Texas floods raise doubts over US weather warnings, response levels

Too late, inaccurate

The National Weather Service first issued a forecast on Thursday afternoon that heavy rain was coming and flooding was possible. It predicted 127 to 177 millimeters of rain.

The flood warning was issued at 1:14 am on Friday when most people were asleep. It triggered Wireless Emergency Alerts which sent notifications to all the mobile phones in the emergency area.

However, it's a feature that mobile phone users can disable and parts of the Hill Country lack good mobile phone reception.

The rain began to fall around midnight, but actual rainfall far exceeded the forecast. Some local weather stations recorded 305 mm of rainfall by sunrise on Independence Day, local meteorologists said.

The water level rose rapidly. The water gauge in a section of the Guadalupe River gauge where it forks recorded a 6.7-meter rise in only two hours, Bob Fogarty, a meteorologist at the NWS Austin/San Antonio office said.

In Kerrville, the water level rose from 0.3 meters to 10.3 meters between 2 am and 7 am on Friday.

Fogarty said the alert was updated nine times throughout Friday. The most serious warning came at 4:03 am when NWS issued a flood emergency, warning of an "extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation "and urging "immediate evacuations".

The riverbank overflow occurred about three hours after the first flood warning, with the strong torrent washing away cabins and vehicles.

Some meteorologists said local authorities are partially responsible for the devastating consequences of the floods.

"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 on Saturday morning.

Local officials blamed the NWS for inadequate weather information. Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management pointed to NWS forecasts that projected up to 152 mm of rain. "It did not predict the amount of rain that we saw," Kidd said.

Facing questions on why officials didn't organize evacuations, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said: "We didn't know this flooding was coming. Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming."

Kelly said they deal with floods frequently and locals know the area as "flash flood valley". However, Kerr County doesn't have a flood warning system in place. Kelly said the county considered implementing one a few years ago, but the plan was put aside due to the cost.

Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice told the media 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,"… things like this happen in a very strategic, very isolated area and when those two things converge you have what happened today."