Texas sheriff who predicted floods says lives could have been saved
'Unfortunately, people don't realize that we are in flash flood alley,' Hierholzer (pictured center), who retired in 2020 after 20 years in the job, told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview. He had moved to Kerr County as a teenager in 1975, graduated high school, and volunteered as a horse wrangler at the Heart O' the Hills summer camp before joining the sheriff's office. He recalled the flash floods of 1987 – that killed 10 teenagers at the Pot O' Gold Christian Camp in nearby Comfort, Texas – when he was sheriff. He's still haunted by the memory of having 'spent hours in helicopters pulling kids out of trees here [in] our summer camps'.
On Friday, Hierholzer's friend Jane Ragsdale, the director and co-owner of Heart O' the Hills camp, was killed along with at least 27 other children at nearby Camp Mystic. Hierholzer said he lost several friends. From 2016 onwards, he and several county commissioners pushed for the installation of early-warning sirens, alerting residents as the Guadalupe River, which runs from Kerr County to the San Antonio Bay on the Gulf Coast, rose. Their calls were ignored, while the neighboring counties of Kendall and Comal have installed warning sirens.
Kerr County, 100 miles northwest of San Antonio, sits on limestone bedrock making the region particularly susceptible to catastrophic floods. Rain totals over the last several days ranged from more than six inches in nearby Sisterdale to upwards of 20 inches in Bertram, further north. In 2016, county leaders and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority (UGRA) commissioned a flood risk study and two years later bid for a $1 million FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant. The proposal included rain and river gauges, public alert infrastructure, and local sirens. But the bid was denied. A second effort in 2020 and a third in 2023 also failed – and local officials balked at the costs of sirens costing between $10,000 and $50,000 each.
'It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities,' Tom Moser, a former member of the county commission, told the Wall Street Journal. 'Trying not to raise taxes. We just didn't implement a sophisticated system that gave an early warning system. That's what was needed and is needed.' Kelly, the Kerr County judge, who leads the county commission, told the New York Times: 'We've looked into it before. The public reeled at the cost. Taxpayers won't pay for it.' Asked by the paper if residents might reconsider now, Kelly replied: 'I don't know.' Hierholzer is reluctant to criticize his successors while the rescue efforts are ongoing, and the death toll still rising.
'This is not the time to critique, or come down on all the first responders,' he said. But, he added, the moment will come. 'After all this is over, they will have an 'after the incident accident request' and look at all this stuff. That's what we've always done, every time there was a fire or floods or whatever. We'd look and see what we could do better.' Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, was asked during a news conference on Saturday whether the fact that many did not receive cell phone warnings until 7 am on Friday – two hours after the waters peaked – was a 'fundamental failure of the federal government's responsibility to keep people safe.'
Noem said the technology was 'ancient' and that Trump's team was working to update it. 'We know that everyone wants more warning time, and that's why we're working to upgrade the technology that's been neglected for far too long to make sure families have as much advance notice as possible,' she said. Even so, Hierholzer admits he doesn't know if warning sirens would have saved lives. 'If we'd had alarms, sometimes there is no way you can evacuate people out of the zone,' he said.
'How are you going to get all of them out safely? That was always a big concern for us: are you making people safer by telling them to stay or go? And what happened in the floods of '87 was that the workers at the church camp tried to get the kids out of the area, but their bus broke down, and they were swept away.' Maria Tapia, a 64-year-old property manager, would certainly have appreciated more warning. When she went to bed at around 10pm on Thursday night in her single-story home 300ft from the Guadalupe River it was not even raining.
'I sleep very lightly, and I was woken up by the thunder,' she told the Daily Mail. 'Then the really, really heavy rain. It sounded like little stones were pelting my window. My husband woke up and I got out of bed to turn on the light, and the water was already half a foot deep.' She and Felipe quickly got dressed. As they did so, the water rose rapidly. Within 10 minutes it was above their knees. 'We tried to get out of the house but the doors were jammed. It was terrifying. Felipe had to use all his body weight to slam the door and open it to let us out, and then the screen to the porch was jammed shut so he had to kick it down so we could escape. The lights went out soon after and Felipe thought of trying to get in our truck, but the water was coming too fast so we ran up the hill to our neighbors because we could see they still had light.
'It was terrifying,' she adds, choking back tears. 'I kept on thinking: I'm never going to see my grandchildren again.' Returning to her home on Saturday, she found the interior thick with mud and branches. Water had reached the ceiling, and furniture was smashed and strewn into the yard. She was frantic with worry about their two cats, Sylvester and Baby, and their four-month-old sheepdog puppy, Milo - but on returning home found the animals sitting on the roof. 'I've seen flooding before, but never anything like that. It was just monstrous.'
Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has ordered state politicians to return to Austin for a special session on July 21, saying it was 'the way to respond to what happened in Kerrville'. A bill to fund warning systems, House Bill 13, was debated in the state House in April, but never made it to a full vote. Some speculated that the bill could be revived, although Abbott would not comment on their plans. Wes Virdell, a representative whose constituency includes Kerr County, was among those to vote against HB13 in the House. He has spent much of the past two days aiding rescue efforts, but told The Texas Tribune he'd now be in favor of the bill.
'I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,' he said. Hierholzer now says all he can do is offer his help. He had texted his successor, Larry Leither, but did not want to get in the way. 'The main thing they need now is for people to stay away,' said Hierholzer. 'First responders can't get to the area if there are sightseers wanting to see all the stuff. That's always a problem: please stay away and let them do their jobs.' He added that Leither 'has his hands full right now', recalling his own time leading the emergency response, and dealing with such heartbreaking scenes. 'He's seeing things he shouldn't have to,' Hierholzer added.
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The Independent
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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.
