Before Tragedy, Texas Repeatedly Rejected Pleas for Flood Alarm Funding | Hacker News Reader

Before Tragedy, Texas Repeatedly Rejected Pleas for Flood Alarm Funding

nytimes.com

96 pointsJimmc41420 comments

County officials paid themselves first, diverting $10M to salaries, and delayed spending $80k on a flash flood siren in Flash Flood Alley 19 times.

NOAA pushed out 2 senior flood forecasters in the Austin office.

911 dispatcher gatekept the Amber Alert/EBS system on approval process grounds in the middle of an emergency.

Camp grounds and other occupied structures were allowed in a known flood zone.

This is always what happens in rural counties with small towns Texas. The politicians maintain their small club of lazy incompetence.

PS: I'm around 1 mile away from the Guadalupe and blocks from Geronimo Creek, on high ground

Get a good system to alert, wake, get the attention of all the people at risk and on the way out'a there right away for $0?

(1) The weather center develops a warning directed graph of persons who spread the word to get the PAS at their work. You ask what is the PAS?

(2) PAS -- People's Alert System: Everyone in the weather center, fire, police, and everyone else ready and willing to help, etc. who has access to a car, better, a firetruck or ambulance, gets in and turns on the horn and/or siren and drives all the vulnerable streets and makes sure all the buildings are awake and know about the threat. Then the PAS people, with others as passengers, drive the heck out of the area of the threat. Should also work for hurricanes, etc.

I don't understand what you mean.

There already exist:

- Apps like Tile (lost device sound) and CodeRED that effectively act like EAS/EBS/AMBER Alerts.

- There are zillion of water stream gauges all over Flash Flood Alley operated by the probably soon-to-defunded NOAA.[0]

0. https://water.noaa.gov/wfo/ewx#@=260.834452,29.625805,7.9432...

> I don't understand what you mean.

I explained in (2). The main point in (2) is that ALL the people in the threatened area, right on the street they ARE, where they live, work, shop, walk, whatever, get LOUD SIRENS, REALLY LOUD, to warn them and also transportation OUT'A there.

Alerts on cell phones, TV, radio, newspapers, "water stream gauges", etc. leave HUNDREDS of people, including a camp full of girls and counselors, still ASLEEP and now "missing" or "DEAD". As in (2), we need to WAKE them, everyone, UP and get them OUT.

There may be proposals to install flashing lights, bells, whistles, sirens, etc. on phone poles, etc., but in the ~60 years to the next such flood such means will likely be rusty, broken, dead, etc. Sooooo, (2) just has people alive at the time of the flood THEN using the cars, trucks, horns, sirens available and working THEN to solve the problem.

Even if it was a lie, I miss the version of America I grew up believing in.

https://archive.is/IVIUd

I thought there was actually an alarm in this case? I read that the camp staff had over an hour notice from the automated flood warning system but nobody was paying attention. Unless what I read is false, it seems like a lot of political opportunism is happening here (no surprise).

A cell phone warning did go out, but only ~1/3 of phones in the flash flood area were warned. It seems really haphazard. Friends who had no warning had other friends call them in the middle of the night to ask about borrowing trucks/trailers. They were lucky!

The alert system in Texas is optimized for "Blue Alerts", to warn people that a cop 250 miles away stubbed their toe.

The NWS issued a flash flood watch, upgraded minutes later to a flash flood warning, just after 1am. At 4am, the NWS Austin office issues an emergency bulletin saying "This is a FLASH FLOOD EMERGENCY for South-central Kerr County, including Hunt. This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!"[0] These warnings would have triggered an alert on people's cell phones, however the timing makes it unlikely that campers or counselors would have been awake to notice. If someone was tasked with monitoring the weather, they either didn't get that warning or didn't act in time for it to make a difference. There were not sirens installed to warn campers of flooding. There was a warning system installed in the late 80s, but it was shut down in 1999 after falling into disrepair due to a lack of maintenance. Efforts to install a new system with warning sirens failed to gain traction.[1] [0] https://www.statesman.com/story/news/nation/2025/07/08/texas... [1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/11/us/camp-mystic-owner-warnings...

Why can't America afford basic infrastructure?

They can, they just don't want to, and as long as it's someone else's kids in the flood, who cares?

Didn’t you know? People cared. The Biden administration gave $10M, but it was described as Democratic bribery, useless, and better diverted to police.

Because we need more billionaires first!

Step 1. More billionaires

Step 2. ???

Step 3. Functional society!

The infrastructure was built with borrowed federal money that was likely never paid off. Then you need to maintain that infrastructure with local taxes. There isn't enough tax revenue to maintain all of it. Run the numbers.

When we built that infra the workers didn't have health insurance and they didn't need it because they could afford their own healthcare out of pocket. Some things have changed.

Welcome to Greg Abbott's Texas microcosm of America.

...of parts of America.

there are still states that take care of their people. weirdly they tend to vote Democratic. but y'know, correlation doesn't equal causation /s

You mean like the fire hydrants running dry during the LA inferno in Newsom’s California?

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/18/nx-s1-5262563/radio-traffic-l...

There is no municipal water system in the world that would've maintained pressure. Seriously, I've done the math.

The real issue with those fires was the unfathomably fast growth rate and the gigantic wilderness-urban interface.

Municipal water supplies are (correctly) designed to put out house fires. A few at a time. They are not designed to put out thousands of house fires in high wind.

Also: California's early warning system did work correctly -- IIRC the fire was detected when it was 10 acres. Within 60 minutes, the fire was 300 acres. 3 hours later it was 1200 acres.

The issue was explosive growth.

> There is no municipal water system in the world that would've maintained pressure. Seriously, I've done the math.

Genuinely curious to see it.

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