A decade of missed opportunities: Texas couldn’t find $1M for flood warning system near camps
KERRVILLE, Texas (AP) — Over the last decade, an array of Texas state and local agencies missed opportunities to fund a flood warning system intended to avert a disaster like the one that killed dozens of young campers and scores of others in Kerr County on the Fourth of July.
The agencies repeatedly failed to secure roughly $1 million for a project to better protect the county’s 50,000 residents and thousands of youth campers and tourists who spend time along the Guadalupe River in an area known as “flash-flood alley.” The plan, which would have installed flood monitoring equipment near Camp Mystic, cost about as much as the county spends on courthouse security every two years, or 1.5% of its annual budget.
Meanwhile, other communities had moved ahead with sirens and warning systems of their own. In nearby Comfort, a long, flat-three minute warning sound signifying flood danger helped evacuate the town of 2,000 people as practiced.
Previous floods provided warnings
A deadly 2015 Memorial Day flood in Kerr County rekindled debate over whether to install a flood monitoring system and sirens to alert the public to evacuate when the river rose to dangerous levels. Some officials, cognizant of a 1987 flood that killed eight people on a church camp bus, thought it was finally time.
But the idea soon ran into opposition. Some residents and elected officials opposed the installation of sirens, citing the cost and noise that they feared would result from repeated alarms.
County commissioners sought compromise. They moved forward with a plan for a warning system without sirens, which would improve flood monitoring with a series of sensors but leave it up to local authorities to alert the public. They didn’t want to pay for it on their own but found little help elsewhere.
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A failure to act
Without the flood monitoring system, the county was left vulnerable when rains pounded the area in the early morning hours of July 4 and the river rapidly rose.
“There wasn’t enough fight in them, and there needs to be more fight this time,” said Nicole Wilson, a San Antonio mother who pulled her daughters out of an area camp ahead of the flooding...
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[It's Never Time in Texas]
“I would be willing to talk about it but not yet. It’s just too raw right now,” said Glenn Andrew, a former Kerrville city council member who voted in 2017 to pull the city out of the grant proposal for the project. “My preference is to look forward to the future.”
AP
4:55 pm:
The backstory: Kerr County does not have outdoor sirens. Previous efforts to install them failed because of the cost. This past legislative session, House Bill 13 would have created an organization to allocate state funding for things like outdoor sirens, but the bill did not make it out of a Senate committee.
Loser Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott: Flood Deaths are Like Football, "Blame is for losers."
"Who's to blame? Know this, that's the word choice of losers."
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Abbott continued by making an analogy to the state's love of football.
"Any size community they care about football, high school, Friday Night lights, college football, or pro. Know this, every football team makes mistakes. The losing teams are the ones trying to point out who's to blame. The championship teams are the ones who say, 'don't worry about it, man. We got this. We’re gonna make sure that we go score again, that we’re going to win this game.'
"The way winners talk is not to point fingers. They talk about solutions. What Texas is all about is solutions."
"Any size community they care about football, high school, Friday Night lights, college football, or pro. Know this, every football team makes mistakes. The losing teams are the ones trying to point out who's to blame. The championship teams are the ones who say, 'don't worry about it, man. We got this. We’re gonna make sure that we go score again, that we’re going to win this game.'
"The way winners talk is not to point fingers. They talk about solutions. What Texas is all about is solutions."
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Outdoor SirensThe backstory: Kerr County does not have outdoor sirens. Previous efforts to install them failed because of the cost. This past legislative session, House Bill 13 would have created an organization to allocate state funding for things like outdoor sirens, but the bill did not make it out of a Senate committee.
4:39 pm
119 Killed by Texas, 173 Missing
“If improvements need to be made, improvements will be made." Kerr County Texas Sheriff Larry Leitha.8:44 am
110 Dead, 161 Still Missing (after 5 days) in Texas Flooding
Trump: “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin. You want to know the truth? It’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
