As floodwaters in Texas rose in the early morning of July 4, a local firefighter petitioned for an emergency alert to quickly be sent out, but local officials do not appear to have followed his request until about an hour later, according to leaked audio.
The reported early-morning request raises questions about the timeline of events offered by local officials, who have said they had little advanced warning and no county system in place to alert residents about the floods, a disaster now responsible for at least 119 deaths, with even more still missing.
According to audio obtained by KSAT, at 4:22am, a fireman with the Ingram Volunteer Fire Department reportedly called into emergency dispatch to warn that the Guadalupe River appeared to be rapidly overshooting its banks. Around that time, the river rose as much as 26 feet in 45 minutes, according to state officials.
The firefighter urged officials to authorize a CodeRED alert, an emergency system that would send warning messages to the cellphones of people who had previously signed up for the service.
“The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on State Highway 39. Is there any way we can send a CodeRED out to our Hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?” the firefighter asked, according to KSAT.
A Kerr County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher responded that the request would need approval from a supervisor.
The earliest CodeRED alerts appear to have reached local residents about an hour later, according to multiple local media outlets, while some reported not getting their first CodeRED alert until after 10am.
“It should have been an immediate county-wide alert,” resident Louis Kocurek, who didn’t get his first alert until after 10am, told Texas Public Radio.
.jpeg)
Questions have swirled over whether local, state, or federal officials could’ve done more to warn residents about the floods.
Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha admonished reporters on Tuesday and said triggering alerts is “not that easy.”
“There’s a lot more to that [just pushing a button], and we’ve told you several times,” he added.
He said the county’s first priority is the ongoing search and rescue effort, but that analysis will be done to reconstruct the timeline for the emergency alerts.
“I believe those questions need to be answered to the family of the missed loved ones, to the public, you know, to the people that put me in this office,” he added on Wednesday.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has also pushed back against those seeking a culprit for the alleged delays, saying during a press conference on Tuesday that seeking to assign blame at this phase is “the word choice of losers.”
The Independent has contacted the Kerrville Police Department for comment.
During a press briefing on Wednesday, Kerrville Police Community Services Officer Chief Jonathan Lamb described officers racing into action the morning of the flood, as residents of Hunt woke to find themselves “trapped on an island.”
“He saw dozens of people trapped on roofs. He saw people trapped in swift-moving water,” Lamb said of one officer, adding that the department evacuated over 100 homes and rescued more than 200 people.
Others have alleged the collection of children’s summer camps along the river, which relied in part on word of mouth from camps upriver about potential floods, should’ve been more alert to the risk of floods in the area.
“That scares the hell out of me,” Russel Honoré, the a Army general who coordinated relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina, told The Wall Street Journal. “There have been floods there before.”
State and local officials have blamed federal emergency managers for what they said were inadequate forecasts and warnings, while others have questioned if Trump administration’s deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service played a role.
“The original forecast that we received Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6 inches of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches in the Hill Country,” Texas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd told reporters last week. “The amount of rain that fell at this specific location was never in any of those forecasts.”
On July 3, a day before the floods, the National Weather Service issued a flood watch for portions of central Texas, warnings that escalated by that evening to a determination that flash flooding was likely across the region.
At 1:14am, the service issued a “life-threatening flash flooding” warning for Kerrville, where much of the devastation has been concentrated, triggering a separate cellphone alert system.
That alert was issued more than three hours before the first reports of flooding came in, an agency spokesperson told The Independent.
Emergency experts have lauded the efforts of federal forecasters.
“This was an exceptional service to come out first with the catastrophic flash flood warning and this shows the awareness of the meteorologists on shift at the NWS office,” Brian LaMarre, former meteorologist-in-charge of the NWS forecast office in Tampa, Florida, told The Associated Press.
County officials have also come under scrutiny for not taking up a previously discussed proposal to install emergency weather sirens in the area around the river.
