As the Hill Country mourns, local officials take stock of emergency protocols
PRESIDIO COUNTY — Since the morning of July 4, all eyes have been on Kerr County in the Hill Country of Central Texas. That morning, a wall of water cresting around 185,000 cubic feet per second — nearly double the flow of Niagara Falls — tore through the idyllic, cypress-lined Guadalupe River, taking with it over 134 lives and leaving an estimated $18 to $22 billion in property damage.
Big Bend locals immediately kicked into high gear, donating time and money to the search and rescue effort. Last Friday, deputies from the Brewster County Sheriff’s Department dropped off a truckload of supplies like ropes, chainsaws and fuel canisters to support the army of volunteers on the ground.
But as the waters recede, shock and grief has turned into anger for many folks questioning why — and if — so many had to die. As of Tuesday, over 100 people are still missing, and no one has been found alive since the day of the flood. (It’s important to note that the widely-reported “missing” figures mostly apply to people who are residents of Kerr County; an accurate count of the dead including tourists in town for the holiday weekend may never surface.)
There are plenty of kinship and friendship ties reaching from the Rio Grande to the Guadalupe, but Kerr and Presidio Counties have a lot in common on paper — they’re both small, rural counties who depend on local natural beauty to drive tourism. Kerr County is home to around 53,000 people and is about an hour and a half from downtown San Antonio, but windy roads and spotty cell service give the illusion that it’s a world apart from the city.
In the more remote reaches of Kerr County — just like in south Presidio County — flash flooding is part of the rhythm of life. There are dozens of low water crossings that cut across the Guadalupe, and “turn around, don’t drown” is more of a suggestion than a hard-and-fast rule. Major flood events have become rarer and rarer as the region suffers drought alongside most of the state, but many old-timers remember a flood in 1987 that resulted in the deaths of several campers caught as they tried to evacuate.
Last weekend, a bleary-eyed Judge Rob Kelly addressed the media alone, just hours after the flood devastated his own property. “We get floods all the time,” he told a reporter who became agitated after deflecting a question about why a string of summer camps along the South Fork were not evacuated. “We had no reason to believe that this was going to be any different.”
When disaster strikes, who’s in charge?
Precinct 4 Commissioner David Beebe expressed sympathy for Judge Kelly at last week’s meeting of the Presidio County Commissioners Court. During the flood, he was actually staying along the Guadalupe River in a family vacation home — an ordeal hauntingly recounted by his wife in last week’s Sentinel. “Those county officials do a good job and are responsible to their people, but they were caught in a bad situation,” he said.
Beebe stressed the importance of designating a public information officer for emergencies to help coordinate media response and of keeping the county website updated regularly. Right now, the Sheriff’s Office does the bulk of issuing community alerts and advisories — but does so via their Facebook page, a social media network that not everyone can or wants to sign up for.
As the days since the tragedy in the Hill Country have turned into weeks, fingers have been pointed in every direction. Local officials initially declared they didn’t have an emergency warning system in place, then state leaders blamed bad forecasts by the National Weather Service. Others blamed the Trump administration for cutting funding for weather forecasting and research. An even smaller fringe claimed that the flood had been engineered by humans through cloud seeding.
During an extreme weather event, it’s up to county or city governments to help coordinate a response. The National Weather Service provides the forecast as best they can and may issue warnings of its own in the form of radio alerts or push notifications to cell phones in a specific area, but more complex, on-the-ground operations — like evacuation orders — have to come from local officials.
One emerging theme from the media deconstruction of what went wrong in Kerr County is a breakdown in communication between state, local and federal authorities. The Texas Department of Emergency Management (TDEM) was concerned enough about the forecast provided by the NWS that they started staging resources for a potential flash flood emergency in Kerr County on July 2, but local officials — including Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring — were not aware of the extent of these operations.
Last Friday, the firefighters union in Austin issued a vote of “no confidence” in Chief Joel Baker for not deploying rescue teams as early as the Wednesday before the flood, suggesting that multiple agencies in Austin were advised of the threat but were not communicating that threat adequately with Kerr County or the city of Kerrville itself.
Judge Kelly initially said that the county “does not have a warning system in place,” but that’s not entirely true. Kerr County uses CodeRED, a cell phone alert system that residents can opt in to for regionally-specific emergencies.
On the morning of July 4 around 4:20 a.m., a firefighter in Ingram noticed that the waters had risen enough to cover a sign on the highway and requested that an alert be put out to residents in neighboring Hunt to warn them that the waters were rising. The firefighter was informed that a supervisor needed to sign off on the alert; it wasn’t issued for another hour and a half, when the death toll had already begun to climb.
Presidio County Emergency Management Coordinator Gary Mitschke said that the process of sending out an alert isn’t instantaneous. In his experience, it takes at least 20 minutes to verify information and get everything ready to go. Sending out alerts too hastily can make a bad situation worse. “You can do as much harm with a false alarm as you can without any alarm at all,” he said.
Presidio County uses a similar program called Hyper-Reach, a “reverse 911” system that allows the county government to send alerts directly to residents’ phones. The system has been in place since 2020, and Mitschke says that they’ve luckily only needed to use it a few times.
Like Kerr County’s CodeRED, it can be toggled to hit specific areas to help circumvent a phenomenon called “alert fatigue” — when people receive too many notifications, they tend to start disregarding them.
This phenomenon is especially pronounced in Texas, which sends out dozens of statewide alerts per year. In 2024, cell phone users in Texas received as many as 47 Amber Alerts for missing or abducted children, many triggered by events on opposite ends of the Lower 48’s biggest state.
As the emergency in Kerr County was unfolding, cell users across the state received repeated push notifications for a shooting at an ICE detention facility in Alvarado, on the outskirts of the DFW metroplex. During the thick of search and rescue operations, while lives hung in the balance, everyone’s phone was pulsing with updates about a targeted political shooting four and a half hours away.
Since the flood, some Kerr County locals have expressed that flash flood alerts are so numerous they’ve stopped paying attention to them. Part of the issue is education — many people aren’t aware of the distance of watches and warnings. Watches are very frequent in many parts of the state, while warnings — even if they don’t feel like it — are statistically rare.
Many meteorologists use the “taco analogy” to teach folks about the difference between watches and warnings. Watches are issued whenever there are all the right atmospheric conditions for a weather event to occur; warnings are issued when they’re actually happening. In the taco analogy, having meat, cheese and tortillas in the fridge is a taco watch; a taco fully assembled on your plate is a taco warning.
Figuring out how to tailor alerts to communicate the severity of emergencies is an ongoing struggle for first responders, but that’s where a well-coordinated local response on the ground is key. Ultimately, it’s up to the county judge — the county’s official emergency management director — to make the final call.
While Texas has some of the most sophisticated emergency response infrastructure in the country, the response is only as strong as its weakest link. “We shouldn’t always depend on the state or federal government,” said Mitschke. “We should be able to help ourselves.”
Uncharted waters
Another major issue being revealed in the wake of the July 4 floods is that many people may be at imminent risk of flooding and not even realize it. One in six Texans live in areas susceptible to flooding — but that figure could prove to be higher, as many parts of the state determine their flood risk by out-of-date maps.
A large cluster of deaths in the flood occurred at Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp for girls that has served elite Texas families for 99 years. The parents who paid over $4,000 per session were likely unaware that much of the camp was located in a flood plain — on three separate occasions, the camp appealed to FEMA to remove buildings from its flood map.
Part of FEMA’s job as a federal agency is to map flood risk. In an effort to get people to build outside of flood zones, FEMA’s maps give insurance agencies an overview of what kind of flood risks affect certain properties, hiking premiums for homes and businesses located in harm’s way.
Independent analysis of Camp Mystic by the New York Times revealed that the camp was not just located in a flood plain, where water pools when the river seeps over its banks. The buildings designated for the youngest campers were built in something called a floodway, which is where particularly fast currents rip during flooding. The buildings were also located at the junction of a creek and the Guadalupe River, creating ferocious eddies if both waterways spilled over at once.
While FEMA’s data for Kerr County is complete and easily accessible on the web, other areas of the state are a patchwork. Presidio County appears blank on the agency’s online system — it’s been mapped, but it was last mapped in 1985 and the latest files available for homeowners to browse online are from 1978.
A lot has changed since 1985: our climate is drier, the river channel has shifted and the population in the southern half of the county has doubled. The region has also experienced a major flood — in 2008, the river swelled for weeks, maxing out at a flow of around 50,000 cubic feet per second.
The water was so high that the U.S. Customs Facility at the international bridge had to be evacuated, and lower-lying parts of town near the river were underwater. “It was a sight to behold,” said Presidio Mayor John Ferguson, who remembered former coworkers at the high school taking shelter in his living room as they waited for the flood to crest.
After the waters receded, city leaders got together to try to revise FEMA’s data, having observed what impact 30 years of climate change and development had on the path of floodwater. Those efforts fizzled out eventually, and the maps remain painfully out of date. “Nobody’s grabbed that torch and ran with it,” said current County Judge and former City of Presidio Administrator Joe Portillo.
Nearby counties could provide an example to follow. The Texas Water Development board is currently working with Hudspeth County — just one of two counties statewide selected for a pilot program — to help collect more accurate flood data.
In contrast with the July 4 floods in Kerr County, classified as an extreme flash flood, Presidio had plenty of warning before total inundation in 2008. The water had been rising steadily from heavy rain, and once reservoirs along the Conchos River in Mexico were maxed out, officials sent a warning that water would have to be released to keep each dam at a safe level.
Presidio was spared a lot of the property damage suffered by its sister city of Ojinaga, thanks to a system of levees near the town’s most populated areas. That system was put in place by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1970s, but has had relatively few opportunities to test its strength. (Judge Portillo said that the levee was recently inspected, but The Sentinel did not have time to review the agency’s report before publication of this article.)
While Ferguson agreed that flood preparedness was a major issue for Presidio, he cautioned that locals should be prepared for a wide range of natural disasters — strong winds, dust storms and other hazards can pop up quickly and threaten lives. “We’ve seen it all down here,” Ferguson said.
Around the riverbend
While Kerr and Presidio counties have a lot in common, the starkest divide might be money — Kerr County’s annual budget is around nine and a half times bigger than Presidio County’s, which usually hovers around $4 million.
Much hay has been made in the national media over the fact that Kerr County lacks river gauges above Hunt and does not have flood sirens. In Comfort, Texas, about 20 miles downstream from Kerrville, there were no fatalities — folks heard their local sirens and voluntarily evacuated.
In 2016, Kerr County footed the bill for a study to help them modernize their flood warning system, which commissioners described at the time as an informal system of neighbors calling neighbors as waters rose — a system that may have worked during the 1987 flood, but as the population balloons and tourism booms, many longterm residents have found themselves with more strangers than neighbors.
The county was turned down by the state twice for $1 million toward a more sophisticated warning system. Kerr County did receive American Rescue Plan Act funds — money that some residents urged their leaders to return because it was “communist” — but chose to spend the bulk of that money on the sheriff’s department instead.
Emergency Management Coordinator Mitschke has been privy to conversations about how to fund Presidio County’s emergency systems for years. He knows that a county as poor as Presidio can’t afford to be choosy, but also cautioned that grant funding isn’t a panacea. For one, most grants have a match requirement — in other words, they’re not free, and can require small governments to cough up large sums of cash on demand to unlock funds. “I have mixed feelings about grants,” he said. “I think they’re good if you have a specific purpose or goal, but if you’re going to rely on grants year after year after year, it’s not the way to go.”
One of the ways that the county can grow its budget is by inviting economic development. The city of Presidio is also trying to hit its stride economically, and has been exploring options for growing business at the port of entry. At Tuesday night’s meeting, the Presidio City Council signed off on a resolution expressing support for a HAZMAT certification for the international bridge, in hopes of swaying Mexican officials who still need to lend their signatures to the project.
Judge Portillo said that the HAZMAT certification opens the city up to a world of risk all its own, but is necessary to growing business — Presidio is the only port of entry in Texas without one, and materials that seem relatively benign to laypeople like charcoal can also be certified as hazardous material. He said that the city might have to explore having a staffed fire department instead of a volunteer operation. “You really need somebody with expertise and training who has a love for the job,” he said.
While HAZMAT might be inevitable for Presidio’s auto and rail bridges, in Portillo’s view, disaster doesn’t have to be. The county has been preparing for potential HAZMAT emergencies since 2022 and has integrated that risk into its emergency management plan. Across the board, the county has been working to offer training opportunities for first responders looking to learn new skills. “We have extreme heat, we have extreme drought, we have flash flooding,” Portillo said. “You can’t prepare for everything, but if you can prepare 80%, wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
In an era where “drought” is a buzzword in every newscast and photos of the dried-up Rio Grande have taken social media by storm, it might seem foolish to worry about flooding. The Rio Grande was dammed in 1916 — the biggest flood ever recorded took place in September 1904, and these events seem to be growing rarer and rarer.
Still, the river wakes up every now and again — at the same time as Kerr County went underwater, portions of Big Bend National Park closed and campers had to be evacuated due to flooding.
Experts warn that while our overall weather is trending drier, extreme rain events are becoming more frequent. Ten to 12 inches of rain fell across Kerr County in a matter of hours right before the flooding — around 100 billion gallons of rainwater, with nowhere to go but downhill. “The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it,” Abrahm Lustgarten wrote in an article on the Central Texas floods for ProPublica.
No matter what’s next for the area’s weather trends, Mitschke said that it’s important to harness any positive momentum toward beefing up emergency protocols. “Out here, so little means so much,” he said of the county’s slim budget. “We’ve got to maintain what we have the best we can.”
On Monday, representatives will reconvene in Austin for a special session of the Legislature. Originally called to tackle unfinished business in the knock-down-drag-out fight over THC legalization, the focus is now on flooding, with a newly-minted state flood plan calling for $54 billion in upgrades.
Big Bend Representative César Blanco will be serving on the Senate’s new Committee on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding. “The recent flooding in Kerrville and across the Hill Country has taken lives, destroyed homes, and shaken entire communities,” he wrote to the Sentinel. “Events like these are a stark reminder that we can’t afford to wait until the next disaster to act.”
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