“Takeaways from the heated July 4 flood hearing: Kerr County officials grilled over absences, delays,” Houston Chronicle's Amanda Drane, Neena Satija and Megan Kimble -- "Flood relief is one of many items the Texas Legislature is taking up in the 30-day special session called by Gov. Greg Abbott. Lawmakers have yet to put forward a comprehensive agenda, but Thursday’s testimony could help shape legislation that is eventually filed.
Here are the key takeaways so far:
Dan Patrick called out Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said he was in Kerr County on July 4 and had a series of meetings with county officials, yet never saw County Judge Rob Kelly that day.
“This is about as bad a day as you can have, and I’ve had a lot of bad days. We didn't just lose people; we didn’t know where people were,” Patrick said. “And you weren't here.”
Kelly had earlier testified he was staying at his lake home in Travis County overnight as the flooding began, but headed back to Kerr County after he woke up on July 4. At one point that day, Kelly said, he went home to check on his wife.
Patrick told the judge he should have been at the county's emergency center.
“I don’t know where you were on Day One, on July 4, but you should have been here. You should have been here directing that response. That is your responsibility … Everyone was here that day working their ass off and you were nowhere to be found.”
Local officials were asleep, out sick when flooding started
The three top emergency officials in Kerr County all testified they were not working until after the floods began.
County Judge Kelly testified he woke up to phone calls and messages from Texas Division of Emergency Management Nim Kidd, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha and Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice in the “5, 5:30 range” on the morning of July 4.
By then, he said, flooding had already overtaken Camp Mystic and other camps.
He said he received no “no alerts suggesting an extreme weather event was imminent,” even though he gets a lot of alerts about weather.
“Something I could never have imagined,” he said, adding the National Weather Service didn’t forecast this “in a timely manner.”
Leitha said he woke up at 4:20 a.m.: "I started calling people out. A little later, I did talk to the judge (Kelly)."
W.B. “Dub” Thomas, the county’s emergency management coordinator, said he was ill and on paid time off on July 3 in the run-up to the deadly storm. He said he was awoken at 5:30 a.m. on July 4 by a caller asking him to respond to the floods.
“Based on the data we had at the time, there was no indication that a catastrophic flood was imminent,” Thomas said.
The three top emergency management officials for Kerr County — the county judge, the sheriff, and emergency management coordinator — pointed out numerous times that some emergency responders were awake and responding to the flooding as early as 3 a.m. But lawmakers from both parties pushed back on that defense.
“The three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable. Am I hearing that right?” asked state Rep. Ann Johnson, D-Houston.
“Knowing now what you know, is there a protocol that needs to be put in place? That, if the three folks who are responsible at this moment are not available for whatever reason, what should we do?” Johnson asked.
“Yes ma’am, we can look at it real hard,” Leitha responded. “Maybe they can call me earlier.”
State Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, echoed Johnson’s concerns and said he found the county officials’ answers “very disturbing.”
“We have people dying,” he said, “and yeah, we have people charged with responsibility for their protection — but they’re in their beds, they’re sick, they’re waiting for somebody else.”
Johnson also asked Leitha and Thomas if they were aware that as early as 2 a.m., according to reports she said she’d heard, “there were little girls with water around their feet” at Camp Mystic on the Guadalupe River.
They said no.
“I’ve had discussions with the camps before, and the process was, they need to notify the sheriff’s office,” Thomas said. Leitha added that he had no indication his office had received any such notifications at that time.
Kerr County criticized over delayed alerts, lack of evacuation notice
Under Texas law, Kelly, the county judge, would have been responsible for deciding whether or not to issue evacuation orders for the county. Asked why he did not, he told lawmakers that it was “too late” and would have resulted in “one heck of a traffic jam” just as waters were overtaking roadways.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, said he understood that evacuations by road could have been too dangerous, but believed something still could have been done as weather forecasters were issuing flood warnings, particularly after an emergency alert went out not long after 4 a.m.
“Would there not have been a recognition of the obvious that there needs to be an alert that says, effectively, get to higher ground?” Bettencourt said.
“I agree,” Kelly responded. Left unaddressed in the exchange was the fact that Kelly had apparently been asleep at that point and so would not have been able to make such a call.
Officials also acknowledged that a “CodeRed” alert regarding the flooding, which people in Kerr County could have received on their phones as long as they hadn’t opted out, wasn’t sent until 5:01 a.m – more than 40 minutes after a dispatcher had requested that it be sent.
Timeline of flood response emerges
For the first time, local officials with the City of Kerrville and Kerr County publicly provided a more detailed account of when emergency dispatchers began receiving urgent calls in the early morning hours of July 4.
At 3:34 a.m. — more than two hours after the National Weather Service had issued a flood alert for portions of Kerr County — emergency dispatchers received the first phone call from a family that was “on a roof requesting air evacuation” that led county officials to realize they had an “all hands on deck” situation, Leitha said.
After that, call volume increased quickly, according to timelines provided by local officials. In the next hour, dispatchers began hearing from children trapped in flooding homes. Because of rising waters, some sheriff’s deputies became stranded, too. Calls from Camp Mystic came in at 3:57 a.m., Leitha said, reporting people were “stranded on a hill seeking evacuation.”
While some Kerr County sheriff’s deputies and other area first responders were awake at that point and saved many lives, Leitha said, it appeared that they were doing so while he and the county’s emergency management official — emergency coordinator Thomas — were not yet awake. Still, Leitha reiterated that even weather forecasters had not foreseen the level of danger.
As an example, he noted that at 4:32 a.m. — a few minutes after a sheriff’s deputy reported hearing “kids screaming in the river” — the National Weather Service called the sheriff’s office to ask if roads were closed and if flooding was occurring.
Leitha paused and shook his head after delivering that testimony to lawmakers.
Flood itself ‘worth studying’
Kerr County commissioned an independent hydrology assessment that confirms that “this was a 1,000-year flood,” Kerr County Judge Kelly said. He described the event as “very much worth studying.” It also sat “in a location with very few rain monitors or flood gauges.”
The storm was “not typical for our weather patterns” because it stayed, “it did not pass through, it overwhelmed the watershed,” he said.
“This was not foreseeable,” Kelly said. It “reveals the urgent need for stronger tools, better detection, and modernized infrastructure.”
Lawmakers again grill leaders of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority
Last week, lawmakers blasted the general manager of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority — which covers the Guadalupe River in Kerr County alone — for choosing to cut property taxes rather than modernize its flood warning system, citing an investigation by the Houston Chronicle.
On Thursday, Darby, a Republican from San Angelo, again grilled UGRA board chair William Rector over that decision. “It was recognized through studies that you paid for that there was a need for an early warning system, in your words, an alert system would have saved lives. And yet you didn't do anything about it,” Darby said.
Rector, who was appointed by Abbott said that the river authority had grown so frustrated with its efforts to secure funding for flood warning that “we said we're going to do it ourselves. We're going to just take the bull by the horn. We're going to create our own system,” he said.
Rector said that in January, UGRA issued a request for proposals to install such a system. “By June 4, we had actually hired a contractor, signed a contract to begin creating a system with our own money that would support flood warning.”
But the UGRA has so far approved little more than a “software system” consisting of a public-facing dashboard, rather than additional river gauges to collect more data, Rector confirmed during the hearing. Earlier this year the board approved spending less than $73,000 on the project, documents show.
Rector told lawmakers Thursday that the river authority more recently committed to spending $1.5 million from its reserves to conduct further studies on the issue.
State Rep. Ken King, a Republican and the chairman of the House committee, noted that UGRA’s board is appointed by the governor.
“So you're not accountable to the voters of Kerr County?” he asked. “They couldn't not elect you and take you off the board, if they didn't think you were doing a good job?”
“That’s correct,” Rector said.
State Sen. Donna Campbell, a Republican from New Braunfels, suggested that the Upper Guadalupe River Authority might be absorbed by the larger Guadalupe Blanco River Authority, which covers 10 counties downstream.
“Guadalupe Blanco has water production and sewer services they can sell so if we were merged you would be asking people downstream to support us in Kerr County,” Rector said.
“It’s a river authority that is managed for one county only and I’m not sure there weren’t things that could have been done over the years … that possibly could have helped,” Campbell said.
Residents plead for more help with recovery
Residents told harrowing stories of escaping rapidly rising July 4 flood waters and asked lawmakers to spend more on recovery efforts — still ongoing weeks later — and invest in warning systems, evacuation routes and more to save lives in future storms.
Ann Carr of Ingram told the panel she lives on Ingram Lake, which is still so full of debris it has become a “toxic pit.” She said she has spoken to divers who have been in the lake and told her there are still bodies in the water. And she said an oil slick “continues to bubble up right in front of our property” from a submerged vehicle.
“We have six feet of rubble that has invaded our lake, and it's become a graveyard,” Carr said.
She urged the state to dip into its massive rainy day fund to drain the lake and clean it out, arguing it is urgent for the survival of the community.
“That lake in Ingram is the heart of our city,” Carr said. “It brings money into our city. We have people that come in and boat, fish. They spend money at the restaurants. We're a poor community, and we need that lake drained.”
Nancy Zdunkewicz told the panel her family awoke at 3 a.m. and the flood water was already at their house in Hunt, about 40 feet above the normal water level.
Her family tried to get to higher ground, but was instead forced to climb into trees on their property and wait out the flood, watching as cars and other trees were washed away.
She called for more evacuation routes and warning systems.
“This community really needs help with recovery, and we need preparation for the next flood,” Zdunkewicz said. “Had there been early detection of the rising waters and sirens, we may have been able to leave in time to get to higher ground safely.”
County officials request more resources
Kelly said his county would need a flood warning and detection system to better predict future floods, more interconnectivity to address cell phone dead zones, and more resources for emergency management to better address future floods.
Much of the western portion of the county has very poor cell service, he said.
“Even if people wanted to call .. and warn folks … they didn’t have the ability,” he said.
Rice said there needs to be investments in localized predictive weather modeling and expanded broadband infrastructure.
”Kerrville will rebuild, but we need the tools and the funding to do it right,” he said.
Texas’ top GOP leaders are in attendance
Lt. Gov. Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows don’t serve on legislative committees and usually don’t attend public hearings, but they showed up to this one in Kerrville.
In opening statements, Patrick, a Republican who presides over the state Senate, said this hearing is just the beginning.
“We will pass bills dealing with the immediacy of things that we can address now, but we will be doing this in the next session and the session after that,” he told the crowd. “We will not quit until you feel like we’ve done everything that we can do that you’ve asked us to do.”
Burrows, R-Lubbock, encouraged officials to be forthright in their testimony.
“We cannot come up with solutions, we cannot try to improve things, if we don’t know everything that you can share with us,” he said." Hou Chron ($) |
