Local (San Antonio and Austin) meteorologists have said that the NWS was staffed up for this and that they didn’t see any degradation of service.
These same meteorologists have complained about the impacts to forecasting that they’ve experienced from NWS cuts.
And the warnings were received. Those that weren’t were the local warnings and evacuation orders.
They said it was staffed up, but my understanding is that they do it by pulling meteorologists (forecasters) from other regions.
And I haven’t seen whether they pulled in a Warning Coordinator from another region, but… pulling someone in from another part of the country isn’t the same as having a Warning Coordinator with 16 years of experience in the San Antonio region (32 years overall).
After 16 years you have a much better idea of the lay of the land, and exactly who you need to reach out to for local emergency operations. You can’t just remote in from Bozeman Montana on a Thursday evening and have the same readiness level.
Also, you say the warnings were received, but from what I read, the County Judge didn’t get the warnings until it was too late, and same with Mayor of Kerrville. You had a firefighter in Hunt asking that a CodeRED alert go out to all residents at 4am Friday morning… it didn’t go out for at least an hour, if at all.
With this cluster**** going on, a Warning COORDINATOR sure would have been helpful:
Stop with the political innuendos. This is tragic beyond any warning systems.
There are three facts that we know. Buildings are along flood prone areas, floods happened prior to this tragedy and death/tragedy too.
Everyone can have their own thoughts on what needs to be done next.
Prayers and love to all affected.
Prayers and love can’t hurt but more is needed to find answers, mitigations and perhaps new regulations for the future.
Those things don’t happen in a vacuum nor when discussion is prohibited and/or delayed.
Out of the horror and madness there is a sliver of good news.
If you’re referring to my post, I didn’t touch politics. I’m sticking to facts, that the longtime NWS Warnings Coordinator for the area was no longer employed, and his position was not filled.
That had to adversely impact the coordination of flood warnings. That’s not political, it’s fact.
The reasons behind the vacancy are political, but I didn’t go there.
Yea, but this has nothing to do with the NWS. This was because of a failure at the county level. They had the necessary weather info.
Yes, I can’t imagine that applies to management.
In hindsight, the only thing that really could’ve been done is for parents to pull their kids out from the camp.
However, for the longtime residents there, it would’ve required a evacuation
In the middle of the night?
Disagree. Some camps in the area paid attention to the warnings and weather and moved everyone to safety before things got bad.
The residents are a different story. I would say that the county’s lack of a warning system was the big failure, but those folks could have paid attention to the weather, too.
It’s just a fact that if you’re going to be sleeping in an area that’s right along a river that is notorious for flash flooding, you have to respect that danger and be more diligent than if you were somewhere else.
Not to mention from hours away in other cities.
If the camp admins had the weather info as coogman91 mentioned, then perhaps parents could’ve pulled them the days prior to the flood
Ok, that makes more sense than your previous statement.
If all the parents would have tried to drive to camp and get their kids that night half of the camp and parents, or more, would have died.
It would have been a giant cluster.uck…think about drop off day and make it 100 times less organized.
What that area needs is emergency warning horns that locals have resisted. There’s a reason tornado prone states have them. They save lives.
I agree the NWS did their job in issuing warnings based on their forecasts, but the lack of a NWS Warnings Coordinator reduced the ability to act on those warnings. The information was there, but didn’t connect.
As it was, the NWS broadcast their warnings out into the general public, but appears they didn’t get targeted warnings out to specific local Emergency Management Coordinators, like Cities and County.
That is one of the roles of the NWS Warnings Coordinator. Better coordination and targeted calls (instead of just broadcasting the message into the great wide open) could have made the difference.
Are you suggesting that not a single parent knew of the looming storm, and couldn’t have been able to make contact with admins days prior to see if necessary measures are in place in case of a flood?
Or did everyone just ignore this for whatever reason, with or without a NWS coordinator
Or maybe they just trusted those in charge.
Perhaps
Overall, this tragedy was just a failure in all fronts
Infrastructure, local and federal politics, financing, geography, ignorance, and just bad luck unfortunately… it’s all of it
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