Live Updates: Downpours Loom as Search for Texas Flood Victims Enters Fourth Day

New York Times

17 hours ago

Eight years ago, in the aftermath of yet another river flood in the Texas Hill Country, officials in Kerr County debated whether more needed to be done to build a warning system along the banks of the Guadalupe River.
A series of summer camps along the river were often packed with children. For years, local officials kept them safe with a word-of-mouth system: When floodwaters started raging, upriver camp leaders warned those downriver of the water surge coming their way.
But was that enough? Officials considered supplementing the system with sirens and river gauges, along with other modern communications tools. 'We can do all the water-level monitoring we want, but if we don't get that information to the public in a timely way, then this whole thing is not worth it,' said Tom Moser, a Kerr County commissioner at the time.
In the end, little was done. When catastrophic floodwaters surged through Kerr County last week, there were no sirens or early flooding monitors. Instead, there were text alerts that came late for some residents and were dismissed or unseen by others.
The rural county of a little over 50,000 people, in a part of Texas known as Flash Flood Alley, contemplated installing a flood warning system in 2017, but it was rejected as too expensive. The county, which has an annual budget of around $67 million, lost out on a bid at the time to secure a $1 million grant to fund the project, county commission meeting minutes show.
As recently as a May budget meeting, county commissioners were discussing a flood warning system being developed by a regional agency as something that they might be able to make use of.
But in a recent interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said that local residents had been resistant to new spending. 'Taxpayers won't pay for it,' he said, adding that he didn't know if people might reconsider now.
The idea of a flood warning system was broached in 2015, in the aftermath of a deadly flood in Wimberley, Texas, about 75 miles to the east of Kerrville, the Kerr County seat.
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A search effort for someone missing after the San Marcos River flooded in Texas in 2015.
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Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
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Cleanup efforts in Wimberley, Texas, in 2015.
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Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
The Guadalupe River Basin is one of the most dangerous regions in the United States when it comes to flash floods. Ordinary floods from heavy rainstorms occur regularly, inundating streets and threatening structures as floodwaters gradually rise. The region is also prone to flash floods, which can occur with little to no notice.
People living near the Guadalupe in Kerr County may have little time to seek higher ground, especially when flash floods come through late at night when people are asleep. In 1987, a rapidly rising Guadalupe River swept away a school bus carrying teens from a church camp, killing 10 of them.
Avantika Gori, a Rice University professor who is leading a federally funded project to improve flood resilience in rural Texas counties, said that flood warning systems are often simple networks of rain gauges or stream gauges that are triggered when rain or floodwaters exceed a certain level.
The gauges can then be used to warn those at risk of flooding, whether by text message, which may not be effective in areas with spotty cellphone service; notifications broadcast on TV and radio; or sometimes through a series of sirens.
More complex systems use forecasts from the National Weather Service to predict rainfall and model what areas might be subject to flooding, Professor Gori said.
After the 2015 floods, an improved monitoring system was installed in the Wimberley area, and cell towers are now used to send out notices to all cellphones in the area.
Mr. Moser, the former commissioner, visited Wimberley after its new system was in place, and then led efforts to have a flood warning system in Kerr County. His proposal would have included additional water detection systems and a system to alert the public, but the project never got off the ground, largely because of budget concerns.
'It sort of evaporated,' Mr. Moser said. 'It just didn't happen.'
One commissioner at the time, H.A. 'Buster' Baldwin, voted against a $50,000 engineering study, according to a news account at the time, saying, 'I think this whole thing is a little extravagant for Kerr County, with sirens and such.'
Mr. Moser said it was hard to tell if a flood warning system would have prevented further tragedy in Kerr County during the July 4 flood, given the extraordinary circumstance of the flooding, which came suddenly after an intense period of rain. But he said he believed that such a system could have had some benefit.
'I think it could have helped a lot of people,' Mr. Moser said.
The death toll from the flooding, now at 80, includes at least 28 children, with several girls and a counselor from one of the camps along the river still unaccounted for.
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The Guadalupe River in Kerrville, Texas, in May.
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Keith Parker
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The Guadalupe River in Kerrville, Texas, as it flooded on July 4.
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Carter Johnston for The New York Times
According to a transcript from a Kerr County Commissioners' Court meeting in 2017, officials discussed how even with additional water level sensors along the Guadalupe River, the county would still need a way to alert residents if water levels were rising dangerously fast.
Sirens, which are used across Texas to alert residents about tornadoes, were considered by county officials as a way to alert people who live along the river about any flooding.
'With all the hills and all, cell coverage is not that great in some areas in Hill Country,' Mr. Moser said, adding that a series of sirens might have provided people in vulnerable areas sufficient time to flee.
Mr. Moser retired as a commissioner of Kerr County in 2021. But he said this week's flooding there should be taken as a warning.
'I think there's going to be a lot of places in the United States that will look at this event that happened in Kerr County and determine what could be done,' Mr. Moser said. 'I think things should come out of this. It should be a lesson learned.'
Current city officials on Sunday did not discuss the earlier deliberations over warning systems. Dalton Rice, the Kerrville city manager, sidestepped a question about the effectiveness of local emergency notifications, telling reporters at a news conference that it was 'not the time to speculate.'
'There's going to be a full review of this, so we can make sure that we focus on future preparedness,' he said.
Professor Gori said that the decision not to install warning systems in the past has for many Texas counties come down to cost.
'If the county had a flood warning system in place, they would have fared much better in terms of preparedness, but most rural counties in Texas simply do not have the funds to implement flood warning systems themselves,' she said in an email.
Some simpler systems, however, like those using stream or rain gauges, may still not have allowed enough time for evacuations, given how fast the water rose in Kerr County, she added.
It is hardly unique in facing challenges.
'Rural counties are extremely data-scarce, which means we are essentially blind when it comes to identifying areas that are prone to flooding,' Ms. Gori said.
Texas has a growing backlog of flood management projects, totaling some $54 billion across the state. The state flood plan of the Texas Water Development Board called on lawmakers to dedicate additional funding to invest in potentially lifesaving infrastructure.
But lawmakers have so far allocated only a fraction of the money needed for flood projects through the state's Flood Infrastructure Fund, about $669 million so far, even as state lawmakers this year approved $51 billion in property tax cuts.
Kerr County, in its earlier discussions about a warning system, had explored along with other members of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority the possibility of applying for financial support through the infrastructure fund. But the authority dropped the idea after learning that the fund would provide only about 5 percent of the money needed for the project.
During last week's flooding, despite the text notifications that warned of rapidly rising waters, some residents were unsure how seriously to take the flood warnings because they are not unusual in that part of the state.
Sujey Martin, a resident of Kerrville for the past 15 years, said she was awakened by an emergency alert on her phone at about 2 a.m. on Friday. She said she had glanced at it and went back to sleep.
'It's never this bad, so I didn't think much of it,' she said.
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A group gathered to pray for those missing and confirmed dead in Kerrville, Texas.
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Carter Johnston for The New York Times
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Crews searched for victims and cleared debris downriver from an R.V. camp in Kerrville, Texas.
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Carter Johnston for The New York Times
It wasn't until about 5 a.m. that she became alarmed, when she realized that her power was out, and she started reading on Facebook about flooding and evacuations, some of them just a few streets over from her. 'It was raining really hard,' she recalled.
Louis Kocurek, 65, who lives in Center Point, about 10 miles southeast of Kerrville, said that he had never received an official government text alert about the flooding. He had signed up for a private emergency alert service known as CodeRED, but by the time that alert came in, his power had gone out. At that time, he said, he had known about the situation for at least three hours, warned by his son-in-law at about 6:30 a.m.
He had checked on the water level of the creek near his home and decided to stay put — even though the water in the creek rose 15 feet in 15 minutes at one point. His house sits at a higher elevation than the homes of some neighbors, and there were 11 people hunkering down at his house.
Mr. Kocurek said the CodeRED alert came in at 10:07 a.m. 'At that point, you know, the roads were closed, no way to get out.' His house, ultimately, was not flooded.
Linda Clanton, a retired schoolteacher who lives on the outskirts of Kerrville, said she did not know how bad the flooding had become until her sister called and woke her up with the news at 8:30 a.m. on Friday. The next day, she was among several people taking in the widespread destruction and piles of debris caused by the floodwaters at Louise Hays Park, along the Guadalupe River on the west side of town.
She said she couldn't be sure that even sirens would have been useful in warning people about the fast-moving water.
'We are all spread out in these hills and the trees,' she said. 'If we had a siren here in town, nobody but town people would hear it,' she added. 'You'd have to have sirens all over the place, and that's a lot of money and a lot of things to go wrong.'
And the danger was not over yet.
Around 3 p.m. on Sunday, another emergency alert went out to people along the Guadalupe River, including the hundreds conducting searches, warning of 'high confidence of river flooding.' Move to higher ground, the alert urged.
Christopher Flavelle and Anushka Patil contributed reporting.