DISASTER WARNINGWhat Another Texas Flood Revealed About the State’s Warning System
Texas revamped its early warning system after a Hill Country flood killed 139 people last year. July’s historic flood revealed what it accomplished — and what’s left to do.
When torrential rain doused the Texas Hill Country last month, Paul Welch stayed up past his bedtime checking radar and rain gauges on RiverHub, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority’s new tracking website. At midnight, comforted by what he saw, he went to bed.
Four hours later, his phone rang. It was a neighbor, the same fellow who had awakened him the previous July, just before floodwaters swamped Welch’s riverfront cabin near Comfort. “Get up. Get out. Quick,” he said, speaking calmly into the phone. The water at Center Point, 4 miles upstream, had risen 25 feet as Welch slept. A wall of water was heading his way.
Welch and his partner, Elizabeth Hastings, could hardly believe it was happening again. This time, they knew what to do: Hastings tossed the guns, jewelry, paperwork, and medication into the Sprinter van and drove through the downpour to a gas station already crowded with vehicles. Welch moved his tractor, golf cart, and other essentials to higher ground, then joined his neighbors on the same high spot near the highway where they’d gathered the last time this happened. For the second time in 12 months, they watched water tear through the valley, roiling and churning with more power than Welch had ever seen.
The next morning, as Welch and Hastings picked their way through the muck, his phone rang. It was Huntly Dantzler, a volunteer who had helped them through last year’s catastrophe. “Paul, give me some good news,” he said. “I’ve got none to give,” Welch replied.
Gone was the $130,000 RV they’d lived in as they awaited construction of their dream house — into which Welch had already sunk $80,000. Gone were the new appliances that sat in his shop, still in bubble wrap. Gone were the 200-year-old cypress trees that had survived so much. “We cried and prayed over the phone,” Dantzler said.
One year after several rivers and creeks in central Texas killed 139 people and spurred a statewide push to improve flood warnings, another historic storm tested those changes. This year’s disaster brought at least 12 inches of rain — and as much as 28 — to one dozen counties north and west of San Antonio and destroyed or damaged hundreds of buildings. Yet just three people died.
