Starting off again this morning talking about the catastrophe in the Texas Hill Country. Kerr County officials recently completed a press briefing where they reported 87 confirmed dead in that county, bringing the total fatalities in Texas to 108 from the Fourth of July flooding on the Guadalupe and flooding the next night west of Austin. Five campers from Camp Mystic are still missing, and Kerr County officials stated that the total number of missing is still unknown.
I spent pretty much all day Monday doing interviews with media outlets from all over the world trying to explain how this tragedy could happen and talking about what can be done to prevent it from happening again. Those conversations have triggered some thoughts and perspectives that I think are worth sharing, particularly in the context of recent developments and statements by various officials.
I think that when people think about a flood, they typically envision the type of flooding that happens on a major river like the Mississippi or its tributaries. This is usually an event that occurs due to large weather systems producing rainfall over many days. While these events have their own challenges as far as forecasting and warning communication, they happen at a time and space scale that makes them more predictable.
Flash flood events like the ones in Texas over the weekend need to be thought of much more like a tornado event: meteorologists can tell you that conditions are favorable for intense rainfall that could cause a flash flood, but we cannot tell you the exact magnitude of that rainfall and where exactly it is going to fall. Flash flood warnings and tornado warnings are what meteorologists refer to as “short-fused” warnings, meaning they are issued primarily based on when conditions for their imminent formation are detected by radar or other observations, not based on forecasts. Flash flood watches - like tornado watches - are meant to alert people to favorable conditions for flooding so that people that live in flash flood prone areas are on heightened alert and ready to take action if a warning is issued.
When I say that my sense is that the NWS performance was not impacted by recent staffing cuts, I am talking about their core mission for this type of event, which is the issuance of these flash flood watches and warnings. I continue to stand by that perspective. The watch was issued on Thursday afternoon, the initial flash flood warning with life-threatening wording to active Wireless Emergency Alerts was issued at 1:14 am, early on in the event and before river gages started to show any rises. The warnings were updated frequently with updated radar estimated totals and potential impacts, and shortly after 4 am a flash flood emergency, the highest level of flood warning for catastrophic impacts, was issued. While a detailed post-mortem of an event like this will almost always yield ways in which warnings and forecasts could have been tweaked or improved, at a high level, these services look reasonable and appropriate for what the public can expect for an event such as this.
Obviously, just issuing the warnings is not all the NWS does. In the above clip, Rick Spinrad, who was the most recent director of NOAA in the Biden Administration, states that he is convinced that the staff cuts that we saw were a contributing factor to the inability of the emergency managers to respond. He is talking about the “decision support services” that the NWS does, collaborating with key partners like state and local emergency managers to provide them more detailed information to help them take appropriate actions for their communities.
There has been quite a bit of media attention about the fact that the Warning Coordination Meteorologist (WCM), the position that is responsible for an NWS office’s DSS program and partnership with core partners such as emergency managers, was vacant due to the recent buyout. I do think it is important to understand that the WCM is responsible for leading the DSS program, in other words having the structure and organization in place to ensure that key actions such as contacting emergency managers and local officials with critical updates happens. It does NOT mean that the WCM is in the office during every moment of a weather event making those calls and providing those briefings personally. That is why I have tried to be more measured in my perspective about this. Is it possible that the lack of a WCM resulted in less in the way of decision support and communication to emergency managers about this event? Absolutely. However, it is also possible that the meteorologists on shift called Kerr County officials multiple times during the event. At this point, I have not seen any reporting on this one way or another.
What certainly raises alarm bells about a potential communication breakdown here is the seeming lack of awareness that Kerrville and Kerr County officials appeared to have about the flooding even as it was ongoing. From NPR’s timeline of the event:
At 5:16 a.m., the City of Kerrville's Police Department posted on its Facebook page its first warning about the weather, noting that it's a "life threatening event" and "anyone near the Guadalupe River needs to move to higher ground now." Kerr County Sheriff posted on its Facebook page for the first time about the flooding at 5:32 a.m.
At 6:22 a.m., the City Hall of Kerrville posted on Facebook: "Much needed rain swept through Kerrville overnight, but the downside is the severe weather may impact many of today's scheduled July 4th events. Citizens are encouraged to exercise caution when driving and avoid low water crossings. Kerrville Police and Fire Department personnel are currently assessing emergency needs." At 6:33 a.m. it posted about road closures due to flooding. At 7:32 a.m. it posted: "If you live along the Guadalupe River, please move to higher ground immediately."
Clearly, these actions did not start until 4 hours after the NWS issued its initial flash flood warning about life-threatening flash flooding, and goes along with the reports from a campground owner who was interviewed on MSNBC as part of an interview I did yesterday who said she called the Kerr County Sheriff at 2:30 am to ask about the need to evacuate and was told they didn’t know anything. While all of this certainly suggests the possibility that there was a lack of the more DSS focused communication between the NWS and local officials, the local officials of course also have responsibility to have their own mechanisms to receive and distribute warnings and as of now we have no way to know where and how the breakdowns might have occurred. What we do know is the warnings were issued by the NWS and that a number of people in the area did report receiving them.
Obviously, there are contributing factors to this disaster that are more difficult to mitigate. One of my colleagues made a great point in a discussion about this tragedy today that on a holiday weekend many of the people camping along the Guadalupe River were from out of town, and may have been unaware of the flash flood danger the river posed; even if they received the warning, they likely did not have context to understand the danger. Contributing factors like this are just inherent to the various factors I have discussed that truly made this a worst case scenario. Still, there are many factors we do have control of and mitigating actions that we can take, and given that, I do believe it is important to sensitively investigate these issues in the coming days and try to learn what happened, not for political or retributive reasons, but to try to do whatever we can to ensure we mitigate the human toll of events like this as much as possible.
Turning to today’s weather, an area of low pressure moving through the Mid-Atlantic and southern New England regions is expected to focus thunderstorm activity today, including the potential for flash flooding and severe storms with damaging wind gusts. Additional slow moving thunderstorms along and south of a cold front could cause localized flash flooding, with the greatest risk across parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri where a slight (level 2 of 4) risk of flash flooding is in place. While widely scattered thunderstorms will remain possible across central Texas, the threat of organized flash flood producing thunderstorms has diminished.
Programming note: my normal tropical newsletter that I do on Monday or Tuesday has been delayed given all of the focus on the Texas flash flood event. Luckily, the tropics both in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific are expected to be quite quiet this week.
I think you nailed it. Kerr county had no plan or staffed emergency center to monitor and pass along the NWS warnings. They were literally asleep at the switch.