Sounding the alarm

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Tuesday, the 15th of July.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up on The World and Everything in It: sounding the alarm.

When record rainfall hit Central Texas on the Fourth of July, the floods came fast and with deadly force. Entire campsites were overrun while families slept. Now officials and residents are beginning to ask hard questions: was this flood more a tragic act of nature, or a failure to warn?

BROWN: From cell signals to sirens, emergency alerts are under the microscope. WORLD’s Lauren Canterberry reports.

LAUREN CANTERBERRY: Texas Hill Country is known for its rolling landscape and rivers that cut through the hills, drawing visitors to their banks. Vacationers come throughout the year, but especially in the summer when swimming and tubing offer a reprieve from the dry Texas heat.

Even as the populations in nearby cities boom and building projects abound, much of the Hill Country remains wild, undeveloped, and rural.

Those who live in the region know that underneath its beauty, the rolling hills and meandering rivers can quickly turn dangerous. Dan Schreiber is a certified consulting meteorologist in the area.

SCHREIBER: This part of Texas, you know, including Kerr County is called Flash Flood alley, and so very similar to, like Tornado Alley. When rainfall occurs, it will flow down those slopes and into these riverines and creeks and watersheds.

The so-called alley stretches from South Western Texas up to Dallas. Steep slopes lining the rivers, shallow soil, and frequent heavy rains contribute to make the region one of the most flood-prone areas in the country.

Schreiber says that residents receive flood warnings from the federal Wireless Emergency Alert System regularly. Not all of them materialize.

SCHREIBER: We're very used to getting weather watches. It can be easy to become complacent.

On the afternoon of July 3rd, the regional National Weather Service office issued a flash flood watch for the western Hill Country. By the early morning hours of July 4th, the watch had upgraded to a warning as the Guadalupe River filled rapidly. Kerr County bore the brunt of the fatalities.

Alan Gerard is a retired meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

GERARD: There have been some reports that some people did get the cell phone alert in the area. But obviously, it’s a rural area. I’m sure cell phone coverage is not universal in that region. And of course, it was 1:15 in the morning, which is not the greatest time to be trying to get people to act and evacuate from an area.

By 4 a.m., Kerr County upgraded the warning to a flash flood emergency as raging water swept through children’s summer camps and campsites where hundreds of people were sleeping. The following day, Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster for 15 counties.

ABBOTT: We will stop at nothing to ensure that every asset and person and plane and whatever is needed is going to be involved in the process of rescuing every last person and ensure everybody involved in this is going to be fully accounted for.

Just over a week after the flood, Texas officials say the raging water killed more than 130 and search teams are still looking for more than 160 missing people. Among the dead are 27 children and counselors from the Christian girls camp Camp Mystic that sits along the Guadalupe River.

As rescue and recovery teams converged along the river, many were left wondering what more could have been done to stop the tragedy, or at least to ensure it does not happen again.

Schreiber says a key challenge is making sure weather warnings get the urgency of the situation across in time so that people make proactive decisions.

SCHREIBER: When you look at some of the comments from the Kerr County officials, you know that some of them were saying, well, we didn't know it was going to be this bad, or the river floods all the time. It does kind of show that when a flash flood warning is issued, it might not be that bad, because that's what history has told them.

In the last decade, Kerr County has received nearly 300 flood advisories or flash flood warnings. The vast majority were not deadly.

Though most floods do not end in tragedy, the county has long debated if and how to install flash flood warning sirens. In 2017, Kerr County officials submitted a grant application to FEMA to help install high water detection systems, gauges, and possible outdoor sirens.

The application was denied because the county lacked a hazard mitigation plan. By the time they resubmitted it, emergency management resources had been refocused on the response to Hurricane Harvey. Despite local lawmakers discussing a new warning system numerous times over the last decade, it was never finalized.

Meanwhile, the small town of Comfort down river from Kerr County did install a siren system that was activated on July 4th. Every citizen survived the flooding. Nearby Comal County also installed warning sirens in 2015.

While some say such a system could have saved lives in Kerr County, Schreiber said it may not be so straightforward.

SCHREIBER: Sirens can obviously be helpful if you can hear them, but also when it's raining really hard and there's lightning and thunder going on and, you know, it's stormy outside, it's difficult, if not impossible, to hear a siren unless you're very close to it.

Abbott last week added four flood-related items to the state legislature’s special session agenda this month to examine flood warning and communication systems. While local officials are prioritizing recovery efforts, they have promised to review their response. Here’s Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha.

LEITHA: As with other significant events that our emergency services encounter, this incident will be reviewed. You have my word. When or if necessary, improvements need to be made, improvements will be made.

Meanwhile, Gerard says more research is needed to improve forecasting models and make flood warnings more accurate.

GERARD: There's obviously a lot of talk about, you know, evacuating once the warnings are issued, but obviously the best case scenario would be that we'd have known Tuesday evening that what was going to happen was going to happen, and we could have gotten people out before the rain even started.

He says these types of events are preventable if meteorologists could more accurately pinpoint where a flood would hit and work with local authorities to develop an evacuation plan. But researchers are struggling to fund those scientific breakthroughs.

GERARD: Right now, the President's budget for next year eliminates NOAA's Research Program, which would basically put this kind of research, I'm assuming, more on universities and private sector.

While experts and officials begin analyzing and reviewing what went wrong and how to avoid similar disasters, the communities of Central Texas are mourning their loss. As the flood cut short countless lives, it also turned a serene landscape into one of destruction, forever changing the once peaceful retreat.

For WORLD, I’m Lauren Canterberry with reporting by Addie Offereins.

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