When the Guadalupe River began rising fast on 4 July, emergency sirens blared across the small Texas town of Comfort.
Their long, flat tone – a final warning to evacuate for those who had not done so – saved lives, says Daniel Morales, assistant chief of the Comfort Volunteer Fire Department.
The sirens are a testament to the determination of a community that has experienced deadly floods in the past, warning residents of devastating floodwaters that hours earlier had killed at least 118 people in communities along the same river, including 27 campers and counsellors in neighbouring Kerr County.
That county did not have a warning system like the one in Comfort.
Everyone in Comfort, a town of more than 2,200 people in unincorporated Kendall County, survived the flooding, with many riverside residents evacuating in time, Morales said.
Learning from history
Morales has been with the department for decades. He was there when flooding in 1978 killed 33 people, 15 of them in Comfort, including his grandfather. So when an opportunity arose last year to expand the community’s emergency warning system, he and other residents found a way to fund it.
The fire department’s siren needed an upgrade. While the firehouse got a new siren, Morales found a Missouri company willing to refurbish the old one at a low cost so it could be moved to a central location in Comfort Park and connected to a US Geological Survey sensor at Cypress Creek.
When the water reaches a certain level, the sensor triggers the siren, but it can also be sounded manually.
“We do [it] for ourselves and for the community,” Morales said. “If we hadn’t had a drought the past months and the [Cypress] Creek hadn’t been down, we could have had another [flood like in 1978]. The past few days, I’ll tell you, it brings back a lot.”
Funding emergency infrastructure
Morales said they cobbled together money from a grant, the county commission, the department’s own budget and the local electric utility, which also donated a siren pole. They also got help installing the flood sensor gauge in the creek.
The total cost with donated materials and departmental expenses was somewhere around $50,000 to $60,000 – about €43,000 to €51,000 – “maybe a little more,” Morales said.
In Kerr County, the price tag for a proposed flood warning system covering a larger stretch of the Guadalupe River was close to €850,000. Several county and city officials backed away when grants and funding fell through. The system ultimately was not installed near the camps where dozens of young campers died in the recent flood.
Comal County, Texas – about 90 miles, or 145 kilometres, east of Kerr County – completed its own siren project in 2015 with funding from several local entities. The county now manages the system and river height data. Officials there did not respond to requests for details about costs.
Training residents to respond
After the updated Comfort sirens were installed, the volunteer fire department spent months getting the community accustomed to the siren tests that sound daily at 12pm, putting out messaging that if they hear a siren any other time, they should check local TV stations, the department’s Facebook page and other outlets for emergency notifications.
The sirens have a distinct sound for tornadoes and a long, flat tone for floods.
So on 4 July, if people in Comfort hadn’t seen the alerts sent to phones or heard shouting firefighters urging evacuation, they heard the long tone and knew they had to leave. A Facebook post from the department noted a mandatory evacuation for all residents along the Guadalupe River.
Comfort was miles away from the flash flooding that overtook the camps and didn’t experience cresting river levels until after the early morning surge. Many Comfort residents were already awake and aware of the rising water by the time the sirens sounded.
The Guadalupe’s crest was among the highest ever recorded in the town, rising from hip-height to three storeys tall in just over two hours.
Morales doesn’t know if sirens would have changed outcomes in Kerr County. But he’s sure they gave Comfort residents an extra level of warning. He’s already been contacted by some funders about the possibility of adding a third siren in town.
“Anything we can do to add to the safety, we’re going to sit down and try to make it work,” he said. “The way things are happening, it might be time to enhance the system even further.”
