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.
The county’s largest city, Kerrville, declined to participate in a joint grant application that would have required a $50,000 contribution. The state’s emergency management agency twice passed over the county’s request for hazard mitigation funding, citing a deficiency in the application and then backing communities ravaged by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
The state’s flood infrastructure fund later offered an interest-free loan for the project — but that plan was seen as too stingy and turned down by the agency in charge of managing the watershed.
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 and who launched an online petition calling on Kerr County to install the sirens. “Whether it’s a combination of city, state and federal funding, there simply can’t be the answer of ‘no’ this time.”