A flood warning system deemed too expensive by the Texas county the place final week’s rains killed a minimum of 27 kiddie campers may need given the victims a preventing likelihood to get out of hurt’s approach, consultants advised The Submit on Monday.
Officers in Kerr County, the place a minimum of 75 of the greater than 100 identified flood victims died, contemplated putting in a flood warning system in 2017 — however rejected the plan on the grounds its price ticket was too excessive.
The proposed system — much like one in a neighboring city that ran $2 million — would have included river gauges, sirens and different fashionable communication instruments alongside the Guadalupe River, identified regionally as “Flash Flood Alley.”
The river rose by greater than 26 ft throughout a freak summer season storm July 4, sending lethal torrents of water flooding the area — and consultants stated a flood-warning system such because the one proposed for Kerr may not have been excellent, however it might have a minimum of probably helped curb the devastation.
“No one is ever going to complain about having more data when it comes to hazardous weather,” stated Nick Bassill, director of the New York State Climate Danger Communication Heart.
“Then there’s the question of, once you know that the flooding is imminent, how do you communicate that to the people who maybe aren’t able to be communicated to, like if they’re at a camp somewhere or something like that,” he stated.
Camp Mystic, a Christian women’ summer season camp a couple of hundred ft from Guadalupe’s riverbanks in Hunt, misplaced a minimum of 27 campers age 8 and 9 and one counselor — with 10 children and a counselor nonetheless lacking, officers stated Monday.
Bassill stated he would have been in help of a sophisticated warning system such because the one Kerr County officers eschewed in 2017 — including that the setups don’t essentially should be high-tech or costly to save lots of lives.
“A really basic one that is probably close to a must-have in these sot of situations would be a NOAA weather radio [for residents], so if you’re in an area without Internet or cell phone service and there’s a flash flood warning in the middle of the night, you’ve got your radio on, you’ll be woken up by a sort of jarring alert from it. So that would be … a really obvious kind of low-cost solution,” he stated.
Comply with The Submit’s protection on the lethal Texas flooding
NOAA radios such because the one Bassill described might be discovered on Amazon beginning at round $20.
Dr. Erik Nielsen, an assistant professor at Texas A&M College and an knowledgeable in excessive rainfall and warning communication, had a barely totally different take, noting that even when a sophisticated early warning system was in place, extenuating circumstances might have restricted their efficacy.
“Sirens are designed to be outdoor alerts. They’re not designed to be indoors, and they probably will not wake you up,” he stated.
“And then it comes into the context. People would have to know what those sirens meant. So there would have to be some sort of educational thing beforehand, maybe at the campground or something like that to make sure people understood that if these sirens are going off, what does it mean and what does that look like?” he stated.
Nielsen stated the most effective method is one which encompasses a number of totally different warning strategies.
“You need layered ways to receive warnings. … Things like a NOAA weather radio, your cell phone alerts, things maybe in place locally like sirens. All those things work together to communicate information,” he stated.
Nielsen praised the Nationwide Climate Service for serving to get the phrase out, noting the Guadalupe had some gauges in place, “however probably not sufficient.
“You need to have river gauges that are showing you these things, so this is an area where the National Weather Service did a very good job. They had a warning out at 1 a.m., and if you look at the river gauges upstream of Hunt on the South fork, I don’t know that there are any to actually show you what that water rise is actually doing.”
Having a greater gauge system in place would have “possibly” saved lives, he stated, “but then it also still goes back to all of the challenges of communicating to people when they’re asleep at 2 to 3 in the morning. Your best alert system is great, but if you don’t get the people to hear it and understand it, it’s not going to do anything,” he famous.
“So that’s where the design aspect and the education aspect of such a system matters, especially to those who are not from the area.”
