Texas officials face scrutiny over response to catastrophic and deadly flooding

Officials with the Texas Game Warden search through debris for victims of flooding. Image via The Associated Press.

Before heading to bed before the Fourth of July holiday, Christopher Flowers checked the weather while staying at a friend’s house along the Guadalupe River. Nothing in the forecast alarmed him.

Hours later, he was rushing to safety: He woke up in darkness to electrical sockets popping and ankle-deep water. Quickly, his family scrambled nine people into the attic. Phones buzzed with alerts, Flowers recalled Saturday, but he did not remember when in the chaos they started.

“What they need is some kind of external system, like a tornado warning that tells people to get out now,” Flowers, 44, said.

The destructive fast-moving waters that began before sunrise Friday in the Texas Hill Country killed at least 43 people in Kerr County, authorities said Saturday, and an unknown number of people remained missing. Those still unaccounted for included 27 girls from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp along a river in Kerr County where most of the dead were recovered.

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.

“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.

At 4:03 a.m., the office issued an urgent warning that raised the potential of catastrophic damage and a severe threat to human life.

Jonathan Porter, the chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, a private weather forecasting company that uses National Weather Service data, said it appeared evacuations and other proactive measures could have been undertaken to reduce the risk of fatalities.

“People, businesses, and governments should take action based on Flash Flood Warnings that are issued, regardless of the rainfall amounts that have occurred or are forecast,” Porter said in a statement.

Local officials have said they had not expected such an intense downpour that was the equivalent of months’ worth of rain for the area.

“We know we get rains. We know the river rises,” said Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top elected official. “But nobody saw this coming.”

Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said he was jogging along the river early in the morning and didn’t notice any problems at 4 a.m. A little over an hour later, at 5:20 a.m., the water level had risen dramatically and “we almost weren’t able to get out of the park,” he said.

Rice also noted that the public can become desensitized to too many weather warnings.

Kelly said the county considered a flood warning system along the river that would have functioned like a tornado warning siren about six or seven years ago, before he was elected, but that the idea never got off the ground because of the expense.

“We’ve looked into it before … The public reeled at the cost,” Kelly said.

He said he didn’t know what kind of safety and evacuation plans the camps may have had.

“What I do know is the flood hit the camp first, and it came in the middle of the night. I don’t know where the kids were,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of alarm systems they had. That will come out in time.”

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Saturday it was difficult for forecasters to predict just how much rain would fall. She said the Trump administration would make it a priority to upgrade National Weather Service technology used to deliver warnings.

“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,” Noem said during a press conference with state and federal leaders.

The National Weather Service office in New Braunfels, which delivers forecasts for Austin, San Antonio and the surrounding areas, had extra staff on duty during the storms.

Where the office would typically have two forecasters on duty during clear weather, they had up to five on staff.

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Republished with permission of The Associated Press.