Texas county deflects mounting questions over actions before deadly flood
At a series of briefings since the flooding on July 4, Kerr County officials have deflected a series of pointed questions about preparations and warnings as forecasters warned of life-threatening conditions.
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The county in the scenic Texas Hill Country is home to several summer camps, including Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer camp that announced on Monday it lost at least 27 campers and counsellors.
Leon Meier throws a tree branch during clean-up efforts after flooding in Centre Point, Texas (AP/Ashley Landis)
'Today's not the day and now's not the time to discuss the warnings, who got them, who didn't got them. Right now, I'm only worried about public safety,' Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said on Monday during an emergency session of the county commissioners court.
Dalton Rice, the city manager of Kerrville, said on Monday that authorities were reluctant to 'cry wolf' and order evacuations, adding that rainfall 'significantly' exceeded the projected amounts.
He said officials had little time to react in the middle of the night, adding that qualified first responders were being 'swept away' driving through the initial rainfall.
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'This rose very quickly in a very short amount of time,' Mr Rice said.
In the 48 hours before the floods, the potential for heavy rains put precautions in motion as the state activated an emergency response plan and moved resources into the central Texas area.
The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning at 1.14 am on Friday to mobile phones and weather radios, more than three hours before the first reports of flooding at low-water crossings in Kerr County at 4.35 am.
The warning was updated at 4.03 am to a flash-flood emergency.
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The warning included Hunt, the small town that is home to Camp Mystic. Girls who were rescued from the camp have said they were woken up after midnight by strong storms that knocked out power.
Bright flashes from lightning strikes showed the river rising rapidly.
Texas Department of Public Safety Troopers load a recovered body into the back of a vehicle near the Guadalupe River (AP/Eli Hartman)
It was not immediately clear what kind of evacuation plans Camp Mystic might have had.
Local officials have known for decades that flooding posed a serious risk to life and property in the region, and a county government report last year warned the threat was getting worse.
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Kerr County's hazard mitigation action plan reported at least 106 'flood occurrences' dating back to 1960.
Local officials determined that another flood was likely in the next year and that 'future worst-case flood events' could be more severe than those of the past.
The risk of a 500-year flood was 'not negligible' and could lead to downed power lines, stranded residents and buildings that were damaged 'or even completely washed away', the report warned.
Climate change could make the river flooding more frequent, it noted.
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The region has known significant tragedy.
A 1987 flood after a heavy rain prompted the evacuation of a youth camp in the town of Comfort.
Officials ride a boat as they arrive to assist with a recovery effort at Camp Mystic (AP/Julio Cortez)
A wall of water quickly swamped buses and vans. Ten teenagers died.
Decades later, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which manages the river watershed, released a video to YouTube titled Be Flood Aware 2017.
Viewed over 40,000 times online, the video outlines the history of the Guadalupe River, its history of tragic flooding and ways the public can remain safe when floodwaters rise.
'Terrain here is unique for flash flooding,' the video noted. It mentioned the dangers of a significant rainfall near the river's headwaters near Camp Mystic.
The storm that hit last Friday dumped more than six inches on the area in three hours. The river rose 26 feet in just 45 minutes.
The river authority has cited the need to develop a flood warning system in Kerr County as a top priority in its last three annual strategic plans.
Kerr County commissioners considered several years ago a proposal for a flood warning system similar to sirens used for tornadoes in other parts of the country, including in nearby Comal County, which includes part of the Guadalupe River.
Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, who was not on the commission at the time but attended meetings, said the warning system idea was shelved because residents 'reeled at the cost'.
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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
A Texas firefighter pleaded for an alert amid rising flood waters. It took an hour to go out
As floodwaters in Texas rose in the early morning of July 4, a local firefighter petitioned for an emergency alert to quickly be sent out, but local officials do not appear to have followed his request until about an hour later, according to leaked audio. The reported early-morning request raises questions about the timeline of events offered by local officials, who have said they had little advanced warning and no county system in place to alert residents about the floods, a disaster now responsible for at least 119 deaths, with even more still missing. According to audio obtained by KSAT, at 4:22am, a fireman with the Ingram Volunteer Fire Department reportedly called into emergency dispatch to warn that the Guadalupe River appeared to be rapidly overshooting its banks. Around that time, the river rose as much as 26 feet in 45 minutes, according to state officials. The firefighter urged officials to authorize a CodeRED alert, an emergency system that would send warning messages to the cellphones of people who had previously signed up for the service. 'The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on State Highway 39. Is there any way we can send a CodeRED out to our Hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?' the firefighter asked, according to KSAT. A Kerr County Sheriff's Office dispatcher responded that the request would need approval from a supervisor. The earliest CodeRED alerts appear to have reached local residents about an hour later, according to multiple local media outlets, while some reported not getting their first CodeRED alert until after 10am. 'It should have been an immediate county-wide alert,' resident Louis Kocurek, who didn't get his first alert until after 10am, told Texas Public Radio. Questions have swirled over whether local, state, or federal officials could've done more to warn residents about the floods. Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha admonished reporters on Tuesday and said triggering alerts is 'not that easy.' 'There's a lot more to that [just pushing a button], and we've told you several times,' he added. He said the county's first priority is the ongoing search and rescue effort, but that analysis will be done to reconstruct the timeline for the emergency alerts. 'I believe those questions need to be answered to the family of the missed loved ones, to the public, you know, to the people that put me in this office,' he added on Wednesday. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has also pushed back against those seeking a culprit for the alleged delays, saying during a press conference on Tuesday that seeking to assign blame at this phase is 'the word choice of losers.' The Independent has contacted the Kerrville Police Department for comment. During a press briefing on Wednesday, Kerrville Police Community Services Officer Chief Jonathan Lamb described officers racing into action the morning of the flood, as residents of Hunt woke to find themselves 'trapped on an island.' 'He saw dozens of people trapped on roofs. He saw people trapped in swift-moving water,' Lamb said of one officer, adding that the department evacuated over 100 homes and rescued more than 200 people. Others have alleged the collection of children's summer camps along the river, which relied in part on word of mouth from camps upriver about potential floods, should've been more alert to the risk of floods in the area. 'That scares the hell out of me,' Russel Honoré, the a Army general who coordinated relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina, told The Wall Street Journal. 'There have been floods there before.' State and local officials have blamed federal emergency managers for what they said were inadequate forecasts and warnings, while others have questioned if Trump administration's deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service played a role. 'The original forecast that we received Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6 inches of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches in the Hill Country,' Texas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd told reporters last week. 'The amount of rain that fell at this specific location was never in any of those forecasts.' On July 3, a day before the floods, the National Weather Service issued a flood watch for portions of central Texas, warnings that escalated by that evening to a determination that flash flooding was likely across the region. At 1:14am, the service issued a 'life-threatening flash flooding' warning for Kerrville, where much of the devastation has been concentrated, triggering a separate cellphone alert system. That alert was issued more than three hours before the first reports of flooding came in, an agency spokesperson told The Independent. Emergency experts have lauded the efforts of federal forecasters. 'This was an exceptional service to come out first with the catastrophic flash flood warning and this shows the awareness of the meteorologists on shift at the NWS office,' Brian LaMarre, former meteorologist-in-charge of the NWS forecast office in Tampa, Florida, told The Associated Press. County officials have also come under scrutiny for not taking up a previously discussed proposal to install emergency weather sirens in the area around the river.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
How the Texas flood disaster was almost inevitable
By On a normal day, the Guadalupe River runs lazily through the scenic hills of Kerr County, Texas – past campsites where families sunbathe on its banks, fish for trout, or float gently downstream. But in the early hours of July 4, after a torrential downpour, a black wall of water swept down the valley, tearing through everything in its path and leaving more than 100 people – including at least 27 camp counselors and children – dead. As rescuers and emergency services comb the destruction for bodies days later and families try to find their loved ones and salvage their homes – it seems at first glance like the floods were the worst kind of freak natural tragedy. But now, experts have told the Daily Mail it was anything but a 'freak' event – in fact, they say the very features which make the river so scenic on a good day, made the disaster almost inevitable. 'They call this area of Texas flash flood alley,' Nicholas Pinter, a professor of Applied Geosciences at UC Davis, told the Daily Mail, 'I can't think of a place more susceptible to flash flooding in the country.' Pinter said the floods happened thanks to a 'cursed' combination of 'meteorology, topography and geology' in the area. First came the torrential rain, pushed inland from the Gulf of Mexico. 'When these types of events happen you get a lot of moisture coming inland from the Gulf, it rises as it moves across Texas and then you get a lot of rain,' Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M, Andrew Dessler told the Daily Mail. Over ten times the average monthly rainfall fell in the area over the weekend with some places seeing 20 inches in just a few hours on July 4. Then, the hills and valleys which make the area so beautiful meant that all that rainwater was funneled into one place. 'If Houston got 12 inches of rain, it would have literally no effect, it's very flat so it would all spread out and they have very good infrastructure for handling it,' Dessler said. 'But if you dump water over hills, like in this area, the water runs down the hills into these low valleys and then gets concentrated there, and runs into the rivers and the rivers rise rapidly,' he added. To make matters worse, the area's geology means that the water flowed particularly quickly. There is only a thin layer of soil on top of a bedrock layer of limestone and it can't absorb very much water. Pinter explained, 'Limestone creates fissures and caves underground which the rainwater funnels into. It essentially creates big pipes of water which then run out straight into the rivers at a very fast pace.' A drought in the weeks before meant the ground was even harder and less absorbent than it might otherwise have been, meaning water could run straight off it into the rivers. 'It's the worst case scenario there of any place,' Pinter said. The combination of the rainfall, steep hills and geology meant the Guadalupe river overflowed within seconds. 'It rose more than a full story of water within 15 minutes,' Pinter said, 'It was lethal and terrifying.' The floodwater crested at a record breaking 37.5 feet – a horrifying wall of water that, at its peak, moved with a force greater than the average flowrate across Niagara Falls. Within ten hours the river's pace had surged from 10 cubic feet per second to 120,000. Despite weather forecasts predicting the rain and issuing flood warnings, this happened so quickly in the middle of the night that those sleeping on the banks of the river had no time to escape. 'If you look, about eight hours before they forecast there was going to be a lot of rain and flooding, and then three hours before they said the Guadalupe was rising rapidly and that people should take action,' Dessler said. 'But it was the middle of the night,' he added, 'and the warnings from the weather service didn't get to the people in harm's way. That's where the breakdown was.' Dessler warns that with climate change, flash floods like this are going to grow more and more common. 'Climate Change is juicing these storms,' he said, explaining that warmer weather means there is more water in the air and more heavy rain, 'it's loading the dice to give us more of these events.' 'We have to be prepared for these kinds of events to happen more frequently, because they are going to happen more frequently,' he added. For those living in at–risk areas, like Kerr County, Dessler recommends planning ahead. 'They need to have a weather radar, and they have to have a plan for what happens if the weather service says they're going to have a lot of rain upstream,' he said. 'For things you can't get out of harm's way, you need to build infrastructure – if you have a hospital you have to build flood infrastructure around it, and all these things are very expensive,' he added.
Daily Mail
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EXCLUSIVE The 'curse' of the monster river that's ripped the heart out of the nation... as officials' toxic claim is exposed as an outrageous LIE
On a normal day, the Guadalupe River runs lazily through the scenic hills of Kerr County, Texas – past campsites where families sunbathe on its banks, fish for trout, or float gently downstream. But in the early hours of July 4, after a torrential downpour, a black wall of water swept down the valley, tearing through everything in its path and leaving more than 100 people – including at least 27 camp counselors and children – dead. As rescuers and emergency services comb the destruction for bodies days later and families try to find their loved ones and salvage their homes – it seems at first glance like the floods were the worst kind of freak natural tragedy.
