The forecast began to look ominous in Texas Hill Country on Thursday afternoon.
A flood watch was issued by the National Weather Service at 1:18 p.m. that predicted up to 7 inches of isolated rainfall early Friday morning in South Central Texas, including Kerr County.
By the time the sun rose on the Fourth of July, less than 24 hours later, as much as 12 inches of rain had fallen in parts of the region while its residents were asleep, according to NWS radar estimates. The Guadalupe River gauge at the unincorporated community of Hunt, where the river forks, recorded a 22-foot rise in just two hours, said Bob Fogarty, meteorologist with the NWS Austin/San Antonio office. The gauge recorded a level of 29 ½ feet before becoming completely submerged and failing, Fogarty added.
[Camp Mystic, a haven for generations of Texas girls, becomes a center of tragedy]
At least 32 people were killed by the flooding. Dozens more remained missing as of Saturday morning, including 27 young girls from a Christian summer camp, according to the Kerr County sheriff’s office. [By Sunday morning, there were more than 50 reported deaths.]
The scale of the disaster — and the fact that major flooding is common in this part of Texas — has raised questions over whether more could have been done to warn people in the path of the flood waters.
Local and state officials were quick to point to weather forecasts that did not accurately predict the intensity of the rainfall. Meanwhile, some forecasters suggested that local officials and camp leadership should have activated more given the threats that were apparent.
“The heartbreaking catastrophe that occurred in Central Texas is a tragedy of the worst sort because it appears evacuations and other proactive measures could have been undertaken to reduce the risk of fatalities had the organizers of impacted camps and local officials heeded the warnings of the government and private weather sources, including AccuWeather,” AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter wrote in a statement Saturday morning.
Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, on Friday pointed to NWS forecasts from earlier in the week that projected up to 6 inches of rain.
“It did not predict the amount of rain that we saw,” Kidd said.
Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly echoed Kidd. When he was asked why camps along the Guadalupe were not evacuated, Kelly told reporters the county had “no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here.”
However, warnings were issued about the potential for flash flooding hours before the waters reached their peak.
Rain began to fall around midnight, and the first flash flood warning was issued by the NWS at 1:14 a.m. Friday, Fogarty said. That warning should have triggered a response by local emergency management and local media to spread the word to those in harm’s way, as well as the Emergency Alert System that broadcasts warnings to televisions and radios, Fogarty said.
All NWS flash flood warnings, including the one issued after midnight on Friday, trigger Wireless Emergency Alerts, the emergency push notification sent through cellphone towers to all wireless phones in the emergency area, Fogarty said. That warning was updated nine times throughout Friday, each of which triggered separate alerts through the Emergency Alert System and the Wireless Emergency Alerts, Fogarty said.
The most serious warning came at 4:03 a.m. when the NWS issued a flash flood emergency, warning of an “extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation” and urging immediate evacuations to higher ground. Flash flood emergencies are issued using a mixture of rainfall data and on-the-ground reports: “Someone has told us we need to get people out of here immediately or people are going to die,” Fogarty said.
The flooding came amid concerns about staffing levels at the NWS, after the Trump administration fired hundreds of meteorologists this year as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts. The NWS Austin/San Antonio office’s warning coordination meteorologist announced in April that he was retiring early due to the funding cuts, leading to speculation that vacancies could have impacted forecasters’ response.
The NWS forecasting offices were operating normally at the time of the disaster, said Greg Waller, service coordination hydrologist with the NWS West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth.
“We had adequate staffing. We had adequate technology,” Waller said. “This was us doing our job to the best of our abilities.”
[The New York Times this morning reported that staffing shortages, according to former Weather Service officials, reflected “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight, while “Separate questions have emerged about the preparedness of local communities, including Kerr County’s apparent lack of a local flood warning system. The county, roughly 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, is where many of the deaths occurred.]
Staffing data provided by the NWS’s labor union showed the San Angelo forecasting office currently has four vacancies out of 23 positions and San Antonio has six vacancies out of 26.
Legislative Director Tom Fahy said that was adequate to issue timely forecasts and warnings before and during the emergency.
At least one independent meteorologist working in Texas echoed that statement, writing on his website that “we have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within NOAA and the NWS played any role at all in this event.”
The timing of the flood may have been a complicating factor. The alerts came out during the start of the Fourth of July weekend, when RV parks, cabins and homes are filled with tourists who might not be as familiar with the flood risks or the habits of the water.
Between 2 and 7 a.m., the Guadalupe River in Kerrville rose from 1 to more than 34 feet in height, according to a flood gauge in the area. The flooding reached its peak at around 6:45 a.m. in Kerrville, hours after warnings were first issued, according to the gauge.
When the NWS issued its flash flood emergency, the river height was still under two feet, although it began to rise quickly shortly after the alert was issued. Major flooding on the river is considered anything above 20 feet, a level the gauge recorded a little after 6 a.m. on Friday.
Porter noted the danger of the nighttime flooding, when many people are asleep and slower to respond to warnings.
Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice told reporters Friday that the suddenness and intensity of the flood caught city officials flat-footed.
“This happened very quickly over a very short amount of time that could not be predicted,” Rice said. “This is not like a tornado where you can have a siren. This is not a hurricane where you’re planning weeks in advance. It hit hard and things like this happen in a very strategic, very isolated area and when those two things converge you have what happened today.”
Asked Saturday afternoon what kind of procedures the county had to warn the summer camps along the river about flooding emergencies, Rice said that each camp is private. This situation happened very fast, he said, so “there wasn’t a lot of time in this case as far as warnings.”
Right now, he said, the focus is on search and rescue operations; they want to address questions about warnings later.
Waller, meanwhile, noted that flooding has long been a in the area.
“In my career, this is our worst case scenario that we brief all of our new forecasters on,” Waller said.
The terrain in the area makes it so precipitation forecasts off by just 20 miles could affect entirely different river basins, he said.
Given the river’s history, Porter said reports of survivors being awoken by rapidly rising water and forced to evacuate in the middle of the emergency instead of much earlier after the warnings were first issued were “extremely concerning.”
The region has experienced catastrophic flooding before, including the 2015 Wimberley flood that left 13 people dead, as well as major floods in 2007 and 2002. A July 1987 flood of the Guadalupe River devastated Kerrville and other communities along the waterway.
–Paul Cobler, The Texas Tribune. Jessica Shuran Yu and Alejandra Martinez contributed reporting.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune here. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
BillC says
“We are all going to die”.
Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) slaps her constituents (and all Americans) in the face.
Greedy nazis says
Haha was this unexpected? You let terrorist cut funding for weather services and fema then complain people die? There shall be many more ! the 12 billionaires need more of your money so cut food stamps oh lol too late! Well just kick 15 millions from insurance that will save bezos and their tax evading friends! Yes people will die but that’s a sacrifice they are willing to make! Murikkka we will starve our own kids for a dollar!
Ann Williams says
Our Country, our Republic, our Democracy is being destroyed right before our very eyes.
Jake from state farm says
Before the liberals start saying it is Trumps fault and using dead girls as a political attach. you better do some research……
Posts from CBS weather man CBS Austin posted “All I’ll say is this. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for Kerr County more than 12 hours ahead of the catastrophic flood. A flash flood warning was issued for Hunt & Ingram 3 HOURS before the Guadalupe started to climb.
They did their job and they did it well”
CPFL says
I would find it strange that the people in those areas did not get warning of the potential flooding. All the way over here I got a weather alert for it from more than one weather source.
BillC says
@Jake Try reading the story first before advising others to “better do some research”. First sentence: “Local and state officials were quick to point to weather forecasts that did not accurately predict the intensity of the rainfall.”
BillC says
PS first sentence after 2nd “Parks and Wildlife” photo.
The dude says
Texas might’ve better used the millions they spent on chartered flights to fly migrants to other states under false pretenses… like to maybe bolster their early warning system?
Or the millions they spent to string razor wire down the middle of the rio grande? Or any other number of other “priorities” that MAGA so hold dear over the lives of a couple dozen kids…
Embarrassing… simply embarrassing…
Hopefully Meatball Ron is paying attention?
Jake from state farm says
@Bill C – Just to clarify, my comment wasn’t directed at the article itself. I was responding to the broader conversation and specifically addressing liberals who are trying to blame the Trump administration for a supposed lack of warning. It’s frustrating to see how quickly some people seize on a tragedy—especially one involving the heartbreaking loss of children—to push a political agenda. Instead of focusing on the facts or looking for solutions, they’re using this as an opportunity to score political points. That kind of exploitation doesn’t help anyone and only deepens the divide.
Atwp says
Predicting the intensity of any storm can be tricky. Always has been and always will be. I don’t care how advanced we think we are, Mother Nature is always smarter. Forecasters will never predict Mother Nature to the t, she is just too smart for that. If a warning is issued listen, plan and move to a safer place. One thing I know about Mother Nature, she goes where she want to go, does what she want to do, leaves when she want to leave, what can we do to stop her, nothing. It is interesting we see storms, we name some storms, we can’t tame them. We see storms coming in our direction but we can’t stop them. Just saying. Am very sorrow for the deaths caused by the floods, in Texas.
Skibum says
While there are legitimate questions and concerns that will need to be addressed pertaining to NWS flood warnings being issued for that area in Texas, and whether NWS staffing cuts ordered from the WH played any part in the unfolding disaster and loss of life, one thing is abundantly clear to me. Mother nature doesn’t play favorites. It is very sad whenever there is a natural disaster that takes people’s lives, and especially when the deaths involve children. It is an unbelievable tragedy that the flooding in Texas’ hill country has swept away and killed close to 100 men, women and children with the death toll expected to climb even more.
Despite the horrific loss of life, what we have NOT heard even a peep of, is that these unexpected deaths of innocent people in Texas was some form of “judgement” by God, uttered from twisted minds on the left because this natural disaster happened in a “red state”, a very conservative “maga” region of this country, etc. Liberals don’t think that way, and don’t use, or rather MISUSE God as a punisher and reason why innocent people who may think and believe differently than us are no longer alive when a natural disaster such as this takes place.
I can’t help but recall many of the past natural disasters in “blue states” or where victims of some horrific tragedy were LGBT citizens when very conservative “religious” fools like the now dead and buried Pat Robertson stood up with a bible raised above his head and proclaimed that those deaths were “God’s judgement” or how they deserved their deaths just because of ignorance and hatred of other people from the pseudo-Christian right. And now that tragedy has struck in deeply religious Texas to include campers at a Christian camp for girls, nobody, not LGBT, not black, not Hispanic, not liberal, NOBODY on the left is as moronic or unhinged as some within the religiosity cult called the “Christian right” who, in a time of sorrow, would dare make such a terrible tragedy worse by spouting hateful un-Christian rhetoric about innocent deaths in a natural disaster being some kind of “judgement from God”.
I hope we can ALL remember and abide by this unspoken measure of compassion and reverence the next time victims of some unspeakable tragedy involve those who are despised by the maga or pseudo-Christian cultists who misuse the bible and God for their own hateful and wrongheaded purpose. When victims happen to be gay who are killed, it is NOT God’s judgement that condemned them! When victims happen to be immigrants or minorities that maga loving cultists treat as less than human or that they somehow deserve to die, that is NOT God’s judgement, no matter how many specific verses in a St. James version of the bible you can point to in declaration of your own personal belief system.
Let’s remember and honor these lives lost and future victims of natural disasters as they are… innocent victims who were caught up in something not of their own doing, and just morn the loss of life as kind and compassionate people are supposed to do for one another. Can we all do that?
BillC says
@Jake liberals “using dead girls as a political attack”? You’re the one clumsily “using this as an opportunity to score political points”.
Sherry says
This tragic situation is just not that “black and white”. Are the trump/doge NWS/NOAA cutbacks in personnel “Solely” to blame? Probably not. If a strategic weather/climate “Expert” had not taken early retirement out of frustration due to the doge cuts in staff would lives have been saved?. . .Possibly yes! Was the NWS/NOAA staff at full strength and at their very best? Absolutely NOT! Don’t we all deserve better than “adequate” staffing of all those government agencies that protect our safety? Hell YES!!!
This from Newsweek:
“We need to understand why that last mile is where the problem was in terms of getting alerts out,” Spinrad said in an interview with CNN.
Spinrad added that “one of the problematic issues” with the most recent flood was the “lack of a warning coordination meteorologist” at the Austin/San Antonio office, which he said was a critical position.
“The individual who had that position took one of the retirements that the administration had offered up a couple of months ago,” Spinrad said.
In an interview with CNN earlier this week, Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the NWS employees’ union, said the NWS forecast offices had “adequate staffing and resources” but confirmed that the Austin/San Antonio office was missing a warning coordination meteorologist.
Critics have raised concerns that job cuts at the NWS and NOAA left offices short-staffed and compromised forecasting coordination and emergency communication. Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, said there needed to be an inquiry into whether NWS job cuts played a role in people in the flood zone not being prepared.
Sherry says
A MUST READ!
Regarding the downsizing of our critical weather prediction service . . . there is most certainly a”Corrupt” motivation that has been brought to light by the Associated Press. . . The push to “Privatize” and make $$$$ for key members of trump’s “Oligarchs”:
WASHINGTON (AP) — As commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick oversees the U.S. government’s vast efforts to monitor and predict the weather.
The billionaire also ran a financial firm, which he recently left in the control of his adult sons, that stands to benefit if President Donald Trump’s administration follows through on a decade-long Republican effort to privatize government weather forecasting.
Deadly weekend flooding in central Texas has drawn a spotlight to budget cuts and staff reductions at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, two agencies housed within the Commerce Department that provide the public with free climate and weather data that can be crucial during natural disasters.
What’s drawn less attention is how the downsizing appears to be part of an effort to privatize the work of such agencies. In several instances, the companies poised to step into the void have deep ties to people tapped by Trump to run weather-related agencies.
Privatization would diminish a central role the federal government has played in weather forecasting since the 1800s, which experts say poses a particular harm for those facing financial strain who may not be able to afford commercial weather data.
The effort also reveals the difficulty that uber wealthy members of Trump’s Cabinet have in freeing themselves from conflicts, even if they have met the letter of federal ethics law.
“It’s the most insidious aspect of this: Are we really talking about making weather products available only to those who can afford it?” said Rick Spinrad, who served as NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, a Democrat. “Basically turning the weather service into a subscription streaming service? As a taxpayer, I don’t want to be in the position of saying, ‘I get a better weather forecast because I’m willing to pay for it.’”
The White House referred requests for comment to the Commerce Department, which said in a statement that Lutnick has “fully complied with the terms of his ethics agreement with respect to divestiture and recusals and will continue to do so.”