Death toll in central Texas flash floods rises to 82 as sheriff says 10 campers remain missing
Rescuers maneuvering through challenging terrain, high waters and snakes including water moccasins continued their desperate search for the missing, including 10 girls and a counselor from the camp. For the first time since the storms began pounding Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said there were 41 people confirmed to be unaccounted for across the state and more could be missing.
In Kerr County, home to Camp Mystic and other youth camps in the Texas Hill Country, searchers have found the bodies of 68 people, including 28 children, Sheriff Larry Leitha said in the afternoon.
He pledged to keep searching until 'everybody is found' from Friday's flash floods. Ten other deaths were reported in Travis, Burnet, Kendall, Tom Green and Williamson counties, according to local officials. The death toll is certain to rise over the next few days, said Col. Freeman Martin of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The governor warned that additional rounds of heavy rains lasting into Tuesday could produce more life-threatening flooding, especially in places already saturated. As he spoke at a news conference in Austin, emergency alerts lit up mobile phones in Kerr County that warned of 'High confidence of river flooding" and a loudspeaker near Camp Mystic urged people to leave. Minutes later, however, authorities on the scene said there was no risk.
Families were allowed to look around the camp beginning Sunday morning. One girl walked out of a building carrying a large bell. A man, who said his daughter was rescued from a cabin on the highest point in the camp, walked a riverbank, looking in clumps of trees and under big rocks.
A woman and a teenage girl, both wearing rubber waders, briefly went inside one of the cabins, which stood next to a pile of soaked mattresses, a storage trunk and clothes. At one point, the pair doubled over, sobbing before they embraced.
One family left with a blue footlocker. A teenage girl had tears running down her face looking out the open window, gazing at the wreckage as they slowly drove away.
Searching the disaster zone
While the families saw the devastation for the first time, nearby crews operating heavy equipment pulled tree trunks and tangled branches from the water as they searched the river.
With each passing hour, the outlook of finding more survivors became even more bleak. Volunteers and some families of the missing who drove to the disaster zone searched the riverbanks despite being asked not to do so.
Authorities faced growing questions about whether enough warnings were issued in an area long vulnerable to flooding and whether enough preparations were made.
President Donald Trump signed a major disaster declaration Sunday for Kerr County, activating the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Texas.
The president said he would likely visit Friday. 'I would have done it today, but we'd just be in their way,' he told reporters before boarding Air Force One back to Washington after spending the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. 'It's a horrible thing that took place, absolutely horrible.'
The destructive, fast-moving waters rose 26 feet (8 meters) on the river in only 45 minutes before daybreak Friday, washing away homes and vehicles. The danger was not over as flash flood watches remained in effect and more rain fell in central Texas on Sunday.
Searchers used helicopters, boats and drones to look for victims and to rescue people stranded in trees and from camps isolated by washed-out roads. Officials said more than 850 people were rescued in the first 36 hours.
Prayers in Texas — and from the Vatican
Gov. Greg Abbott vowed that authorities will work around the clock and said new areas were being searched as the water receded. He declared Sunday a day of prayer for the state.
"I urge every Texan to join me in prayer this Sunday — for the lives lost, for those still missing, for the recovery of our communities, and for the safety of those on the front lines,' he said in a statement.
In Rome, Pope Leo XIV offered special prayers for those touched by the disaster. History's first American pope spoke in English at the end of his Sunday noon blessing, 'I would like to express sincere condolences to all the families who have lost loved ones, in particular their daughters who were in summer camp, in the disaster caused by the flooding of the Guadalupe River in Texas in the United States. We pray for them.'
The hills along the Guadalupe River are dotted with century-old youth camps and campgrounds where generations of families have come to swim and enjoy the outdoors. The area is especially popular around the Independence Day holiday, making it more difficult to know how many are missing.
Harrowing escapes from floodwaters
Survivors shared terrifying stories of being swept away and clinging to trees as rampaging floodwaters carried trees and cars past them. Others fled to attics inside their homes, praying the water wouldn't reach them.
At Camp Mystic, a cabin full of girls held onto a rope strung by rescuers as they walked across a bridge with water whipping around their legs.
Among those confirmed dead were an 8-year-old girl from Mountain Brook, Alabama, who was at Camp Mystic, and the director of another camp up the road.
Two school-age sisters from Dallas were missing after their cabin was swept away. Their parents were staying in a different cabin and were safe, but the girls' grandparents were unaccounted for.
Locals know the Hill Country as ' flash flood alley' but the flooding in the middle of the night caught many campers and residents by surprise even though there were warnings.
Warnings came before the disaster
The National Weather Service on Thursday advised of potential flooding and then sent out a series of flash flood warnings in the early hours of Friday before issuing flash flood emergencies — a rare alert notifying of imminent danger.
At the Mo-Ranch Camp in the community of Hunt, officials had been monitoring the weather and opted to move several hundred campers and attendees at a church youth conference to higher ground. At nearby Camps Rio Vista and Sierra Vista, organizers also had mentioned on social media that they were watching the weather the day before ending their second summer session Thursday.
Authorities and elected officials have said they did not expect such an intense downpour, the equivalent of months' worth of rain for the area.
Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said authorities are committed to a full review of the emergency response, including how the public was alerted to the storm threat.
Trump, asked whether he was still planning to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that was something 'we can talk about later, but right now we are busy working.' He has previously said he wants to overhaul if not completely eliminate FEMA and has been sharply critical of its performance.
Trump also was asked whether he planned to rehire any of the federal meteorologists who were fired this year as part of widespread government spending reductions.
'I would think not. This was a thing that happened in seconds. Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it. Very talented people there, and they didn't see it,' the president said.
___
Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio. Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Christopher Weber in Los Angeles; Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee; Cedar Attanasio in New York; Sophia Tareen in Chicago; Michelle Price in Morristown, N.J.; and Nicole Winfield in Rome.
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CNN
31 minutes ago
- CNN
Local officials facing questions over lack of preparations in the years and hours before deadly Texas floods
As Central Texas reels from flash floods that killed over 100 people this weekend, questions are sharpening about whether officials could have done more to avert the tragedy – both in the decades leading up to the disaster, and in the moments after the Guadalupe River began cresting its banks. In recent years, multiple efforts in Kerr County to build a more substantial flood warning system have faltered or been abandoned due to budget concerns, leaving the epicenter of this weekend's floods without emergency sirens that could have warned residents about the rising waters. And while at least one neighboring county issued evacuation orders in the morning hours of July 4, Kerr County officials don't appear to have done so. A review of typically off-the-record communications from a real-time messaging system operated by the National Weather Service showed that no emergency manager from Kerr County was sending messages or interacting with NWS staff on the platform, even as emergency officials from other counties were doing so. CNN was granted permission to report some of the information from this platform. The lack of messages doesn't mean officials in Kerr County weren't monitoring the communications from the NWS and acting on them. But it raises new questions about local officials' actions, particularly in a crucial window between NWS's first public warning alert at 1:14 a.m. and a more urgent flash flood warning sent several hours later. Some local officials have defended the decision not to order broad evacuations, saying they were concerned cars could have been trapped in quickly rising waters. Kerr County Emergency Management Coordinator W.B. 'Dub' Thomas declined to comment when CNN asked him to explain actions the county took in the early morning hours of Friday. 'I don't have time for an interview, so I'm going to cancel this call,' he said. While NWS issued numerous warnings early Friday morning as the danger increased, it's unclear how widely they reached those in more remote areas where cell phone service may have been limited – including at Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors were killed. Some campers at Mystic were staying in areas that had previously been identified as high-risk flood zones, government records show. Ali Mostafavi, a civil engineering professor at Texas A&M University, said the disaster showed how efforts to prepare for floods failed to keep pace with the risk in a region that he described as 'one of the deadliest flash flood alleys in the nation.' Local warning systems 'might have been adequate in the past,' Mostafavi said. 'But for the new norm, they are not adequate.' Local officials have long acknowledged the risk of deadly flooding in Kerr County. At a 2016 meeting, County Commissioner Tom Moser declared that Kerr was 'probably the highest risk area in the state for flooding,' and described the county's early warning system as 'pretty antiquated' and 'marginal at the best.' Moser, who retired from the commission in 2021, told CNN that his efforts to improve the local system hit wall after wall over the years. After massive flooding elsewhere in the Hill Country region in 2015, Moser said he studied how nearby Comal County had installed sirens, adopted plans for shutting off low-water crossings and made other flood preparations. He suggested that Kerr County follow suit. But some locals questioned where the funding would come from, while others worried about noise: 'Some people didn't like the concept of sirens going off and disturbing everybody,' Moser said. One of his fellow commissioners, H. A. 'Buster' Baldwin, voiced those concerns at a 2016 meeting. 'The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I'm going to have to start drinking again to put up with y'all,' said Baldwin, who died in 2022, according to a transcript of the meeting. In 2017, officials with the county and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which manages the river, applied for $980,000 in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to build a flood warning system but were denied, meeting minutes and public records show. Without state or federal funding, Moser said, a flood warning system 'just didn't get to the top of the list' of funding priorities for the county itself – even though commissioners had considered 'all the number of people that have died in flash floods in the past.' Again in 2021, meeting minutes show how county commissioners discussed possibly allocating funds for a flood warning system that specifically included sirens. An engineer said a county commissioner had 'identified' $50,000 for the system. But the plans went nowhere. More recently, local officials considered applying for money for the system from Texas' Flood Infrastructure Fund, but declined to submit an application because the grant would have only covered about five percent of the cost of installation, according to documents from the river authority. Just this year, officials were moving forward with a more limited goal: The river authority posted a request for bids on a project to develop a data resource 'to improve flood warning to the public' in the county, according to an archived webpage from February. In April, the river agency passed a resolution to select a firm for the project, and an official said at a meeting the following month that 'consolidating rainfall, stream flow and other flood-related [data] would enhance delivery of flood warnings for the public,' according to an article in the Kerrville Daily Times. Moser said he thought that if the county had implemented an early warning system, it could have saved lives. 'You know, cell phones are good, okay? Text messages are good. But at the same time, there are places in the Hill Country you can't get a good signal,' he said. In the nearby town of Comfort, Texas, further downstream on the Guadalupe River, two sirens were helpful in alerting residents to evacuate, Brian Boyter, a volunteer firefighter in the town, told CNN. First responders on Monday in Comfort were still finding bodies that had washed down the river from Kerr County, but Boyter said that he wasn't aware of any flooding deaths in Comfort. The two areas have significant differences in topography and flood timing that made the flooding in Kerr County much more deadly, but Boyter attributed his town's success in part to the warning sirens. The Upper Guadalupe River Authority does have five gauges on the river in Kerr County, and one on a tributary, Johnson Creek, according to its website. Those gauges show the river level rose as much as 30 feet within a few hours early Friday morning. But Philip Bedient, a professor of engineering at Rice University who researches disaster management and flood modeling, said he thought the river should have at least double or triple that number of gauges in place. 'There should have been a better system,' Bedient said, calling the devastation caused by the flooding 'inexcusable.' He said the fact that Kerr County had been rejected for grant money to fund a warning system was 'just horrific.' 'I don't think they'll get turned down this time,' he said. Mark Rose, who worked as the manager of another Texas river authority, agreed that a larger network of gauges to give residents real-time information about the river's water level and 'what's coming down' toward them is critical – and worth the price tag. 'We'll spend more on recovery than the several million it would cost to put in a system of gauges,' Rose said of the Kerr County disaster. Without warning sirens, residents who faced rapidly rising waters in the early hours of July 4 were forced to rely on cellphone alerts and door-knocks from their neighbors. The National Weather Service issued its first public warning about the flooding in Kerr County at 1:14 a.m. on July 4, warning of 'life-threatening flash flooding of creeks and streams.' That warning, and subsequent warnings, triggered alerts to mobile devices through the Wireless Emergency Alert system, according to a CNN analysis of a FEMA alert database. The 1:14 a.m. message was followed by a series of increasingly dire bulletins, including a 4:03 a.m. warning saying, 'Move to higher ground now! This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation.' But cellphone service in the area can be spotty, and not all residents appear to have received the alerts in the critical early-morning hours when the floodwaters rose. Behind the scenes, NWS officials were communicating with local emergency managers in the affected region over an internal messaging platform. Typically, the media is expected to treat messages from this platform as off-the-record, but a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official granted CNN permission to report general information about the Texas disaster from the platform. The messages show that after initial briefings on the afternoon of Thursday, July 3, about the potential of heavy rains to come, emergency managers from some counties in the region were posting on the system, querying forecasters about what to expect. Those messages picked up in pace as the flooding began in the early hours of July 4. But no emergency manager from Kerr County participated in those discussions on the messaging platform. It's unclear whether officials were reviewing the information being shared. As the floodwaters rose, officials in neighboring Kendall County ordered evacuations of residents living along Guadalupe River on Friday morning. But while Kerr County posted social media messages about the flooding on the morning of July 4, officials do not appear to have ordered any immediate evacuations. Local officials have defended the decision in recent days, saying that an evacuation in the middle of the night as waters were rapidly rising could have put more people in danger. In 1987, 10 campers in the region were killed when their bus was caught in Guadalupe River floodwaters as they were evacuating a flash flood, according to the NWS. 'It's very tough to make those calls,' Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice told CNN on Monday. 'Evacuation is a delicate balance, because if you evacuate too late, you then risk putting buses or cars or vehicles or campers on roads into low water areas trying to get them out, which then can make it even more challenging.' 'What we also don't want to do is cry wolf,' Rice added. The risk was especially high at Camp Mystic, the nearly 100-year-old girls' camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River, where counselors and campers were forced to flee for higher ground amid rapidly rising floodwaters and more than two dozen people died. Some of the cabins campers were staying in are located in the river's 'regulatory floodway' – the area that floods first and is most dangerous – according to federal flood maps. Other cabins were located in an area that the federal government has determined has a 1% chance of flooding each year. New construction or significant renovations in those zones would have required a specific review by a local floodplain manager, according to Kerr County documents. But historic aerial imagery shows that the cabins in the area of the campground most affected by flooding have been there for more than 50 years. The county floodplain administrator did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. L. David Givler, a hydrologist and civil engineer based in Texas, said that residents and business owners in flood zones often don't realize the danger they're in. 'I don't think you're going to find anybody who would say it's a good idea for those structures to be there,' Givler said of Camp Mystic's cabins. CNN's Thomas Bordeaux, Isabelle Chapman, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Brandon Miller, Bob Ortega, and Jeff Winter contributed to this report.
CNN
31 minutes ago
- CNN
Local officials facing questions over lack of preparations in the years and hours before deadly Texas floods
As Central Texas reels from flash floods that killed over 100 people this weekend, questions are sharpening about whether officials could have done more to avert the tragedy – both in the decades leading up to the disaster, and in the moments after the Guadalupe River began cresting its banks. In recent years, multiple efforts in Kerr County to build a more substantial flood warning system have faltered or been abandoned due to budget concerns, leaving the epicenter of this weekend's floods without emergency sirens that could have warned residents about the rising waters. And while at least one neighboring county issued evacuation orders in the morning hours of July 4, Kerr County officials don't appear to have done so. A review of typically off-the-record communications from a real-time messaging system operated by the National Weather Service showed that no emergency manager from Kerr County was sending messages or interacting with NWS staff on the platform, even as emergency officials from other counties were doing so. CNN was granted permission to report some of the information from this platform. The lack of messages doesn't mean officials in Kerr County weren't monitoring the communications from the NWS and acting on them. But it raises new questions about local officials' actions, particularly in a crucial window between NWS's first public warning alert at 1:14 a.m. and a more urgent flash flood warning sent several hours later. Some local officials have defended the decision not to order broad evacuations, saying they were concerned cars could have been trapped in quickly rising waters. Kerr County Emergency Management Coordinator W.B. 'Dub' Thomas declined to comment when CNN asked him to explain actions the county took in the early morning hours of Friday. 'I don't have time for an interview, so I'm going to cancel this call,' he said. While NWS issued numerous warnings early Friday morning as the danger increased, it's unclear how widely they reached those in more remote areas where cell phone service may have been limited – including at Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors were killed. Some campers at Mystic were staying in areas that had previously been identified as high-risk flood zones, government records show. Ali Mostafavi, a civil engineering professor at Texas A&M University, said the disaster showed how efforts to prepare for floods failed to keep pace with the risk in a region that he described as 'one of the deadliest flash flood alleys in the nation.' Local warning systems 'might have been adequate in the past,' Mostafavi said. 'But for the new norm, they are not adequate.' Local officials have long acknowledged the risk of deadly flooding in Kerr County. At a 2016 meeting, County Commissioner Tom Moser declared that Kerr was 'probably the highest risk area in the state for flooding,' and described the county's early warning system as 'pretty antiquated' and 'marginal at the best.' Moser, who retired from the commission in 2021, told CNN that his efforts to improve the local system hit wall after wall over the years. After massive flooding elsewhere in the Hill Country region in 2015, Moser said he studied how nearby Comal County had installed sirens, adopted plans for shutting off low-water crossings and made other flood preparations. He suggested that Kerr County follow suit. But some locals questioned where the funding would come from, while others worried about noise: 'Some people didn't like the concept of sirens going off and disturbing everybody,' Moser said. One of his fellow commissioners, H. A. 'Buster' Baldwin, voiced those concerns at a 2016 meeting. 'The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I'm going to have to start drinking again to put up with y'all,' said Baldwin, who died in 2022, according to a transcript of the meeting. In 2017, officials with the county and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which manages the river, applied for $980,000 in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to build a flood warning system but were denied, meeting minutes and public records show. Without state or federal funding, Moser said, a flood warning system 'just didn't get to the top of the list' of funding priorities for the county itself – even though commissioners had considered 'all the number of people that have died in flash floods in the past.' Again in 2021, meeting minutes show how county commissioners discussed possibly allocating funds for a flood warning system that specifically included sirens. An engineer said a county commissioner had 'identified' $50,000 for the system. But the plans went nowhere. More recently, local officials considered applying for money for the system from Texas' Flood Infrastructure Fund, but declined to submit an application because the grant would have only covered about five percent of the cost of installation, according to documents from the river authority. Just this year, officials were moving forward with a more limited goal: The river authority posted a request for bids on a project to develop a data resource 'to improve flood warning to the public' in the county, according to an archived webpage from February. In April, the river agency passed a resolution to select a firm for the project, and an official said at a meeting the following month that 'consolidating rainfall, stream flow and other flood-related [data] would enhance delivery of flood warnings for the public,' according to an article in the Kerrville Daily Times. Moser said he thought that if the county had implemented an early warning system, it could have saved lives. 'You know, cell phones are good, okay? Text messages are good. But at the same time, there are places in the Hill Country you can't get a good signal,' he said. In the nearby town of Comfort, Texas, further downstream on the Guadalupe River, two sirens were helpful in alerting residents to evacuate, Brian Boyter, a volunteer firefighter in the town, told CNN. First responders on Monday in Comfort were still finding bodies that had washed down the river from Kerr County, but Boyter said that he wasn't aware of any flooding deaths in Comfort. The two areas have significant differences in topography and flood timing that made the flooding in Kerr County much more deadly, but Boyter attributed his town's success in part to the warning sirens. The Upper Guadalupe River Authority does have five gauges on the river in Kerr County, and one on a tributary, Johnson Creek, according to its website. Those gauges show the river level rose as much as 30 feet within a few hours early Friday morning. But Philip Bedient, a professor of engineering at Rice University who researches disaster management and flood modeling, said he thought the river should have at least double or triple that number of gauges in place. 'There should have been a better system,' Bedient said, calling the devastation caused by the flooding 'inexcusable.' He said the fact that Kerr County had been rejected for grant money to fund a warning system was 'just horrific.' 'I don't think they'll get turned down this time,' he said. Mark Rose, who worked as the manager of another Texas river authority, agreed that a larger network of gauges to give residents real-time information about the river's water level and 'what's coming down' toward them is critical – and worth the price tag. 'We'll spend more on recovery than the several million it would cost to put in a system of gauges,' Rose said of the Kerr County disaster. Without warning sirens, residents who faced rapidly rising waters in the early hours of July 4 were forced to rely on cellphone alerts and door-knocks from their neighbors. The National Weather Service issued its first public warning about the flooding in Kerr County at 1:14 a.m. on July 4, warning of 'life-threatening flash flooding of creeks and streams.' That warning, and subsequent warnings, triggered alerts to mobile devices through the Wireless Emergency Alert system, according to a CNN analysis of a FEMA alert database. The 1:14 a.m. message was followed by a series of increasingly dire bulletins, including a 4:03 a.m. warning saying, 'Move to higher ground now! This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation.' But cellphone service in the area can be spotty, and not all residents appear to have received the alerts in the critical early-morning hours when the floodwaters rose. Behind the scenes, NWS officials were communicating with local emergency managers in the affected region over an internal messaging platform. Typically, the media is expected to treat messages from this platform as off-the-record, but a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official granted CNN permission to report general information about the Texas disaster from the platform. The messages show that after initial briefings on the afternoon of Thursday, July 3, about the potential of heavy rains to come, emergency managers from some counties in the region were posting on the system, querying forecasters about what to expect. Those messages picked up in pace as the flooding began in the early hours of July 4. But no emergency manager from Kerr County participated in those discussions on the messaging platform. It's unclear whether officials were reviewing the information being shared. As the floodwaters rose, officials in neighboring Kendall County ordered evacuations of residents living along Guadalupe River on Friday morning. But while Kerr County posted social media messages about the flooding on the morning of July 4, officials do not appear to have ordered any immediate evacuations. Local officials have defended the decision in recent days, saying that an evacuation in the middle of the night as waters were rapidly rising could have put more people in danger. In 1987, 10 campers in the region were killed when their bus was caught in Guadalupe River floodwaters as they were evacuating a flash flood, according to the NWS. 'It's very tough to make those calls,' Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice told CNN on Monday. 'Evacuation is a delicate balance, because if you evacuate too late, you then risk putting buses or cars or vehicles or campers on roads into low water areas trying to get them out, which then can make it even more challenging.' 'What we also don't want to do is cry wolf,' Rice added. The risk was especially high at Camp Mystic, the nearly 100-year-old girls' camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River, where counselors and campers were forced to flee for higher ground amid rapidly rising floodwaters and more than two dozen people died. Some of the cabins campers were staying in are located in the river's 'regulatory floodway' – the area that floods first and is most dangerous – according to federal flood maps. Other cabins were located in an area that the federal government has determined has a 1% chance of flooding each year. New construction or significant renovations in those zones would have required a specific review by a local floodplain manager, according to Kerr County documents. But historic aerial imagery shows that the cabins in the area of the campground most affected by flooding have been there for more than 50 years. The county floodplain administrator did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. L. David Givler, a hydrologist and civil engineer based in Texas, said that residents and business owners in flood zones often don't realize the danger they're in. 'I don't think you're going to find anybody who would say it's a good idea for those structures to be there,' Givler said of Camp Mystic's cabins. CNN's Thomas Bordeaux, Isabelle Chapman, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Brandon Miller, Bob Ortega, and Jeff Winter contributed to this report.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Texas flooding causes a wake-up call for local preparedness
ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (News-Press NOW) —The death toll in Texas continues to rise after deadly flash flooding turned what was meant to be a celebratory holiday weekend into a devastating and life-altering event. In the Texas Hill Country, more than 20 inches of rain fell in a short period, causing the Guadalupe River to rise 26 feet in under an hour. The National Weather Service (NWS) office in San Antonio worked to communicate the severity of the incoming weather. Despite their efforts, many residents did not receive or hear the warnings in time. According to the NWS website, forecasters began highlighting the potential for heavy rainfall as early as Sunday, June 29. By Tuesday, July 1, the forecast included warnings about the risk of dangerous flooding due to excessive rainfall. On Thursday, July 3, at 1 p.m., a flood watch was issued for a large portion of the Texas Hill Country. Just after midnight on Friday, July 4, an additional flash flood watch was issued for Kerr County, warning that rainfall totals could exceed 10 inches. Less than an hour later, a flash flood warning was issued due to life-threatening conditions. These alerts continued throughout the early morning hours and ultimately escalated into a flood emergency. While this tragedy happened in Texas, it's a sharp reminder that flooding can happen quickly and without much warning — even in our local communities. It's important to understand the flood-prone areas in your neighborhood and be aware of nearby rivers and streams that are likely to overflow during heavy rain. Throughout the St. Joseph area, city officials are continuing to implement preventative measures to help combat flash flooding in the local area. Colleen Armstrong from the City of St. Joseph's stormwater department explains that putting detention systems in place will help with stormwater flooding. Put in stormwater controls, whether those are basins, rain gardens, or underground stormwater detention to help hold back that peak flow during a heavy rain event," said Armstrong. Beyond knowing which areas are most vulnerable, it's critical to have multiple ways of receiving weather alerts — especially at night. A NOAA weather radio or the Storm Tracker Weather App can help ensure you stay up to date with watches and warnings specific to your location, even while you sleep. Scott Watson, chief hydrologist at the NWS, said it's common for people to believe severe weather won't affect them. This is when tragedy can strike—people may go to sleep unaware of the situation unfolding outside. "Most people don't think it's going to affect them," said Watson. "Then there's some people that just, you know, they're not paying attention to what the weather forecast is." If you find yourself in a situation where floodwaters are rising, take immediate precautions. Always remember the phrase: "Turn Around, Don't Drown. Move to higher ground as quickly as possible, and never try to outrun or drive through floodwaters. As little as two feet of moving water can sweep away a vehicle or knock a person off their feet.
