Texas officials face scrutiny over response to catastrophic and deadly flooding
But as authorities launch one of the largest search-and-rescue efforts in recent Texas history, they have come under intensifying scrutiny over preparations and why residents and youth summer camps that are dotted along the river were not alerted sooner or told to evacuate.
The National Weather Service sent out a series of flash flood warnings in the early hours Friday before issuing flash flood emergencies — a rare alert notifying of imminent danger.
Local officials have insisted that no one saw the flood potential coming and have defended their actions.
'There's going to be a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking,' said Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, whose district includes Kerr County. 'There's a lot of people saying 'why' and 'how,' and I understand that.'
An initial flood watch — which generally urges residents to be weather-aware — was issued by the local National Weather Service office at 1:18 p.m. Thursday.
It predicted between 5 to 7 inches (12.7 to 17.8 centimeters) of rain. Weather messaging from the office, including automated alerts delivered to mobile phones to people in threatened areas, grew increasingly ominous in the early morning hours of Friday, urging people to move to higher ground and evacuate flood-prone areas, said Jason Runyen, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service office.
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Miami Herald
33 minutes ago
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Before dawn Friday morning, Dalton Rice went for a jog along the Guadalupe River in Kerrville, Texas. Rice, the city manager, finished his run around 4 a.m. as a light rain set in. An hour later, he began receiving emergency calls: the river had flooded out of control. Torrential rains dumped into the Guadalupe, and in just 45 minutes, it surged about 26 feet (8 meters), according to state officials. Walls of water swept into camps and RV parks that were busy with holiday visitors. At least 70 people have died and dozens of children are still missing in the wake of the catastrophic flooding, which swept through an all-girls summer camp. With heavy rains still battering Texas on Sunday, politicians are raising questions over whether federal, state and local officials were adequately prepared. Texas has been at the epicenter of extreme weather events in recent years - just in 2024, the state saw Hurricane Beryl knock out power to millions, a powerful windstorm that punched windows out of Houston skyscrapers and a massive wildfire that blazed across the Panhandle. The onslaught of disasters have come as warmer ocean waters and moister air - two results of global warming - provide added fuel to storms. At the same time, climate change has made it harder to predict the speed at which disasters can spin out of control, like in the Maui wildfires that killed dozens in 2023 and the "rapid intensification" that accelerated Hurricane Milton in Florida last year. In Texas, the loss of life is so astounding that on Sunday search crews had to break down efforts into a grid pattern to recover bodies, Rice said during a press conference. "We have increased our number of personnel that are navigating the really challenging shores along the bank line," Rice said. "Our biggest focus is to making sure that we get families reunited with their loved ones." In the wake of the tragedy, some politicians are raising questions over the accuracy of weather forecasts issued before the disaster. "The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of the forecasts," Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said in a briefing in which he also said the National Weather Service underestimated the severity of the storms. The weather service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Commerce Department, said that emergency management officials were briefed Thursday morning, flood watch was posted in the afternoon and, by 6:22 p.m. local time, forecasters were warning of flash floods and saying rain could fall at rates of more than 3 inches per hour. There should be inquiries made into whether staffing cuts at the National Weather Service played a contributing role, Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat whose district covers parts of San Antonio, said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." The weather service has been under scrutiny since President Donald Trump took office, with staffing cuts and retirements hitting the agencies. Still, Castro emphasized that there's no clear evidence to show conclusively that the staff cuts impacted the outcome of forecasts. At least 20.3 inches of rain fell in Streeter, Texas, about 100 miles northwest of Austin and 18 in nearby Hext. In some areas, flooding started around midnight on Friday morning. Many residents in the area said they didn't receive weather service warnings to their phones before 7 a.m. But reports are mixed. 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Axios
34 minutes ago
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Forecasting models that failed to predict the severity of rainfall, a lack of an adequate warning system and bad timing in part led to the disaster that left at least 59 people dead and more missing in Kerr County, Texas. The big picture: Meteorology and climate experts tell Axios that storms like the one that surged the Guadalupe River more than 30 feet in a short time are likely to happen again, partially due to climate change. Catch up quick: As of Sunday afternoon, 11 girls and one counselor remained missing from Camp Mystic, a private Christian camp. An unknown number of people in Kerr County and surrounding areas are still unaccounted for. The regional death toll has climbed to 70. Zoom in: Bob Fogarty, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Austin/San Antonio office, tells Axios that while forecasters anticipated the storm would stall, models struggled to pinpoint where and when the heaviest rain would fall. A flood watch was issued Thursday afternoon, and the first warning for the area came just after 1am Friday — by then, the storm was already dumping far more rain than models had projected. Zoom out: The storm hit as the Trump administration has pushed some of the National Weather Service's most veteran staffers out, including a local warning coordination meteorologist with 32 years of experience who took a buyout in April. In response to questions about whether staffing levels impacted forecasting the storm, NWS spokesperson Erica Grow Cei says the agency issued flash flood warnings in neighboring county Bandera the night before the storm and in Kerr the early morning of, "giving preliminary lead times of more than three hours before warning criteria were met." NWS "is heartbroken by the tragic loss of life in Kerr County," Grow Cei adds. Between the lines: The region struck hardest on Friday is colloquially known as "flash flood alley" because of its topography, including hills that channel rather than absorb water. "This was made horribly worse by the timing being in the middle of the night when the fewest number of people would receive warnings," Houston-based meteorologist Matt Lanza tells Axios via email. "While the warnings may have been meteorologically sound and adequate, it's clear that they were not received by people with enough time to react," Lanza adds. What they're saying: Climate scientists tell Axios it's too early to know whether climate change directly impacted the Fourth of July flooding. But in general, climate change " can and is shifting those probabilities — sometimes bringing us floods that are more severe and more frequent than in the past," says Nicholas Pinter, a professor and associate director of Watershed Sciences at the University of California Davis. "This is a challenge because it makes predicting and mitigating flood risk a moving target," Pinter tells Axios via email. Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University and a professor of atmospheric sciences, says the floods are "exactly what the future is going to hold," adding that Kerr County was not prepared and local governments should be ready for "more, bigger, extreme events."
