TEXAS FLOODSWeather Warnings Gave Officials a 3 Hour, 21 Minute Window to Save Lives in Kerr County. What Happened Then Remains Unclear.
Federal forecasters issued their first flood warning at 1:14 a.m. on July 4. Local officials haven’t shed light on when they saw the warnings or whether they saw them in time to take action.
Three hours and 21 minutes.
That’s how much time passed from when the National Weather Service sent out its first flash flood warning for part of Kerr County to when the first flooding reports came in from low-lying water crossings.
The weather service says that first warning triggered one of many automatic alerts to cell phones and weather radios, telling people in the area of the danger.
But if any local officials got those warnings, and if so, whether they activated in any meaningful way in that 3 hours and 21 minutes remains a black box.
County officials have not responded to requests for interviews and have not said at public press conferences what efforts they took when the flooding threat turned from possible to imminent in the middle of the night. At those press conferences, Kerrville’s city manager has repeatedly said they are focused on search and rescue, rather than answer questions about their response.
“We knew there was a flash flood warning,” Gov. Greg Abbott said at a press conference on Tuesday. “No one would know that would be a 30-foot-high tsunami-ball of water.”
NWS officials said they communicated directly with local officials during the night of the floods, but did not specify when. In some cases, they said, calls went to voicemail. Kerrville’s mayor said he was unaware of the flooding until around 5:30 a.m., more than four hours after that first warning, when the city manager called and woke him up.
Warnings didn’t go up on county Facebook pages until around the same time — when the Guadalupe River had already risen rapidly and pushed out of its banks around Hunt and was making its way toward the county seat of Kerrville.
Weather experts say that — from the outside at least — weather service forecasters appear to have done most everything right as the river rose with astonishing speed, blew past its previous record level and blasted through summer camps, RV parks, homes and campgrounds. It’s the kind of situation that meteorologists warn trainees about, the sort of nightmare scenario some refer to as a silent killer. A holiday weekend that brings out-of-town visitors to the area known as “Flash Flood Alley.”
The worst of the danger arrived in the dark, while people slept. The river claimed more than 90 lives in Kerr County, where many people were still missing more than four days later.
