Amid flood tragedy, Texas officials promise improvements ‘will be made’
While emergency speakers continue to comb through mountains of debris tangled a week after a sudden catastrophic flood jumped in this picturesque city in Texas, state officials are starting to think about how similar tragedies could be avoided in the future.
While local leaders say that their objective is to remain in the search for the 161 people who are still missing after the disaster, the heads of state announced that the preparation of the floods will be at the center of a special legislative session to come. Many tools exist, say the experts, but the cost is an obstacle for rural communities like this. Now, by tragedy, there can be the political will to support these areas. President Donald Trump visited the region on Friday.
The flood that has inflated the Guadalupe river in the early hours of independence has so far made more than 100 lives. The county of Kerr, near the water upstream of the river, was the hardest hit. Local authorities have reported 96 deaths, including 36 children. Twenty-seven campers and advisers in a Christian camp for girls on a southern bank isolated from the river died in the flood. Five children and an advisor remain missing.
Why we wrote this
While recovery efforts continue in Texas, details emerge on the way the region could have been better prepared. The political will increases for responsibility and improvements to the level of the state.
These figures change almost every day. But questions around what local leaders knew and how they answered as the flood waters rose, also last. Warnings of the flash floods seem to have been missed or minimized by local officials and camp leaders. The examination rises both on alert technology for the community’s floods and its human supervisors.
City and county officials “are attached to a transparent and complete examination of” the response to the storm, said Jonathan Lamb, with the Kerrville police service at a press conference on Thursday.
“The special [legislative] The session will be the starting point for this work, but our orientation from the first day is on rescue and reunification. »»
Henry Gass / The Christian Science Monitor
Translate warnings in action
Mobile phone alerts have been the main warning system here, but the problems inherent in this approach seem to have been a factor in this tragedy. The attention turned to improved technology, such as sirens and sensors, which could faster detect and warn the inhabitants of sudden floods.
However, technology is as effective as people responsible for using it, according to experts. The biggest challenge for communities like Kerr’s county is to ensure that all that these systems diffuse reach people who are in danger in time.
The researchers came to this problem of “last kilometer”. This should be a main objective of Texas officials rethinking flood alert systems following the July 4 disaster, explains Erik Nielsen, atmospheric science teacher at Texas A & M University.
“The best warning system has several ways to receive information,” he said. When a natural disaster strikes, “you convince someone to do something that he has never had to do before, and it is difficult and it is frightening.”
An additional communication challenge is that the instructions for people in a flood zone, including when and how to evacuate, depends strongly on the conditions of the soil. Most of the deaths linked to floods in the state occur when motorists try to travel the roads covered with water; In 2003, the State launched a public relations campaign “Turn Turning, Don’t Naying”. These warnings are now omnipresent through the state during high precipitation events.
A similar campaign took place in Colorado, a legacy of the flood of the Big Thompson river in 1976, which caused at least 144 deaths. The researchers later discovered that many of those who died were trying to cross flood waters, while survivors tended to seek higher terrain. Fifty years later, there are panels everywhere in the mountainous areas of the state saying to people to go on higher ground during floods.
“Understand who is dead, where they died and why, but also to understand who survived” is crucial, explains Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“Asking these kinds of questions in the future will be critical.”
“We need to hear this”
In Kerr County, many residents are not yet ready to answer these questions.
Last week, early on the morning of July 4, Kristin Webb woke up at the Guadalupe river which accumulated against his house. Her heart jumped a beat, then she started hearing emergency speakers outside to tell the neighbors to evacuate. She caught her two dogs and left.
Speaking in a local church where she picked up free supplies a few days later, she considered herself “incredibly lucky”.
“We have a house and we have not lost their lives,” she said, wiping the tears of her eyes.
Henry Gass / The Christian Science Monitor
“I’m not trying to blame,” she adds, “I’m just trying to go.”
Given the ferocity of the flood of July 4, “it is difficult to blame” local officials, explains Kohnor Brown, a resident of the county. But “flooding of the sirens,” he added, “we have to hear this”.
In addition to mobile phone alerts, which only reach one population segment, many communities in the country already have mermaid networks that release messages telling people to evacuate certain areas.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that in 2017, Kerr county officials discussed the installation of a network of mermaids, but finally chose not to do so because a state fund would have only covered 5% of the cost.
A special legislative session was already to start in Austin on July 21, mainly to deal with a potential ban on cannabis products. Governor Greg Abbott announced this week that the session will now focus on the infrastructure for the preparation of floods in the state.
“We are going to approach all aspects of this storm to ensure that we will have set up the systems necessary to prevent fatal floods like this in the future,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday in Kerr.
Find funding for sensor systems
Improving flood water sensors along the river could also help. Other Texas counties have systems where sensors trigger sirens when water reaches a certain height, or can open and close the valves to control the flow of water, or light the road beacons with low water. Maintenance costs are the most important expenses for these systems, a challenge for the poorest counties, which sometimes pool their funds to install joint systems.
In southeast of Texas subject to floods, a group of counties has gathered to install a system of flood warning sensors in an area of 6,000 square miles. Nicholas Brake, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, manages the system as a principal and active manager.
“This is the kind of model that could be used” in the country of the hills, explains Dr. Brake. The 250 mile Guadalupe river flows through eight counties, and all these counties would benefit from an advanced flood warning system.
Robert Levy knows everything about these challenges.
Henry Gass / The Christian Science Monitor
“I came from a small community, so I understand their pain” trying to collect funds for systems like this, he says.
Deputy Sheriff in the Northern Mountains of California for three decades, he developed expertise as a subsidy editor which requests government funds for his department in short of money. This knowledge has since informed his work as a co -owner of Science Monitoring Systems, a company that installs advanced flood monitoring systems in the country’s communities.
His business installs such a system in the county of Comal, about 80 miles downstream from Kerrville. The military quality solar collectors trigger mobile phone notifications as well as sirens, which tell people – in English and Spanish – to move to higher ground. They seek to add lights to the sirens for hearing disorders.
No deaths were reported in the county of Comal. Being downstream – and therefore having more reaction time – probably helped, but Mr. Levy says that the part of their active system was able to warn residents to evacuate or reach higher terrain.
Responsibility measures
In the end, whatever the warning systems in place, the July 4 flood would probably have been devastating in Kerr county.
Strong precipitation in the days preceded on July 4 saw the Guadalupe increase by more than 30 feet in just five hours on the morning of independence, according to data from US Geological Survey.
From 1 hour, the National Weather Service published a series of increasingly urgent lightning flood warnings. Between 5:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., the agency issued lightning flood warnings for Kerr County approximately every 30 minutes, according to a calendar compiled by CBS News.
Residents said they had received lightning flood warnings on their phone, but because it was late at night, many ignored them. For those who are closer to the Guadalupe, cell phone signals can be more sperles. At the Mystic Camp, campers were not allowed to have phones or electronic devices with them. According to the media, the camp succeeded in an inspection by the Texas Department of State Health Services two days before the flood, which included an examination of its emergency plans for a natural disaster. These plans were not made public.
Local officials were first informed of the flood around 5 am, according to the authorities. At a press conference on Tuesday, Kerr’s county sheriff Larry L. Leitha said that the authorities were “setting up a calendar” from the response to the deluge. But, he added: “My priority at the moment is to identify the victims [and] inform families.
At a press conference the next day, the Sheriff Leitha stressed that local authorities do not try to avoid responsibility. There will be an investigation into the response to the flood, he said, but finding each missing person has remained priority.
“We are not going to run. We are not going to hide from anything,” he added. “If improvements should be made, they will be made.”
The history of the Hinckley staff editor has contributed to this Richmond, Virginia report.
