State and local officials in Texas have come under scrutiny over the lack of sirens in place to warn people of impending flash flooding.
As state and local officials in Texas have come under scrutiny over the lack of sirens to warn people of impending flash flooding on the Guadalupe River that killed more than 100 people, records reviewed by ABC News show authorities of one of the hardest hit counties have had discussions about implementing such an alert system for nearly a decade.
The destructive flooding hit in the early morning hours of the Fourth of July, causing the Guadalupe River in Kerr County to rise by 26 feet in less than an hour, spilling its banks and flooding multiple summer camps and RV parks along the winding river.
On Monday, the death toll from the flooding climbed to more than 100, according to officials. At least 84 of the deaths occurred in Kerr County, including 27 children at Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer camp near the banks of the Guadalupe, authorities said.
Ten girls and a counselor from Camp Mystic remained unaccounted for on Monday as search-and-rescue efforts stretched into their fourth day.
Since the catastrophe, local officials have faced questions about how warnings were sent out to the community, why evacuations weren’t ordered in low-lying areas and why there were no audible warning systems to alert campers along the Guadalupe.
«There should have been sirens here», Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News on Monday, adding that the subject will likely come up in a special session of the state legislature to analyze what occurred during the flooding.
Patrick added, «Had we had sirens around this area, up and down — the same type of sirens they have in Israel when there’s an attack coming, that would have blown very loudly — it’s possible that would have saved some of these lives.»
‘I’ve spent hours in those helicopters pulling kids out of trees’
Records reviewed by ABC News show that many of the same questions have been under discussion, specifically in Kerr County, for nearly a decade.
The minutes from a March 28, 2016, meeting of the Kerr County Commissioners’ Court, show that former Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer pushed the commission to upgrade the county’s flood-warning system. At the time, Hierholzer told the commission that he was in favor of placing high-decibel outdoor sirens along the river that could go off and be heard from a distance of 3 miles when water gauges indicated flooding, according to the online minutes of the meeting.
