Flood warningTexas flood exposes serious weaknesses in high-tech warning systems

The Memorial Day weekend flood in Texas was a test for regional flood warning systems employed by local and federal emergency agencies. Hays County officials issued three “reverse 911” notifications to residents residing in homes along the Blanco River. The National Weather Service sent out flash flood warnings to registered local cellphones. Yet the disaster flood, which caused tens of millions of dollars in property damage in Blanco and Hays counties and killed more than a dozen people, exposed serious weaknesses in high-tech warning systems.

Most of Wimberley, a Texas town, lacked the alarm systems used in other Texas river towns. The warning system used during the flood “was the bare minimum, but it’s what we had at the time,” said Wimberley Fire Chief Carroll Czichos, who has roughly forty-five years experience with the department. “There’s a lot of people that flat didn’t know about it.” Emergency workers spent hours pounding on doors and yelling to residents that they needed to evacuate the area. Critics say emergency alarms had been inconsistent during the flood. Linda Persohn owns two rental homes on River Road and recalling the warnings she received said: “Over there, they got phone calls, but no one came to their door. One house over, someone came to their door.” “Here, they said they didn’t hear anything.”

State and local officials have spent millions of dollars to install disaster-warning systems, yet each method has weaknesses that can become obvious during extreme disaster events. Mystatesman points out  that the Regional Notification System, an automated system used to phone imperiled residents in a targeted area, primarily reaches landlines. The system becomes less effective as more residents rely exclusively on cell phones for voice communications. Tourist towns such as Wimberley are particularly a challenge as many of the residents are out-of-town visitors who might not have answered the landlines in their rental units. Even some updated emergency notification systems that issue alerts to cellphones require cell customers to actively register their numbers with local emergency management authorities to receive alerts.

Ed Schaefer, homeland security director for the Capital Area Council of Governments, which administers an updated notification system in Central Texas, said it is likely that very few people received the cell phone alerts during the Memorial Day weekend. Only 23,500 cell users in the ten-county region with a population of more than 2 million people have registered their cell numbers for alerts. “It’s been a struggle to get the word out,” Schaefer said. The National Weather Service operates the federal Wireless Emergency Alert system which sends out text warnings accompanied by an alarm. The system connects with cellphones in targeted areas by bouncing the alerts off local cell towers, however, cell customers can choose to block the alerts. Others may also turn their phones off at night.

The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority uses a color-coding system to inform area residents about the seriousness of incoming floods. Residents can log onto a website that signals the color green as a lower flood risk and the color red indicating historic flood levels. Following a devastating flood in 1988, Guadalupe County installed a series of fifteen sirens in communities along the river; eight years later, after another flood, the county added eight more sirens. Each unit cost about $15,000, plus $500 a year to maintain. The sirens proved to be effective during floods in July 2007 and in June 2010.

Hearing “a siren is kind of universal,” said Guadalupe County Emergency Management Coordinator Dan Kinsey. And “you don’t have to have a phone or a cellphone.”