Questions remain about what warnings people in Texas received before catastrophic floods over the weekend.
Scripps News has confirmed the National Weather Service did issue a flash flood warning three hours before the swollen Guadalupe River gushed through Kerr County, Texas. That notice included a wireless emergency alert that would have lit up cellphones.
The problem is, that would not have been enough in a rural area with spotty cell service, or for those whose cellphones were turned off in the middle of the night when the disaster happened.
Kerr County did not have a flood detection system and outdoor emergency sirens common in other parts of the country.
We now know that for years local leaders talked about getting a system like that that didn't rely on cellphones for this area known as Flash Flood Alley.
Scripps News obtained a document that Kerr County sent to the federal government just last year. It says Kerr County had a plan as far back as 2018 to install sirens that could be activated to warn about floods and other disasters.
The document refers to this as a "county wide flood warning system" and describes it as including:
- high water detection
- precipitation sensors
- automatic crossing barriers
- a web-based platform
It was projected to cost around a million dollars, with several thousand dollars for each siren.
But the county was unable to get federal funding for the project and did not decide to pay for the project with local tax dollars. The document shows both the flood warning system and siren project marked as "deferred."
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City and county leaders have not yet answered questions about why there was not more warning ahead of the flood.
"We don't want to speculate at this time, we know there's a lot of questions and speculation around it. There's going to be a full review of this so we can make sure we focus on future preparedness," said Dalton Rice, Kerrville city manager. "We just again want to focus on families at this time and so we're getting through that."
In the meantime, families in Texas are now demanding a better warning system. An online petition started by the community calls on the county to make funding an outdoor siren system a top priority.
The devastating floods in central Texas have left families and communities in urgent need of support. Scripps News and the Scripps Howard Fund are partnering to provide critical relief to those impacted. Every dollar donated here will go directly to helping victims recover.
This campaign is a Scripps News initiative in collaboration with the Scripps Howard Fund, a 501(c)(3) organization. Contributions to this campaign are tax deductible.
