Weather forecasters were calling for likely flash flooding at least a day in advance; however, it was impossible to forecast the location and magnitude because it’s still weather, and this wasn’t like a hurricane where you can watch it move across the ocean. A couple of forecasters even compared the conditions to the previous floods that sent water over Canyon Lake spillway in 2002, so if any government official says “we had no clue” then that just means they weren’t paying attention. Those conditions should have put people in flood-prone areas on high alert.
The thing that’s really bothersome to me is that we have the technology to implement a warning system that would have enabled more people to take action once the flooding rains started. A combination of river gauges and radar-indicated rainfall totals could have triggered alerts before water started leaving the banks. Whether this should be a county-driven or statewide system, we have to do better.
And honestly, it’s incumbent on these camps and RV parks to ensure that they’re connected and monitoring what’s going on upstream. While it’s true that this flood was extreme, it’s also true that there have been floods just like it in the same areas before. RV parks and campgrounds are one thing - those are adults who can assess the risk and keep an eye on things. Kids’ camps have to be more proactive and protective, in my opinion.
I carefully read the Daily Beast article and did not see any mention of a “blame game” but I did see this:
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In May, all five living directors of the NWS issued a warning that T rump’s cuts “leave the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit … just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes,” the directors wrote. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
Please uncork your head from your useless a$$ and read an article or ten.
Scattered thunderstorms in the hill country is like predicting where a ball is going to land on the roulette table. The outcome of decisions made on Capitol Hill 5 months ago wasn’t going to change the outcome of this storm.
I went through one of these in 2016 at Cedar Bayou near Baytown. It was partly cloudy with a threat of a rainstorm that turned into a stalled cell that dumped 14” of rain over our facility in 3 hours. Mont Belvieu and Baytown got less than 5”. No weather service could have predicted what happened to us just like what happened Friday morning in Kerr County.
I believe it was already posted, but this link explains it all.
“The original forecast that we received Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6 inches of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches in the Hill Country,” saidTexas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd at a press conference Friday. “The amount of rain that fell at this specific location was never in any of those forecasts.”
