Posted on 07/05/2025 10:19:33 PM PDT by NoLibZone
The forecast began to look ominous in Texas Hill County 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 32 people were killed by the flooding. Dozens more remained missing as of Saturday morning, including 27 young girls from a Christian summer camp, according to the Kerr County sheriff’s office
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.
Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly echoed Kidd. When he was asked why camps along the Guadalupe were not evacuated, Kelly told reporters the county had “no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here.”
However, warnings were issued about the potential for flash flooding hours before the waters reached their peak.
That warning should have triggered a response by local emergency management and local media to spread the word to those in harm's way, as well as the Emergency Alert System that broadcasts warnings to televisions and radios, Fogarty said.
All NWS flash flood warnings, including the one issued after midnight on Friday, trigger Wireless Emergency Alerts, the emergency push notification sent through cellphone towers to all wireless phones in the emergency area, Fogarty said.
That warning was updated nine times throughout Friday, each of which triggered separate alerts through the Emergency Alert System and the Wireless Emergency Alerts, Fogarty said.
The most serious warning came at 4:03 a.m. when the NWS issued a flash flood emergency, warning of an “extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation” and urging immediate evacuations to higher ground. Flash flood emergencies are issued using a mixture of rainfall data and on-the-ground reports: “Someone has told us we need to get people out of here immediately or people are going to die,” Fogarty said.
The flooding came amid concerns about staffing levels at the NWS, after the Trump administration fired hundreds of meteorologists this year as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts. The NWS Austin/San Antonio office’s warning coordination meteorologist announced in April that he was retiring early due to the funding cuts, leading to speculation that vacancies could have impacted forecasters’ response.
Staffing data provided by the NWS’s labor union showed the San Angelo forecasting office currently has four vacancies out of 23 positions and San Antonio has six vacancies out of 26.
Legislative Director Tom Fahy said that was adequate to issue timely forecasts and warnings before and during the emergency.
The timing of the flood may have been a complicating factor. The alerts came out during the start of the Fourth of July weekend, when RV parks, cabins and homes are filled with tourists who might not be as familiar with the flood risks or the habits of the water.
Between 2 and 7 a.m., the Guadalupe River in Kerrville rose from 1 to more than 34 feet in height, according to a flood gauge in the area. The flooding reached its peak at around 6:45 a.m. in Kerrville, hours after warnings were first issued, according to the gauge.
When the NWS issued its flash flood emergency, the river height was still under two feet, although it began to rise quickly shortly after the alert was issued. Major flooding on the river is considered anything above 20 feet, a level the gauge recorded a little after 6 a.m. on Friday.
Porter noted the danger of the nighttime flooding, when many people are asleep and slower to respond to warnings.
Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice told reporters Friday that the suddenness and intensity of the flood caught city officials flat-footed.
"This happened very quickly over a very short amount of time that could not be predicted," Rice said. "This is not like a tornado where you can have a siren. This is not a hurricane where you're planning weeks in advance. It hit hard and things like this happen in a very strategic, very isolated area and when those two things converge you have what happened today."
Asked Saturday afternoon what kind of procedures the county had to warn the summer camps along the river about flooding emergencies, Rice said that each camp is private. This situation happened very fast, he said, so "there wasn’t a lot of time in this case as far as warnings.”
Right now, he said, the focus is on search and rescue operations; they want to address questions about warnings later.
Waller, meanwhile, noted that flooding has long been a in the area.
“In my career, this is our worst case scenario that we brief all of our new forecasters on,” Waller said.
The terrain in the area makes it so precipitation forecasts off by just 20 miles could affect entirely different river basins, he said.
Given the river’s history, Porter said reports of survivors being awoken by rapidly rising water and forced to evacuate in the middle of the emergency instead of much earlier after the warnings were first issued were “extremely concerning.”
The region has experienced catastrophic flooding before, including the 2015 Wimberley flood that left 13 people dead, as well as major floods in 2007 and 2002.
A July 1987 flood of the Guadalupe River devastated Kerrville and other communities along the waterway.
They need to stop the blame game. We used to call natural disasters an “Act of God.” It’s nobody’s fault. Sometimes bad things happen.
> That warning was updated nine times throughout Friday, each of which triggered separate alerts through the Emergency Alert System and the Wireless Emergency Alerts, Fogarty said.
The NWS was issuing warnings. Were they also supposed to parachute in and pull people out of cabins? Any blame on cuts is pure politics.
This is so tragic! But this river has flooded before right?
Why weren’t more precautions taken? Especially for those younger campers that were closest to the river.
So many questions but as a parent & spending a lot of $$ to send a child to this camp for 30 days, on a river..safety always first. Flash Flood warnings & those kids were allowed to just go to sleep & not moved to higher location?
Scum media already pointing fingers at Musk/Doge
They will try their best to turn this into Trumps Katrina
Everything’s gotta be Trump’s fault for the lickspittle Leftist media.
Sounds like the NWS was doing what it normally does, but maybe more could have been done locally. This is heartbreaking.
I live in Kerr County. We do get NWS alerts a lot. Outside of the City there are dead zones as far as cell reception. Also, many times we get warnings, and not even more than a sprinkle, so aside from low water crossings that flood for a few hours, a lot of people ignore the warnings. Think boy who cried wolf.
It’s not DOGE’s fault (watch as the Left deifies failed FEMA though. ugh)
GOP needs to be better about critiquing our own and that includes less than stellar standards of the Texas government both at the state and local levels when it comes to natural disaster preparation and long term planning..
No matter how much money and effort you throw at prediction and warning systems the speed at which these things happen will still cause havoc.
The long term solution is to not have people placed in low lying areas.
The problem is where do you put that much water in a flat landscape? 12” of rain is absolutely absurd amount. You would need a network massive channels and reservoirs.
I agree. I have no respect for people who are busy pointing fingers and assigning blame, especially while so many people are suffering such anguish right now.
May Gid bless and comfort the families who are waiting for news and families who have received the worst news. :(
And may God bless the first responders and the search and rescue workers and volunteers.
Sorry for the typo…*God 🙏
When information is constant, it is less paid attention to. The drawback of all of this technology. Used to one local TV or radio station broke in with urgent weather news, everyone paid attention. Now you have devices that will sound the alarm directly to everyone on top of every local broadcast station and too many pay scant attention.
This isn’t limited to emergency situations, either. Despite access to everything, it seems people are aware of less and less - less than when the only information was a newspaper that came twice a week in a community.
I understand
I always joke that here in CA if it says chance of rain 90%, ignore but pay attention to when it says 20% chance.
What about water level sensors or even sensors that could be placed in those cabins? Similar to fire alarms
I have a child the age of these younger campers so this is so heartbreaking for me. The wall of water, no chance to escape - no emergency attic hatches. These poor babies most likely were just swept away, drowned in their cabins while they slept. Having a hard time understanding why there weren’t more safety protocols in place.
Why are you posting
a Soros funded Dem propaganda Site .
This a Pure lies site created by a Cali rich lefty
to flip TX Blue .
Remove it .
Every swinging Richard in Texas has a cell phone. They had the damn weather warnings in their HANDS!!!! Hell, I start with a check of my stupid Samsung refrigerator. If I have questions about the information there, I go to the local TV stations. I also have weather crap all over my cell phone and laptop. I knew what was happening during all this rain and allowed situational awareness to kick in.
That little south pacific undersea volcano threw TRILLIONS of gallons of water into the STRATOSPHERE a few years ago and has altered weather patterns around the globe; legacy media coined the fear porn term “atmospheric river” to describe a natural phenomenon of the water returning to sea level. Australia is reporting record SNOW fall right now while parts of the US are getting record RAIN. This IS all part of “climate change” but human activity has a drop in an ocean’s worth of effect on it.
There are “conspiracy theorists” all over the web chattering about HAARP and how the focus of the rainstorm had all the elements of a GEOENGINEERED weather phenomenon - i.e., it was a MAN-MADE event by evil geniuses somewhere in our government - for reasons unknown but paranoiacally guessed at. These nutballs truly believe that EVERY major storm event in the modern era is a creation of some highly-placed secret society who has been using DEW radar and HAARP to modify weather around the globe for decades now.
Never mind that weather has been with the planet since there was an atmosphere.
I don’t know who is more mentally deranged. THESE people or the people who think they can “transition” from one sex to another.
Sorry but this is a dumb statement, “ This is not like a tornado where you can have a siren.” You can setup a warning system and siren or whatever you want. No one has and this is actually more predictable and has more lead time than a tornado.
Local and national news makes everything a crisis, same goes for the weather.
While a warning coming in the middle of the night isn’t helpful, I think people ignore weather warnings because everything is always a “crisis”.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.