Kerr County’s top emergency coordinator said Thursday he had been feeling ill for days leading up to the deadly floods but that he immediately mobilized when he was awakened early on July 4.
In his first public remarks since the disaster that killed more than 130 people in Texas and led to urgent questions about his whereabouts and response, William “Dub” Thomas defended his handling of the emergency. In testimony before state lawmakers, Thomas said he immediately reported to the sheriff’s office but decided not to issue an alert to cellphones because the National Weather Service had already done so.
“To those who ask, what would you have done differently? The honest answer is that, based on the data we had at the time, there was no clear indicator that a catastrophic flood was imminent,” Thomas said. “The situation evolved faster than anyone could have predicted.”
His testimony in a joint hearing held by the Texas Senate and House’s select committees on disaster preparedness and flooding comes after weeks of mounting frustration from members of the community and other leaders over a lack of answers from the emergency management coordinator.
Public testimony is expected during the hearing, which is slated to continue through Thursday.
State Sen. Charles Perry urged participants not to “throw rocks” or assign blame, emphasizing that the point of the hearing was to gather information to save lives in the next flood.
Thomas was notably absent last week when officials in the hard-hit small city of Ingram met to discuss the tragedy, with hopes of learning the answers to key unanswered questions, including where Thomas was when the National Weather Service sent out its first flash flood warning at 1:14 a.m. and who was coordinating the response during critical hours.
Thomas had canceled his appearance last week, citing a scheduling conflict.
On Thursday, he addressed those concerns with a roughly nine-minute written statement that he read aloud.
Thomas said he started feeling ill around July 2. That day, he said he attended a fire chiefs’ meeting in which “no concerns were raised and no indications of elevated weather risk were noted beyond what is typical for this region during the summer.”
His symptoms, which he did not elaborate on, worsened when he got home around 8:45 p.m., he said. Thomas said he spent July 3, a scheduled day off, resting in bed.
“In my absence, my supervisors and sheriff’s office leadership were aware that I was off duty,” he said.
On July 4, Thomas said his wife woke him up around 5:30 a.m. after receiving a call from Kerrville Emergency Management Coordinator Jerremy Hughes, requesting him to mobilize.
“I reported immediately to the sheriff’s office,” he said. “There was no visible flooding on my drive into the office, but it quickly became clear that the situation was escalating.”
Within 30 minutes, Thomas said he was “actively coordinating our county’s response” and working with the sheriff’s emergency operations center and Hughes to coordinate first responders, “under rapidly changing and difficult conditions.”
The storm dumped more than 12 inches of rain in less than six hours, killing more than 130 people, including dozens of children, across the Texas Hill Country over the Fourth of July weekend, officials said.
The water rose more than 20 feet per hour, engulfing multiple youth camps, said Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s most senior elected official, who serves as the head of emergency management.
Kelly, who has also faced questions about his whereabouts and response, was criticized for his absence Thursday by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
“Everybody was here working their ass off, but you were nowhere to be found,” Patrick said.
The rebuke garnered applause from the audience.
Kelly said he was at his lake house in the early hours of July 4, preparing for a family gathering.
“We received no alerts suggesting an extreme weather event was imminent,” he testified Thursday.
Kelly said he woke up to texts and calls from law enforcement leaders. By that time, he said, Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp for young girls, had already flooded. At least 27 campers and staff members died.
While waters began rapidly rising, the three people tasked with responding to emergencies in the county were unavailable, Texas state Rep. Ann Johnson said at the hearing.
While Kelly was at his lake house, Thomas was sick and Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha was asleep until he was roused at 4:20 a.m.
Johnson asked the leaders what the protocol is when all three leaders are unreachable as a disaster unfolds. She also asked whether there was a way for Camp Mystic to alert officials or for officials to have warned the camp.
Thomas said his office was not notified that Camp Mystic had flooded, adding that the camp’s protocol is to alert the sheriff’s office. Leitha said he had no notifications from the camp.
The flooding was “something I could never have imagined,” Kelly said.
Kelly said he gathered his things and contacted Thomas.
Thomas also addressed his reasoning for not sending an alert through the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS, which is similar to an Amber Alert and one of two ways county officials can alert their community to an emergency.
The National Weather Service used IPAWS to send a flash flood warning alert to cellphones at 1:14 a.m. and then again at 4:03 a.m., describing a flash flood emergency. Kerr County did not use the system to issue its own alert, such as one that could have ordered evacuations.
Thomas, who has the authority to issue IPAWS alerts manually, said he did not issue one “because the National Weather Service had already triggered more than a dozen alerts, which all provided a similar forecast.”
The first alert the county issued through IPAWS was on July 6, warning of the “high probability” of renewed river flooding, according to IPAWS data.
Thomas said he has “spent a lot of time reflecting” on what the county and state can improve. He said a siren alert system is needed, though there are concerns about its effectiveness in areas with high canyon walls and rural terrain, where sirens would be most needed, as well as limitations in reaching visitors who may not understand what the sirens mean or how to respond.
He said officials “need better data,” including real-time monitoring of rainfall and river gauges, but that the county alone cannot afford the upgrade.
“We cannot rely solely on radar or traditional forecasting from the National Weather Service,” he said. “We need systems that detect what’s happening on the ground minute by minute.”
