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Posted on 07/08/2025 9:33:22 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Nearly a decade before catastrophic flash flooding in Kerr County…several local officials were hard at work convincing their peers to buy into a new early flood warning system. The once “state of the art” program installed along the Guadalupe River back in the 1980s was in desperate need of an upgrade, they argued…
“I’m not trying to put a dollar on a life or a flood, but the fact of the matter is floods do happen, and we need to be prepared for them,” then-Kerr County Commissioner Bob Reeves noted during a series of public meetings that began in 2016. And, his former colleague Tom Moser pointed out, “We also have more summer camps than anybody else along the Guadalupe River.”
The wide-ranging discussions back then — captured in transcripts archived online — proved to be a chilling precursor to the disaster that unfolded early on July 4…
But the new warning system never became reality. Though local officials agreed to spend $50,000 on an engineering study, which made specific recommendations for such a project in 2016, they never secured the $1 million they estimated would be needed to implement it – despite asking for help from state officials at least three separate times.
“We never were successful in getting that funding, or putting the matching funding with it to do anything,” said Moser, who retired in 2021, in a phone interview. He said he hopes the county can “go back to the drawing board on this, and hopefully it’ll be a model that could be used all over the United States.”
(Excerpt) Read more at houstonchronicle.com ...
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If only Texas didnt have hundreds of 1000s of illegal immigrants to take care of.
1. Sirens are going out of fashion for emergency warning. I don’t think there is an operational siren in my county. Air conditioning, well insulated homes, and double pane windows, have reduced the utility of sirens, which came into vogue before central heating and air conditioning, and when houses in Texas tended to be made with thin wood walls, with no insulation.
2. Even back when sirens were used, Texas is a big place and covering the entire state with warning sirens would have been a massive project.
The system worked. AccuWeather and NWS were spot on and warned back to July 2. Some ignored the eventual grave flash flood warnings and didn’t ANTICIPATE the intensity of the flooding. I’m shocked that camps of that magnitude didn’t have protocols, procedures, communication and night shift personnel for SHTF contingencies like this.
Kerr County can’t pay for a flood warning system?
What do they do with their taxes?
Maybe they need a better grant writer...
The whole theme of the hill country is natural beauty. That’s why out-of-state people flock there. Miles of power lines and towers don’t exactly fit in. Maybe now there is a way to set something up that is aesthetically pleasing. Otherwise, make it a requirement for everyone staying overnight in the area to have a satellite phone.
I watched an interview with Joe Bastardi yesterday. He said the NWS did everything right, backing up other weather forecasters.
Nothing is stopping Kerr County from doing this on their own. Quit passing the buck.
At another meeting in 2017, a different commissioner said the “river calling” system between camps “still works” and added that “the thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of [the] night, I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.”
I believe it was a ballot item at one time that the voters rejected.
From what I understand, each one of the warning sirens is about $50K & of course there would be ongoing maintenance costs as well. With well over 100 deaths, this will certainly take on a new urgency.
That is correct. This rise of water was at the north fork of the Guadalupe at about 1:30 am. It rose fast downstream by 4 am when the county was asleep. A tragedy that happens about every 50 years. The thunder and lightning woke me up about 3:30. Natl Weather Service alerts began shortly thereafter on my phone. I live about a mile from the river in Kerrville. Got 3" of rain in the gauge from that downpour but no flooding of the streets near me.
Took less than 10 minutes to rise 35 feet. Unless everyone wears a jet pack all you have to do is know there’s rain coming in significant amounts (which they were warned of) and it should be enough to get the campers decamped.
ABC News reported the flooding was exacerbated by a combination of factors including high moisture levels in the atmosphere, a mid-level disturbance, the region’s topography (which funnels water into rivers), and drought conditions that reduced the soil’s ability to absorb rainfall. The flooding in Kerr County killed at least 43 people, including 15 children, and at least eight people died in nearby counties. Flooding in this area has been recorded since 1936.
They had all these unusual additional red flags besides the river over flowing, and failure to react? Hindsight could be related to anal cranial insertion.
wy69
Closing that barn door that was deliberately left open several years ago.
So all of us should move into areas prone to earthquake, tornados, hurricanes, wildfire and floods so government can provide us with early warning systems and protect us from what nature can wreak.
I am surprised they didn't have Lena "the Comrade" Hildago co-author an op-ed with world renown intellectual Jasmine Crockett about why Trump, Dan Patrick, and Ken Paxton should be charged for manslaughter.
Money would be better spent on a $50 emergency radio and trained staff with an evacuation plan.
“ They should have requested the grant from the EPA for climate change readiness.”
That actually would have worked
Yes, if only.
Do the people upstream near Hunt and Ingram where the camps are located get a decent cell phone signal, I wonder?
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