Texas County Flagged Need for Flood Alarm Months Before Tragedy

The warning last fall was, in retrospect, achingly prescient.

“It is likely” that Kerr County “will experience a flood event in the next year,” city and county officials concluded in a report for the Federal Emergency Management Agency released last October. Such floods, they added, could pose a particular danger to people in “substandard structures” and result in “increased damage, injuries, or loss of life.”

One solution, county officials noted, would be a flood warning system that could alert residents to rising waters. They estimated the cost of such a system at less than $1 million, and noted that FEMA had grant programs that could pay for it.

But by the time floodwaters raged down the Guadalupe River last Friday morning, killing at least 121, including at least 36 children, no such alarm system had been installed in Kerr County. A week later, amid trees shorn of their bark from the force of the water, recovery crews were still cutting through towering piles of debris, in search of the missing.

The October warning, part of a 220-page “hazard mitigation” report that addressed a range of threats and that counties are required to send periodically to FEMA, followed years of failed attempts by local officials to secure funding for such a system, according to records and interviews with local officials.

The New York Times identified at least three occasions between 2017 and 2024 when local officials sought funding for a flood warning system but were rebuffed by the state. Those failed applications came even as the federal government made billions of additional dollars available for disaster-reduction projects — including $1.9 billion that has flowed to Texas over the past decade to be spent at the discretion of state officials, according to a Times analysis.

The Texas Division of Emergency Management rejected a 2017 request from Kerr County because it did not meet federal requirements, according to Wes Rapaport, a department spokesman. Those included a requirement to have completed a recent plan for addressing natural disasters.

The state rejected a 2018 request from the county because state officials chose to focus that spending on counties affected by Hurricane Harvey, a massive storm that caused flooding across large portions of Texas in August 2017, Mr. Rapaport said.

Kerr County, a popular resort area northwest of San Antonio with only about 50,000 full-time residents, was not among those counties.

Since 2018, Kerr County officials submitted no other grant applications for flood warning systems to the state emergency management office, according to Mr. Rapaport.

A FEMA spokesman said in a statement that the Trump administration was shifting the agency “to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens.”

Last year, a separate body, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, sought money for a warning system — this time, through the Texas Water Development Board, which funds flood-control projects. The board manages grants that are separate from FEMA money controlled by the Texas Division of Emergency Management.

That effort was also unsuccessful. The board offered to match just 5 percent of the cost, according to public records from the river authority. The river authority, whose jurisdiction includes the portions of the river where most of the deaths occurred, decided it was not enough money to proceed.

The authority’s president, William Rector, said in an interview that he believed his organization was unable to get more money “because we’re considered a rich county.” He said he did not recall why the authority waited until 2024 to apply, referring questions to other authority representatives who did not respond to requests for comment.

“I’ve been really insistent on getting a system in place,” Mr. Rector said, adding that the county in April hired a contractor to begin work on a warning system, spending $73,000 of its own money. “I wish our timing had been better.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Texas Water Development Board said the grant offered to the river authority was limited to 5 percent of the project’s cost based on criteria that included the area’s average household income. The board said it offered an interest-free loan to cover the rest of the cost of the project.

It is not clear how many lives, if any, would have been saved by an alarm system. But other flood-prone counties have alert systems, and after the Kerr County flood, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said there “should have been sirens here.” If local officials could not afford it, he added, “then the state will step up.”

Officials in Kerr County did not respond to detailed questions about their efforts to install a warning system.

“Our city and county leadership are committed to a transparent and full review of past actions,” officials in Kerr County and Kerrville, the county’s largest city, said in a statement. “Our entire focus since day one has been rescue and reunification.”

The lack of an alert system in Kerr County, despite repeated attempts to fund one, is now drawing scrutiny amid questions over whether government inaction left people more vulnerable to flooding in Texas Hill Country. While the abrupt and explosive nature of the overnight storm caused clear challenges, the potential for a catastrophic flood was widely known. Yet neither county, state nor federal officials took the steps that many experts and local leaders felt could have made people safer.

“The more I’m finding out about it, the more I’m getting pissed off,” said Raymond Howard, a city council member in Ingram, in Kerr County, referring to the number of times the county discussed a flood warning system without getting funding to put one in place. He added: “They spend money on all types of other stuff. It just makes me very sad that they talked about it but never followed through with it.”

Mr. Howard said that he knew some people thought any discussion about blame was premature, but that he disagreed. “If we don’t talk about it now and get the fire underneath everybody, it’s going to get shuffled again. And I don’t want to see that,” he said.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said this week that the state legislature would investigate the floods. But he also pushed back against efforts to assign blame, calling it “the word choice of losers.”

Nonetheless, the disaster has highlighted a range of potential failures.

Some of the buildings at Camp Mystic, the Christian camp where at least 27 girls and counselors were lost to the flooding, were inside an area that experts call the “floodway” — a designation that indicates an exceptionally high risk of flooding, and one where construction is generally prohibited.

In addition, while many experts credit the National Weather Service with issuing up-to-the-minute flash flood warnings through the night, some have questioned whether key vacancies in local Weather Service offices hurt the agency’s ability to coordinate with emergency management officials.

Kerr County’s inability to get help paying for a flood warning system is all the more striking because of a shift in U.S. disaster policy in recent years — one that made disaster-protection money far easier to obtain.

After Hurricane Harvey inundated Texas in 2017, the start of a series of record-breaking disasters across the country, the federal government shifted its approach to protecting Americans from more frequent and severe weather catastrophes.

Instead of simply rebuilding communities after disasters, the government began providing more money to build protections ahead of time, through a mix of new and existing programs. The approach, championed by the first Trump administration, became supercharged under the Biden administration, with billions of dollars directed to those preparations.

One of the greatest beneficiaries of that funding was Texas. Over the past decade, according to federal data, Texas has received nearly $1.9 billion through FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, one of the federal government’s main disaster-protection programs. Only a handful of states, including Florida and North Carolina, received more.

The way FEMA structured that program gave officials at the Texas Division of Emergency Management the authority to decide which projects, in which counties, received the funds. Over the past decade, that money has been approved to fund disaster warning systems in more than two dozen of the 254 counties in Texas, federal records show.

The episode highlights a major flaw in America’s disaster defenses, according to Roy Wright, who managed the risk-reduction programs at FEMA during the first Trump administration. Because so many levels of government are involved, it is impossible to know who is responsible.

“Big risks aren’t getting to the top of the list for funding,” said Mr. Wright, who now runs the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. “Clearly, it needs to be different.”

County officials began trying to install a warning system along the Guadalupe River after floodwaters swept down the Blanco River, which runs roughly parallel to and just north of the Guadalupe, on Memorial Day weekend 2015. The flood ripped through the Hill Country town of Wimberley, killing 13 people.

Some residents argued that outdoor sirens blaring warnings in the event of a flash flood would ruin the natural feel of the area that many prized. “The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of the night,” one county commissioner at the time, Buster Baldwin, said during a 2016 meeting. “I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.” (Mr. Baldwin died in 2022.)

Still, county commissioners hired a local engineer, who came up with a plan. They identified grant money and worked with a grant writer to make an application to the Texas Department of Emergency Management for federal money from the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, according to county meeting minutes from January 2017. The cost: about $976,000.

The plan would have added 10 gauges to measure rising water at river crossings and created a system for warnings to be shared with the sheriff, emergency managers and the public, according to a description shared at the meeting.

The state denied the application in 2017, the county commissioners said, according to meeting minutes.

“They selected about eight different counties,” Tom Moser, a county commissioner, said at the time.

“They prioritized us lower?” asked Tom Pollard, then the county judge, Kerr County’s senior elected official. Mr. Pollard could not be reached for comment.

“They did,” replied Mr. Moser, who also did not respond to a request for comment.

Then, after Hurricane Harvey hit, Mr. Abbott said the state would do more to fund local government efforts to deal with flooding. Mr. Moser and other Kerr County officials were again hopeful. They reapplied to the Texas Department of Emergency Management in 2018, according to meeting minutes.

Then they waited. Months later, the application had not been approved.

“We thought we might get some money for that, but I think that’s probably not going to happen until next year,” Mr. Moser said during another county meeting in August 2019. It never did.

The minutes show that the county began moving on to other issues over time. Heather Davis, a former official with the city of Ingram, one of the places involved in the push for a flood warning system, said that elected leaders became more focused on grants for improving roads.

Still, the issue of the warning system, and the failure to get money for it, occasionally resurfaced as an ongoing concern.

“We’ve been trying to get a new flood warning system here,” the county’s head of emergency management, William B. “Dub” Thomas, told the county commissioners at a meeting in 2020. “We haven’t been able to do it.”

Mr. Thomas declined to comment. He referred inquiries to the county’s emergency operations center, which did not address questions about the county’s efforts to secure funding for a warning system.

There are signs, though, that sirens may be in place for future flooding.

Soon after the recent tragedy, Mr. Patrick said the state would pay for a warning system.

“Whatever the problem was, why they didn’t have them, we’re moving on,” he said.

Research was contributed by Kitty Bennett, Sheelagh McNeill, Kirsten Noyes and Julie Tate.

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