Texas County Flagged Need for Flood Alarm Months Before Tragedy

The warning last fall was, in retrospect, achingly prescient.

“It is likely” that Kerr County “will experience a flood event in the next year,” city and county officials concluded in a report for the Federal Emergency Management Agency released last October. Such floods, they added, could pose a particular danger to people in “substandard structures” and result in “increased damage, injuries, or loss of life.”

One solution, county officials noted, would be a flood warning system that could alert residents to rising waters. They estimated the cost of such a system at less than $1 million, and noted that FEMA had grant programs that could pay for it.

But by the time floodwaters raged down the Guadalupe River last Friday morning, killing at least 121, including at least 36 children, no such alarm system had been installed in Kerr County. A week later, amid trees shorn of their bark from the force of the water, recovery crews were still cutting through towering piles of debris, in search of the missing.

The October warning, part of a 220-page “hazard mitigation” report that addressed a range of threats and that counties are required to send periodically to FEMA, followed years of failed attempts by local officials to secure funding for such a system, according to records and interviews with local officials.

The New York Times identified at least three occasions between 2017 and 2024 when local officials sought funding for a flood warning system but were rebuffed by the state. Those failed applications came even as the federal government made billions of additional dollars available for disaster-reduction projects — including $1.9 billion that has flowed to Texas over the past decade to be spent at the discretion of state officials, according to a Times analysis.