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Ingram, Texas – managers of this small town who have been hardly affected by the July 4 have urgent questions for the coordinator of the emergency management of their county.
Where was William “Dub” Thomas When the National Weather Service sent its first lightning flood warning to 1h14? Who coordinated the answer in these critical hours when the first speakers and volunteer firefighters dismissed by radio on rising waters? And what is Thomas, who oversees emergency planning in Kerr County, who makes them to protect them from the next flood?
Ingram leaders thought they could finally get answers more than two weeks after the floods on Monday evening at a city council meeting on Monday evening, which would have been the first time that Thomas was speaking publicly to the disaster. Instead, Thomas canceled his appearance, citing a time conflict.
“We have no information,” said Mayor Claud Jordan to those who attended the meeting. “No one called us. We would hope to hear [Thomas]But I guess not.
Ingram, a city of approximately 1,800 people who swell each summer with visitors to its campsite and motorhome fields along the Guadalupe river, does not have its own emergency management operations and relies on Thomas to supervise its emergency management plan. The growing questions have occurred while residents are cleaning up and depositing federal aid, and the first stakeholders move away from recovery operations after a disaster that killed more than 130 people through Texas Hill Country.
While the Guadalupe river increased in the early hours of July 4, residents and visitors rushed to evacuate without any final orientation of the county. Flood waters swept away more than two dozen houses At the Blue Oak RV Park near Ingram, where a 30 -foot wall of water swallowed them in 40 minutes, said owner Lorena Guillen. Guillen described when he saw trailers tearing from the ground and diving into the river. Her husband spotted a man holding babies in rushed water and tried to save them. But the current controlled them and they were carried away.
Ingram officials told NBC News that no one of the county had communicated with them the emergency response or to evacuate it after the National Weather Service sent its lightning flood warning to 1:14.
“Why were we not informed?” Rocky Hawkins asked.
County officials provided few details on communication and coordination in the contribution of floods and in the hours when the Guadalupe river and its streams have reached record levels. The officials said that their objective was mainly to focus on research and rescue efforts, and Kerr’s county sheriff, Larry Leitha, assured to the public that there would be a “after-action” examination of what happened on July 4. His office said on Wednesday that he remained in response and recovery operations and that an exam had not yet been carried out.
Thomas, who has been the first emergency coordinator of the county since 2015, has not responded to requests for comments.
Jordan said he would have welcomed a call to say, “Get up!” The floods of your city. “
“Why didn’t anyone called me at 1:30 am?” He asked. “Why didn’t Dub Thomas called me at 1:30 am?”
Answer chaos
Jordan, mayor of Ingram, said that he did not know any communication between his city and the county on July 3, before the holiday weekend and the forecast rains.
And Diana Baccus, head of the Ingram volunteer firefighters, said that she was not in communication with anyone from the county on July 4. “I only talked about Dub Thomas once during all of this,” she said. They had a conversation a few days after the floods on the changes in the river.
His experience early in the morning of July 4 was random when the calls came to the radio that the streets were flooded and the firefighters suddenly asked the help of Ingram to the Blue Oak RV Park, where emergency speakers started to arrive around 4 am
“We were moving,” said Baccus when his team undertook rescues in the low motorhome parks where people had to be awakened from the bed. “I say to myself:” Enter your children, get your things, get your pets and go. »»
Other fire and rescue managers in Ingram and in the surrounding areas not constituted in society also said that their objective, on learning floods, was trying to save lives while other departments were starting on radio.
In Hunt, an area not formed in a company near Ingram overflowing from summer camps along the river, at least 27 young campers and staff members Died at the Camp Mystic des Girls After the flood waters exceed the cabins.
Lee Pool, the head of the Hunt volunteer fire department, said that from 3 a.m. to 3:30 a.m., he was in bed at home while listening to radio chatter when he heard “flood”, which prompted him to jump into the clothes and head west on highway 39 to go to the fire station.
At that time, water had already reached dangerous levels. Pool said that he went to Schumacher Crossing, had seen that he was impracticable and called the county to confirm that the river was flooded. The water rushed, trapping his vehicle. He said he had abandoned him for higher terrain, believing that he was 4:15 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. when he was in a safe place.
Protocol in emergency situations
Comté officials had at least two ways to alert their community that they faced an imminent disaster: Codered, in which mobile phones can opt to receive, and the integrated, or iPaws alert warning system, which is similar to an alert.
The National Weather Service used the IPAW to send a warning alert for lightning floods on mobile phones at 1:14, then at 4:03 am describing a sudden flood urgency.
However, IPaws data examined By NBC News and the affiliate of NBC, Kxan of Austin, does not indicate that the county of Kerr used the system to emit his own alert, like the one that could have ordered the evacuations. The first alert that the county published through the IPAW was on July 6 on the “high probability” of renewed flood of the river, according to data from the IPAW.
The data also shows that some people obtained coded alerts from Kerr county on July 4, although they are versions of the National Weather Service warning and have been received inconsistently. Some officials said they had no alert and an official in Kerrville told NBC News This “codered was not in our mind” while they were doing evacuations around 5 am
It is not clear if the emergency alerts would have been received on all phones. A spotted cell service or none is not uncommon in certain parts of the county of Kerr, northwest of San Antonio.
Joe Arellano, who worked for more than two decades as a meteorologist at the National Weather Service before retiring from his Austin / San Antonio office in 2021, said that the disaster scenarios can always be chaotic and that it is unknown if the dispatch of warning or evacuation would have made a difference.
“The night of July 4 was only a catastrophic flood recipe in this area,” said Arellano. “But that does not mean that actions could not be taken.”
Arellano noted that the delay period on the initial warning of flash floods was more than an hour, which is “excellent with regard to warnings for floods”.
ARELLANO said that during his stay at the National Weather Service Office, before a pending emergency, such as serious rains and floods, meteorologists would organize telephone conferences with all affected counties, including with senior officials and emergency officials. The Ministry of Internal Security Noted on x That such a briefing took place on July 3, but we do not know who attended and if a representative of the county of Kerr was on the call.
Arellano said the National Weather Service would be in contact with county emergency management so that they understand the potential gravity of any meteorological event. Some counties may have staff overnight to monitor and communicate with the office.
The office also launched a national “cat” of the online weather service before Arellano leaves its role as a means of communicating with emergency officials and civil servants anyway.
Arellano said it is crucial that meteorological forecasters and government representatives are in constant communication when they decide the best way to inform the public of potentially dangerous and deadly events. We do not know what communication there was between the National Weather Service and the County of Kerr before and during the floods.
“The meteorological service could extinguish hundreds of warnings, but if they do not come out and people do not take measures, what is the value of the warning?” A said Arellano.
Brady Constantine, emergency management coordinator in Kendall county, said that he was in communication with the National Weather Service on July 3 and early in the morning of July 4. He said he was in contact with meteorologists from the Austin / San Antonio office by phone and email.
Nim Kidd, chief of Texas Department of Emergency Management, told state legislators on Wednesday at a hearing examining the tragedy that his agency has appealed with local emergency coordinators and local officials that hundreds of the state throughout the state called on July 3.
“The responsibility of being responsible is the responsibility of the local authorities,” said Kidd. He also noted that there is no accreditation system for local emergency managers.
“There are no minimum qualifications to be an emergency management coordinator in the state of Texas; that is the county judge or the one that the mayor appoints,” said Kidd. “We are better than that.”
You are still looking for answers
Stuart Gross, the head of the Ingram law application, who lives near the Guadalupe river for more than 45 years, attended the meeting of the council on Monday in the hope of hearing Thomas, which he called a “good guy”.
In the absence of evacuation orders, the inhabitants had to communicate with each other by a process of “word of mouth” called “river discourse”.
“This is the only way I knew we were evacuated on the morning of the fourth,” said Gross. “It is really because of these people who stayed up all night, they make this” speech on the river ” – they spoke to Mountain Home, they spoke to Hunt, and that is why we obtained a good notice to evacuate – nothing else.”
The mayor of Ingram said on Wednesday that he appreciated how managers of neighboring communities had contacted the disaster, but he still expects to hear Thomas because there was growth calls for a better flood alert system In the county, including the sirens along the river.
“The county is the big dog, which is why we have to see Dub Thomas in person,” said Jordan. “It’s a day late and a short film now.”
He said he could ask some of his questions for Thomas in writing if he does not appear before the municipal council. His best question: “Why did no one contacted us on July 4?”
Suzanne Gamboa reported on Ingram and Erik Ortiz and Daniel Arkin from New York.
