The deadly floods that ripped through Kerr County, Texas, early Friday morning have left state and federal officials blaming each other and asking why so few people evacuated even as the National Weather Service issued increasingly dire alerts.
In the immediate aftermath, state emergency officials placed blame on the short-staffed NWS, whose forecast the day before did not definitively state that record-breaking rains were going to fall that night.
But in the days since, meteorologists, former NWS leaders, and emergency management experts all told NOTUS that it’s not the NWS that deserves the brunt of the blame but rather the lack of an adequate early warning system.
“Bottom line, all need to work toward an improved alerting system,” said one former National Weather Service official with insight into the Texas region. He and others told NOTUS that the weather forecast was about as good as could be expected, based on analyses of data in the aftermath.
The floods reached their peak in the early hours of the morning on Friday in the valley of the Guadalupe River, one of the most flood-prone areas in the country. Summer camps dot the river valley — nicknamed “Flash Flood Alley” — including the all girls Christian camp, Camp Mystic. Eleven girls from the camp are still missing. At least 70 people died in the flooding, including 21 children, with dozens missing.
State and federal finger pointing is already dominating the political news, with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blaming “neglected” and “ancient” systems at NWS inherited from the previous administration and a Texas Emergency Management official blaming the weather forecast.
“In classic Washington D.C. fashion, everybody wants to politicize everything. Forty-eight hours after a flood came through here and ravaged our community where we’re still trying to heal and talk to the parents who have lost loved ones, still trying to find little girls, still trying to find adults out here,” said Texas Rep. Chip Roy on Fox and Friends on Sunday.
“Don’t point fingers. Maybe there were Democrats that were involved in not doing something, maybe there were Republicans involved in not doing something,” he added.
The daughters of Rep. August Pfluger and the granddaughters of Rep. Buddy Carter — both Texas Republicans — were among those evacuated from the camp. The cousin of Carter’s granddaughters’ was among those who died in the floods, he said on social media.
NWS started sending emergency alerts directly to cell phones at 1:14 a.m. local time, but the local sheriff’s office didn’t flag the storm until hours later.
Experts told NOTUS that it’s not clear that flood warnings from the NWS reached all of the people who needed to evacuate in time or reached them at all. The area has spotty cell service, the alerts were issued in the middle of the night, and the county does not have its own early warning system in place.
In order to act on a late-night flood warning, people would need to not only actually receive them on their phones but be awakened by the alert and then take the information seriously.
“We don’t have a warning system,” said county Judge Rob Kelly in a press conference Saturday. “Rest assured no one knew this kind of flood was coming. We have floods all the time, this is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.” Kelly told the Associated Press that the county had examined setting one up in the past but the public “reeled at the cost.”
Warning systems that consist of sirens and require local staffing are often used for tornados in other parts of the country, and they can be very costly to set up, one former NWS official said to NOTUS.
“There were certainly solid, timely flood watches and warnings in place for Kerr County. The first flood warning (issued around 1 a.m.), which warned that life-threatening flash flooding was possible, included a tag to activate cellphone alerts in the warned areas,” said Bob Henson, a nationally renowned meteorologist who has written for the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
But because the county doesn’t have its own system in place to further disseminate those warnings, it’s still not clear who received them or knew to act on them.
“Did people receive these notices? It was nighttime, so many people likely did not have immediate access to their phones. Texas Hill Country is also complex terrain, which means there are likely pockets of spotty cellular coverage,” wrote Mark Shepherd, an atmospheric sciences expert at the University of Georgia, in an analysis he shared with NOTUS.
“One takeaway is the importance of having a NOAA Weather Radio at every home, business, and any place where there are a large number of people gathered (like a camp on a river). I would imagine cell service is very spotty along the Guadalupe where the camps were located. NWR does not use cell service and will wake you up. The alert is very loud, and can’t be missed,” said James Spann, a meteorologist in Alabama and the host of the WeatherBrains podcast, in a Facebook post.
It’s also possible that those who did manage to receive the alerts didn’t take them seriously, said both Spann and Shepherd in their analyses. The fact that the area floods so frequently could have given people a false sense of security, based on their own experience of past flooding events and warnings.
Despite months of aggressive NWS staffing cuts from the Trump administration, the NWS did have extra staff on hand for the storm.
“At the River Forecast Center, we usually close overnight unless there is a flood threat. We identified the threat and we increased overnight coverage and were staffed 24 during this event,” Greg Waller, the service coordination hydrologist at the NWS West Gulf River Forecast Center, told NOTUS. Waller said that the Austin/San Antonio and the San Angelo offices also increased their staffing ahead of time.
As of June 2, the Austin/San Antonio, San Angelo, and Houston/Galveston NWS offices all had one or more key leadership vacancies. The National Weather Service had announced plans last month to hire back a little more than a hundred of the positions, after more than 600 people left the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Tom Fahy, legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, previously told NOTUS, but those new hires could take months. No job openings for the NWS are currently posted online.
The agency also learned from the Department of Defense recently it will lose access to key nighttime hurricane forecasting satellite data. DoD extended the timeline to the end of this month for weather agencies to prepare for the data to go offline, after widespread panic over the announcement the data would be suddenly eliminated.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, said Sunday that any staffing shortages should be “investigated” in the future but for now, his focus was on search and rescue and recovery missions.
“I think obviously the priority is on making sure that those girls are found and are saved. And anybody else who may be missing at this point,” Castro said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And then I think after that we have to figure out in the future how we make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”