, and shallow. But when it rains, that topography 'causes the river to roar,' the Upper Guadalupe River Authority explained in a 2017 video warning people of flood risks. The silky, shallow limestone river beds turn the meandering water into massive walls of concrete that hurl downstream in a matter of minutes.
While much of the region is rural and remote, there is a heavy concentration of old mobile home parks — many filled with vulnerable residents — along and near the river.
Kerrville has been growing steadily, according to an overview of city and county meeting minutes, and new residents may not have the lived experience of how quickly heavy rains can spark a flash flood.
Ahead of these floods, the Weather Service office near San Antonio, which oversees warnings issued in Kerr County, had one key vacancy: A warning coordination meteorologist, who is responsible for working with emergency managers and the public to ensure people know what to do when a disaster strikes. The person who served in that role for decades was among hundreds of Weather Service employees who accepted early retirement offers and left the agency at the end of April, local media reported.
Lyons said that departure would have had a limited impact on Friday's emergency, however, because this staffer's key work takes place weeks and months ahead of a disaster, ensuring training and communication channels are in place.
Pat Vesper, meteorologist-in-charge of the Weather Service's San Antonio/Austin office, declined to answer questions about the vacancy, flood warnings or communications with Kerr County officials. He referred questions to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials, who did not immediately respond to questions.
The tragedy in Hill Country was already reigniting debate among meteorologists and social scientists that goes back decades, about how to craft and disseminate warnings in a way that saves lives.
'The real trick is, how do you get people to get the message quickly, a message they can understand easily, and have them take action that will save their lives?' Lyons said.
'People think, 'It can't be that bad; I'll just jump up on my roof,'' Lyons said. 'Well, not if your house is floating away.'
The fact that the worst of the flooding hit in the middle of the night only exacerbated the challenge.
'If people had gotten the message before they had gone to sleep, would they have gotten out of there? Maybe,' Lyons said. 'The messaging is critical but so are the actions that people take based on the messaging. We can't tell you how many raindrops are going to fall out of a thunderstorm.'
Past floods have spurred the same discussions about how to protect people around Hill Country.
About a decade ago, Kerrville leaders began working on a flood warning system, after a river rose to about 45 feet and nearly swallowed the nearby Texas town of Wimberley over Memorial Day Weekend 2015, said Tom Moser, a Kerr County commissioner at the time.
County officials assessed an upgrade to a warning system that would have included sirens. But some balked at the cost, with one commissioner calling it 'a little extravagant for Kerr County, with sirens and such.'
Then next year, they submitted a grant request for $980,000 to FEMA for the initiatives, county documents show. But they didn't get the money, and 'most of the funds went to communities impacted by Hurricane Harvey,' according to the county's Hazard Mitigation Action Plan.
In an interview, Moser said the community took some steps to reduce flood dangers, installing flood gauges and barriers at low river crossings, spots where rural roads pass through what is normally a trickling stream. They also trained emergency management staff and other authorities on what to do in the event of a flood.
But despite attempts to fund a larger flood warning system project in the county budget, Moser said, 'It never got across the goal line.' Moser said. The efforts stalled by the time he retired in 2021.
But the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which partners with the county, made some progress this past year. They signed an agreement with a consulting firm to assess the county's needs, aiming to develop a monitoring and warning system depending on 'what we can afford,' said director Diane L. McMahon.
The investment comes as the deaths in Texas are likely to galvanize a push for similar flood warning systems across the states and the country, Moser said.
'I think there will be a lot of attention paid to it now,' Moser said, adding that he doesn't know if any warning system will be able to protect everyone. But 'it could be a lot better than what we currently have.'
Watching the death toll rise, Nicole Wilson wondered what might have happened if campers along the river had the kind of warnings she had growing up in tornado-prone Kentucky: loud, blaring sirens.
After rushing to pick up her two daughters from another Central Texas camp, Wilson thought how just minutes could be life changing. She started a Change.org petition on Saturday, calling on officials to 'implement a modern outdoor early warning siren system.'
'Sometimes we only had five minutes,' she recalled of her childhood tornado warnings.
'Maybe those girls in the lower cabins would have come outside and seen the water,' she said. 'Maybe they could have grabbed others and ran uphill.'
Eva Ruth Moravec and John Muyskens contributed to this report.