(NEW YORK) — As state and local officials in Texas have come under scrutiny over the lack of sirens to warn people of impending flash flooding on the Guadalupe River that killed more than 100 people, records reviewed by ABC News show authorities of one of the hardest hit counties have had discussions about implementing such an alert system for nearly a decade.
The destructive flooding hit in the early morning hours of the Fourth of July, causing the Guadalupe River in Kerr County to rise by 26 feet in less than an hour, spilling its banks and flooding multiple summer camps and RV parks along the winding river.
On Monday, the death toll from the flooding climbed to more than 100, according to officials. At least 84 of the deaths occurred in Kerr County, including 27 children at Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer camp near the banks of the Guadalupe, authorities said.
Ten girls and a counselor from Camp Mystic remained unaccounted for on Monday as search-and-rescue efforts stretched into their fourth day.
Since the catastrophe, local officials have faced questions about how warnings were sent out to the community, why evacuations weren’t ordered in low-lying areas and why there were no audible warning systems to alert campers along the Guadalupe.
“There should have been sirens here,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News on Monday, adding that the subject will likely come up in a special session of the state legislature to analyze what occurred during the flooding.
Patrick added, “Had we had sirens around this area, up and down — the same type of sirens they have in Israel when there’s an attack coming, that would have blown very loudly — it’s possible that would have saved some of these lives.”
‘I’ve spent hours in those helicopters pulling kids out of trees’
Records reviewed by ABC News show that many of the same questions have been under discussion, specifically in Kerr County, for nearly a decade.
The minutes from a March 28, 2016, meeting of the Kerr County Commissioners’ Court, show that former Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer pushed the commission to upgrade the county’s flood-warning system. At the time, Hierholzer told the commission that he was in favor of placing high-decibel outdoor sirens along the river that could go off and be heard from a distance of 3 miles when water gauges indicated flooding, according to the online minutes of the meeting.
According to the meeting minutes, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, then-Commissioner Tom Moser said there are state-of-the-art warning systems, including those with sirens, in other parts of the state, “even though this [Kerr County] is probably one of the highest flood-prone regions in the entire state.”
Hierholzer told the commission that the sirens, in addition to the county’s CodeRED emergency notification system, would work to quickly spread the word of imminent danger, according to the meeting minutes.
In that meeting, according to the minutes, Hierholzer raised what he called the “most important” issue — that of warning the summer camps along the Guadalupe, recalling a 1987 flash flood in which 10 children from the Pot O’ Gold Ranch Christian camp in Comfort, Texas, were killed attempting to evacuate the camp in a bus.
“I’ve spent hours in those helicopters pulling kids out of trees,” Hierholzer told the commission, according to the meeting minutes.
At the time, Hierholzer added that a lot of people in the county were not signed up for CodeRED alerts and that it was difficult to get people to sign up for the phone alerts.
“So yes, you need both. You need the sirens, and you need CodeRED to try to make sure we’ll notify everybody we can when it’s coming up,” Hierholzer said, according to the meeting minutes.
Moser, according to the meeting minutes, told his fellow commissioners that upgrading the warning system to include sirens was “not hugely expensive,” adding that the units would cost around $40,000 each.
The Kerr County Commissioners’ Court applied for a nearly $1 million FEMA grant, according to the meeting minutes. The county’s application was not selected, but it was not immediately clear why.
Moser could not be reached for comment by ABC News on Monday. He told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday that the county considered paying for the upgrade of its flood warning system, but eventually decided not to include it in its annual budget.
“It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities. Trying not to raise taxes,” Moser told the newspaper.
Reached by ABC News by phone on Monday, Hierholzer declined to comment on the statements he made to the commissioners more than nine years ago.
“This is probably one of the worst disasters Kerr County has ever seen. So right now, I don’t want to get into all this kind of political stuff — what we could’ve, would’ve, should’ve done,” Hierholzer told ABC News.
Officials concede they were caught off guard
Kerr County officials said during a news conference on Saturday that they were caught off guard by the torrential rains that caused the Guadalupe River to rise to near-historic levels in a matter of minutes.
“We didn’t know this flood was coming,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said. “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States, and we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here, none whatsoever.”
But during a news conference on Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the state began preparing for the storm last Wednesday by pre-positioning assets and resources in flood-prone areas of the state, including Kerr County.
Chief W. Nim Kidd of the Texas Division of Emergency Management said alerts were also sent out.
“From a technical perspective, there were multiple warning systems that are out there, and all of us can choose to sign up for warning systems in certain areas depending on the local government that they’re in and the way their system works,” Kidd said during the governor’s press conference. But he added that some places have spotty cell phone reception.
Kidd added, “There can be all kinds of alert systems that are sent, and we know that some general messaging was sent early, some urgent warnings were sent at various times. But just sending the message is not the same as receiving the message, having a plan to do something when you receive the message and then the ability to implement that plan.”
During a news conference on Monday, Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said staff at some of the summer camps on the Guadalupe were monitoring the rising river at 3:30 a.m. on the day of the flood and managed to move campers to higher ground.
Asked by reporters why mandatory evacuations were not issued by the city or county, Rice said, “Evacuations are a delicate balance because if you evacuate too late, you then risk putting buses, or cars, or vehicles, or campers on roads … trying to get them out, which can make it more challenging because these flash floods happen very quickly.”
When pressed on why evacuations were not announced far in advance of the storm, Rice added, “It’s like disasters in Texas everywhere — it’s very tough to make those calls because what we also don’t want to do is cry wolf.”
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