The National Weather Service sent out a series of flash flood warnings<\/a> in the early hours Friday before issuing flash flood emergencies \u2014 a rare alert notifying of imminent danger.<\/p>\nLocal officials have insisted that no one saw the flood potential coming and have defended their actions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s going to be a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking,\u201d said Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, whose district includes Kerr County. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of people saying \u2018why\u2019 and \u2018how,\u2019 and I understand that.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the warnings began<\/p>\n
An initial flood watch \u2014 which generally urges residents to be weather-aware \u2014 was issued by the local National Weather Service office at 1:18 p.m. Thursday.<\/p>\n
It predicted between 5 to 7 inches (12.7 to 17.8 centimeters) of rain. Weather messaging from the office, including automated alerts delivered to mobile phones to people in threatened areas, grew increasingly ominous in the early morning hours of Friday, urging people to move to higher ground and evacuate flood-prone areas, said Jason Runyen, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service office.<\/p>\n
At 4:03 a.m., the office issued an urgent warning that raised the potential of catastrophic damage and a severe threat to human life.<\/p>\n
Jonathan Porter, the chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, a private weather forecasting company that uses National Weather Service data, said it appeared evacuations and other proactive measures could have been undertaken to reduce the risk of fatalities.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople, businesses, and governments should take action based on Flash Flood Warnings that are issued, regardless of the rainfall amounts that have occurred or are forecast,\u201d Porter said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Officials say they didn’t expect this<\/p>\n
Local officials have said they had not expected such an intense downpour that was the equivalent of months\u2019 worth of rain for the area.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know we get rains. We know the river rises,\u201d said Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top elected official. \u201cBut nobody saw this coming.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said he was jogging along the river early in the morning and didn’t notice any problems at 4 a.m. A little over an hour later, at 5:20 a.m., the water level had risen dramatically and \u201cwe almost weren’t able to get out of the park,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Rice also noted that the public can become desensitized to too many weather warnings.<\/p>\n
No county flood warning system<\/p>\n
Kelly said the county considered a flood warning system along the river that would have functioned like a tornado warning siren about six or seven years ago, before he was elected, but that the idea never got off the ground because of the expense.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve looked into it before \u2026 The public reeled at the cost,\u201d Kelly said.<\/p>\n
He said he didn\u2019t know what kind of safety and evacuation plans the camps may have had.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I do know is the flood hit the camp first, and it came in the middle of the night. I don\u2019t know where the kids were,” he said. “I don\u2019t know what kind of alarm systems they had. That will come out in time.”<\/p>\n
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Saturday it was difficult for forecasters to predict just how much rain would fall. She said the Trump administration would make it a priority to upgrade National Weather Service technology used to deliver warnings.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know that everyone wants more warning time, and that’s why we’re working to upgrade the technology that’s been neglected for far too long to make sure families have as much advance notice as possible,\u201d Noem said during a press conference with state and federal leaders.<\/p>\n
Weather service had extra staffers<\/p>\n
The National Weather Service office in New Braunfels, which delivers forecasts for Austin, San Antonio and the surrounding areas, had extra staff on duty during the storms, Runyen said.<\/p>\n
Where the office would typically have two forecasters on duty during clear weather, they had up to five on staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were extra people in here that night, and that’s typical in every weather service office \u2014 you staff up for an event and bring people in on overtime and hold people over,\u201d Runyen said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before heading to bed before the Fourth of July holiday, Christopher Flowers checked the weather while staying at…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":44160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5138],"tags":[5229,33332,7371,7372,5313,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-44159","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-worth","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-central-texas-flood","10":"tag-fort-worth","11":"tag-fortworth","12":"tag-severe-weather","13":"tag-texas","14":"tag-tx","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114808054353969862","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}