Emergency Officials Were Asleep as Floods Raged in TX Hill County

KERRVILLE — Testimony Thursday in Kerrville revealed that several local officials were missing in action during the initial response to Hill Country floods that killed at least 137.

Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly was nowhere to be found on July 4, said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who took the rare step, along with House Speaker Dustin Burrows, of attending a committee hearing.

Patrick was acting governor during the initial response to the floods, leading the state’s response while Gov. Greg Abbott was out of state. Kelly, the top elected official in Kerr County, told a joint committee of state House and Senate lawmakers he had been out of the county for the July 4 holiday at a lake near Austin, about a two-hour drive from Kerrville.

“I never saw you on day one,” Patrick said, speaking to Kelly. “In this room, I talked to the sheriff multiple times. I talked to the mayor multiple times. … I was here. And you were not.”

Kelly’s absence was highlighted as testimony from Kerr County and city of Kerrville officials painted a picture of a local government response that lacked central leaders during the critical first 24 hours. Residents also testified that communication in the wake of the flood was slow to come from government leaders, and poor cellphone service throughout the area made getting any information about their loved ones even more difficult. 

“Literally, no one could tell you anything at all,” said Alicia Jeffrey Baker, who lost her daughter Madelyn “Emmy” Jeffrey and her parents in the flood. “No one was in charge.”

Lawmakers have been searching for answers after being asked to create legislation in response to the deadly floods. 

While they heard testimony that described the flood as a once-in-a-millennium event, lawmakers also took issue with a dearth of leadership in the aftermath.

Kerr County’s emergency management coordinator, William B. “Dub” Thomas, said he was sick and sleeping while the floods raged. Kerr County Sheriff Larry L. Leitha was not notified of the flood until at least 60 minutes after the county received its first report of people on rooftops to avoid the floods. That should have been an “all hands on deck,” moment, Leitha said.

“Somebody has to have the football,” House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, said while taking questions from reporters at the Hill Country Youth Event Center, which has doubled as an emergency operations center since the floods. “Somebody has to have the authority that’s present in the moment to basically call a Code Red.”

Officials described a lack of communication between the city and county on July 4, with each operating separate incident command centers. It wasn’t until the state’s division of emergency management arrived on the scene that the county and city began to coordinate.

Several hundred people attended the public hearing on the outskirts of Kerrville. The city continues to recover from the floods with first responders’ presence ubiquitous on nearly every street corner as they continue to search for those who remain missing since the flood.

State and local authorities are also contending with a river that has been overwhelmed by debris. Locals described the ever-present signs of the disaster – visible every time they drive on one of the five bridges over the river that bisects the city – in a community known as a sleepy riverside enclave pockmarked by the distinct rocky rises of the Texas Hill Country.

For now, it is a community that continues to recover even as it grieves.

“People are optimistic, people are resilient,” said Kerrville homemaker Sarah Stewart before the hearing began. Stewart said she signed up to testify to encourage lawmakers to build a siren system along the Guadalupe River. “I really hope to see some solutions out of this,” she said.

Jeffrey Baker spoke to the committee about the day Emmy, her oldest daughter, died. They were staying at a cabin in Hunt along the Guadalupe River. 

Jeffrey Baker said her family had been spending summers in the area since 1990. Her parents bought their cabin in 2008. 

“This was our regular happy place,” she said, speaking through tears. “The river we loved so much killed them.”

She spoke of the frantic hours that followed as she waited to learn whether her family members had survived the flood. Her parents’ bodies were found on July 5 and not identified until the next day. Her daughter was not identified until July 10, after she was found still wearing her charm bracelet.

She said there was no cellphone service at their cabin, which might have made it difficult for any type of mobile alert to reach people’s phones. Jeffrey Baker added that while having sirens or cellphone alerts could help, people might ignore them.

Improving cellphone service, broadband access and creating an alert system, such as flood sirens, are some of the ideas lawmakers are mulling during a special session in which Gov. Greg Abbott has made improving disaster communications a top priority.

Local officials described the cell phone reception in Hunt, the epicenter of the flood’s destruction, as spotty at best.

And Leitha, the Kerr County sheriff, said that interoperability between first responder agencies became an issue as emergency workers from across the state arrived to assist in the flood response. He said it took several days for each agency’s radios to be reprogrammed so they could communicate with each other.

Nancy Zdunkewicz told lawmakers she was at her family’s river house on July 4, not too far from Camp Mystic, the Christian all-girls camp where 27 children and counselors were lost in the flood. She described waking up at 3 a.m. to find water already at her house level, 30-to-40 feet above the Guadalupe River.

Her family clung to trees for several hours as they watched cars swept away in the raging flood waters. “We were actually very, very lucky,” said Zdunkewicz, who also said an early-detection flood warning system or sirens might have allowed them to leave their home before the water reached their property.

“If we had that warning, more lives also could have been saved,” she said. 

Jeffrey Baker said that it was up to lawmakers to address the floods.

“When we know better, we do better, and so we need to do better for the people in this community,” Jeffrey Baker said.

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