FLOODSIn Texas Region Prone to Catastrophic Floods, Questions Grow About Lack of Warning
Water rose fast along the Guadalupe River, causing dozens of deaths. Local officials said they couldn’t have seen it coming.
The forecast began to look ominous in the Texas Hill Country on Thursday afternoon.
A flood watch was issued by the National Weather Service at 1:18 p.m. that predicted up to 7 inches of isolated rainfall early Friday morning in South Central Texas, including Kerr County.
By the time the sun rose on the Fourth of July, less than 24 hours later, as much as 12 inches of rain had fallen in parts of the region while its residents were asleep, according to NWS radar estimates. The Guadalupe River gauge at the unincorporated community of Hunt, where the river forks, recorded a 22-foot rise in just two hours, said Bob Fogarty, meteorologist with the NWS Austin/San Antonio office. The gauge recorded a level of 29 ½ feet before becoming completely submerged and failing, Fogarty added.
At least 75 people were killed by the flooding in Kerr County, local officials said Sunday afternoon. More remained missing, including 10 young girls and a counselor from a Christian summer camp. At least 15 additional deaths were confirmed in surrounding counties, pushing the storm’s overall toll to at least 90.
The scale of the disaster — and the fact that major flooding is common in this part of Texas — has raised questions over whether more could have been done to warn people in the path of the flood waters.
Local and state officials were quick to point to weather forecasts that did not accurately predict the intensity of the rainfall. Meanwhile, some forecasters suggested that local officials and camp leadership should have activated more given the threats that were apparent.
“The heartbreaking catastrophe that occurred in Central Texas is a tragedy of the worst sort because it appears evacuations and other proactive measures could have been undertaken to reduce the risk of fatalities had the organizers of impacted camps and local officials heeded the warnings of the government and private weather sources, including AccuWeather,” AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter wrote in a statement Saturday morning.
Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, on Friday pointed to NWS forecasts from earlier in the week that projected up to 6 inches of rain.
“It did not predict the amount of rain that we saw,” Kidd said.
