Officials feared flood risk to youth camps but rejected warning system

A group gathers to pray for those missing and confirmed dead after the Guadalupe River flooded in Kerrville, Texas, July 6, 2025. When catastrophic floodwaters surged through Kerr County last week, there were no sirens or early flooding monitors — instead, there were text alerts that came late for some residents and were dismissed or unseen by others. (Carter Johnston/The New York Times)

By Jesús Jiménez, Margarita Birnbaum, Danny Hakim and Mike Baker

Eight years ago, in the aftermath of yet another river flood in the Texas Hill Country, officials in Kerr County debated whether more needed to be done to build a warning system along the banks of the Guadalupe River.

A series of summer camps along the river were often packed with children. For years, local officials kept them safe with a word-of-mouth system: When floodwaters started raging, upriver camp leaders warned those downriver of the water surge coming their way.

But was that enough? Officials considered supplementing the system with sirens and river gauges, along with other modern communications tools. “We can do all the water-level monitoring we want, but if we don’t get that information to the public in a timely way, then this whole thing is not worth it,” said Tom Moser, a Kerr County commissioner at the time.

In the end, little was done. When catastrophic floodwaters surged through Kerr County last week, there were no sirens or early flooding monitors. Instead, there were text alerts that came late for some residents and were dismissed or unseen by others.

The rural county of a little over 50,000 people, in a part of Texas known as “flash flood alley,” contemplated installing a flood warning system in 2017, but it was rejected as too expensive. The county, which has an annual budget of around $67 million, lost out on a bid at the time to secure a $1 million grant to fund the project, county commission meeting minutes show.

As recently as a May budget meeting, county commissioners were discussing a flood warning system being developed by a regional agency as something that they might be able to make use of.

But in a recent interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said that local residents had been resistant to new spending. “Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” he said, adding that he didn’t know if people might reconsider now.

On Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas acknowledged that flood-warning sirens might have saved lives if they had been along the river. He added that they needed to be in place by next summer.

The idea of a flood warning system was broached in 2015, in the aftermath of a deadly flood in Wimberley, Texas, about 75 miles east of Kerrville, the Kerr County seat.

The Guadalupe River Basin is one of the most dangerous regions in the United States when it comes to flash floods. Ordinary floods from heavy rainstorms occur regularly, inundating streets and threatening structures as floodwaters gradually rise. The region is also prone to flash floods, which can occur with little to no notice.

People living near the Guadalupe in Kerr County may have little time to seek higher ground, especially when flash floods come through late at night when people are asleep. In 1987, a rapidly rising Guadalupe River swept away a school bus carrying teens from a church camp, killing 10 of them.

Avantika Gori, a Rice University professor who is leading a federally funded project to improve flood resilience in rural Texas counties, said that flood warning systems are often simple networks of rain gauges or stream gauges that are triggered when rain or floodwaters exceed a certain level.

The gauges can then be used to warn those at risk of flooding, whether by text message, which may not be effective in areas with spotty cellphone service; notifications broadcast on TV and radio; or sometimes through a series of sirens.

More complex systems use forecasts from the National Weather Service to predict rainfall and model what areas might be subject to flooding, Gori said.

After the 2015 floods, an improved monitoring system was installed in the Wimberley area, and cell towers are now used to send out notices to all cellphones in the area.

Moser, the former commissioner, visited Wimberley after its new system was in place, and then led efforts to have a flood warning system in Kerr County. His proposal would have included additional water detection systems and a system to alert the public, but the project never got off the ground, largely because of budget concerns.

“It sort of evaporated,” Moser said. “It just didn’t happen.”

One commissioner at the time, H.A. “Buster” Baldwin, voted against a $50,000 engineering study, according to a news account at the time, saying, “I think this whole thing is a little extravagant for Kerr County, with sirens and such.”

Moser said it was hard to tell if a flood warning system would have prevented further tragedy in Kerr County during Friday’s flood, given the extraordinary circumstance of the flooding, which came suddenly after an intense period of rain. But he said he believed that such a system could have had some benefit.

“I think it could have helped a lot of people,” Moser said.

The death toll from the flooding rose past 100 Monday evening, including at least 27 campers and staff members from a single summer camp, where 11 people were still missing.

According to a transcript from a Kerr County Commissioners’ Court meeting in 2017, officials discussed how even with additional water level sensors along the Guadalupe River, the county would still need a way to alert residents if water levels were rising dangerously fast.

Sirens, which are used across Texas to alert residents about tornadoes, were considered by county officials as a way to alert people who live along the river about any flooding.

“With all the hills and all, cell coverage is not that great in some areas in Hill Country,” Moser said, adding that a series of sirens might have provided people in vulnerable areas sufficient time to flee.

Moser retired as a commissioner of Kerr County in 2021. But he said last week’s flooding there should be taken as a warning.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of places in the United States that will look at this event that happened in Kerr County and determine what could be done,” Moser said. “I think things should come out of this. It should be a lesson learned.”