After years of unsuccessful attempts to finance and build a public alarm network that would warn residents of Kerr County, Texas, about dangerous flooding, officials in the region, nicknamed “flash flood alley,” were going to start developing a centralized flood monitoring system this summer to help leaders and emergency managers plan ahead.
On July 4, storms in Central Texas caused the Guadalupe River to overflow, rising as high as 26 feet over about an hour in the very early morning. At least 121 people from several counties have been confirmed dead so far, and even more remain missing six days after the disaster. The majority of those deaths happened in Kerr County, where at least 96 people perished in floodwaters and another 161 are unaccounted for, local authorities said Thursday. In Hunt, a section of the county that faced particularly formidable inundation, at least 27 children and counselors from a girls’ summer camp called Camp Mystic are among the dead, the camp announced.
The Upper Guadalupe River Authority, a leadership board that manages the river, had approved funding earlier this year for a dashboard “to support local flood monitoring and emergency response,” a spokesperson for the joint information center established in Kerr County since the disaster said in a statement to CBS News on Thursday.
“While real-time streamflow and rainfall data are already available through various sources, this new tool will bring those datasets for Kerr County into one platform to enhance usability for emergency managers,” the statement said. “This is not a public alert system, but a decision-support resource intended to complement existing infrastructure.”
Board meeting minutes for the Upper Guadalupe River Authority stretching back to at least August 2024 reflect those plans. Last year, the river authority requested bids for a “flood warning” dashboard that would combine multiple sources of weather and forecasting data into a single tool, intended to assist its own staff, local emergency management coordinators, and leaders as they made decisions regarding potential flooding events. Part of the project also called for recommendations for how to improve monitoring equipment in the county related to flood warnings in the future.
Kisters North America, an environmental technology company, was selected as the contractor for the project in April, when Kerr County also submitted a hazard mitigation plan to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with one hazard being flooding.
The contract was initiated in June, and preliminary meetings with Kisters to begin developing the flood monitoring dashboard were scheduled for mid-July, “but in light of recent events the timeline will be reevaluated,” according to the joint information center in Kerr County.
How weather alerts and forecast warnings contributed to the consequences of last week’s floods in Kerr County is unclear, but the death toll has left many questioning whether more could have been done to protect those in the path of the inundation. A CBS News analysis found that 22 warnings from the National Weather Service were issued for Kerr County around the storms and flash flooding. However, some local residents said they either did not receive emergency alerts on their phones or received them late, while others said they did not understand the gravity of the situation until the flooding actually hit.
Judge Rob Kelly, a leading official in Kerr County, said at a news conference Friday that his area does not have a warning system established for weather events and suggested that could have played a role in the lack of preparedness. County officials had previously discussed installing a public alarm system but did not proceed because of the cost.
