HUNT, Texas — Four days after the devastating flash floods in Texas Hill Country, local officials and law enforcement in Kerr County couldn’t provide basic details of the emergency response — including whether the emergency management coordinator, who decided to order evacuations, was awake when the waters started rising.
“We’re in the process of trying to put a timeline — that’s going to take a little bit of time,” Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said at a news conference Tuesday, stressing that his priorities were finding missing people, identifying them and notifying their next of kin.
On “Here’s the Scoop,” podcast co-host Morgan Chesky takes listeners on the ground to hear from survivors of Texas’ catastrophic flooding.
Pressed about the critical window after the National Weather Service issued its first flash flood warning for the area at 1:14 a.m. on the Fourth of July, Leitha offered little clarity. He was unable to describe the role emergency management officials played in those moments, including who was communicating with the weather service or monitoring for critical notifications.
The severity and speed of the disaster that has killed more than 100 people caught this swath of land — known as flash flood alley — by surprise, even as such extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common. This is raising questions about whether local officials were prepared and whether proper planning is in place to avoid a similar disaster in the future.
Many were still in their beds when the floodwaters rose. The majority of those killed were in Kerr County — 57 adults and 30 children, mostly from a summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Another 161 in the county were still missing, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said. Among the unanswered questions: What actions were taken to notify residents? Were emergency alerts adequate and who issued them?
It was also unclear whether emergency alerts were received on all phones; girls at the summer camp weren’t allowed to have them, and service can be spotty. A neighboring town had an outdoor warning siren, but Kerr County doesn’t.
Leitha, appearing with Kerrville’s mayor and law enforcement officials, said he was notified about the events between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. — hours after the flash flood warnings issued by the weather service were pinging to cellphones, although not all residents said they were received. By daybreak, the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, burying its flood gauge.
Officials and police in Kerr County began to post on Facebook about “life threatening” flooding after 5 a.m., when the river had already surpassed a record level of over 36 feet. It’s unclear whether officials were communicating with residents in other ways before then.
Leitha couldn’t say whether the county’s emergency coordinator, W.B. “Dub” Thomas, was out of bed earlier and involved in warning residents. Lt. Col. Ben Baker of the Texas Game Wardens declined to comment on emergency operations and who was in charge.
Thomas, the emergency management coordinator since 2015, didn’t respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
The catastrophe left Kerr County residents such as Marvin Willis, 67, wanting answers.
“I didn’t get one alert,” said Willis, a magazine publisher who lives a mile and a half from the Guadalupe River and typically receives them on his phone. “I haven’t talked to anyone I know who’s gotten one.”
He said complete transparency from leaders is needed: “If you don’t know what happened, you don’t know how to fix it.”
Even Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring said he received no emergency alerts early Friday and was only awakened by a call from City Manager Dalton Rice at 5:30 a.m.
“If they had come,” Herring said of the alerts, “and we had a chance to save all the people we’ve lost and are missing — absolutely, we should have had them more. We should have had a warning.”
Herring said Tuesday on MSNBC that government leaders take threats from natural disasters seriously, but that the events that night unfolded very rapidly.
“The question is, ‘Do I wish we had warned those people?’ Absolutely. The question is, ‘Do I hope we warn people better in the future?’ Absolutely.”
Abbott, in a separate news conference later Tuesday, reiterated that the focus remained on the search and rescue efforts, and said officials would get into the whys and hows of the disaster after that phase was over.
Asked what local officials knew early Friday as the flood was bearing down, Abbott, a Republican, said: “You’d have to ask them.”
Ronnie Barker, who has lived in the unincorporated community of Hunt in Kerr County for 23 years, said he was among the residents who didn’t receive any alerts early Friday. But he’s looking at the positives, such as how first responders have mobilized.
“People from all over the country and the world, everybody wants to come in and do something,” Baker said. “We’ve just been flooded with people helping.”
Another resident, Rena Bailey, who has lived in Hunt since 1990, got alerts but said they could have been worded stronger.
“I’ve got notices all the time about whatever. There was no urgency in what I got,” Bailey said.
While she recalled one alert saying the weather was “life threatening,” she said people may have needed more guidance, particularly in a place where flooding is a way of life.
“If they had said there’s a wall of water coming or evacuate,” Bailey said, “but I didn’t take it that way. And they can blame me, but don’t blame me, because I live here, and I know what I get all the time.”
Minyvonne Burke and Suzanne Gamboa reported from Hunt and Erik Ortiz from New York.
