Before the Hill Country flooding disaster on July fourth, 13 people lost their lives here in Bexar County. They were swept away by fast moving water over the roadway in the Perrin Beitel area.

Bexar County is about to spend $21 million on a system to predict roadway flooding before it happens.

Bexar County already has a number of low water crossings with gates and lights that are activated when water is detected on the road, to warn drivers not to cross especially when it’s dark and hard to see how deep the water is. The new money in the budget will upgrade this system and add new flood warning measures.

Back in June,13 people died when flood waters engulfed the 410 Perrin Beitel access road in northeast San Antonio.

It is one of many roadways throughout San Antonio and Bexar County being considered for automatic crossing arms and new solar powered street lighting.

“I would say that’s a good place to start if we can prevent it from ever happening again that would be good,” said Tyson Tufono, whose father Matthew Tufono was killed in the flooding.

The $21 million will also pay for the San Antonio River Authority to do predictive modeling upstream so gates will automatically lower earlier.

“That way we can close it before there’s ever a danger of a motorist being swept away,” said Bexar County Manager David Smith.

That will involve adding rainfall and water level sensors to give more advanced warnings.

“Our existing rainfall sensors are slow to relay information, 30 minute, 40 minute delay, that’s not good enough for the model we’re proposing so we’ll need to upgrade those,” Smith said.

Data from sensors at low water crossings and stream and rain gauges could be accessed quickly by the city, Bexar County and the River Authority.

The information could then be transmitted to the bexarflood.org website, Waze and Google Maps so the public could see the latest warnings.

The county wants people to go to bexarflood.org and sign up for alerts that can already be sent to your cell phone. Each dot is a low water crossing. You can select the ones you travel through often and you’ll be texted when it floods.

Bexar County hopes to reduce the number of deaths and high water rescues by activating these systems before, not after, a roadway has flooded.