Dalton Rice, the Kerrville city manager, said he had gone jogging around 3:30 or 4 a.m., but where he was, on the city’s walking trail along the Guadalupe, “there was very light rain” and “we did not see any signs of the river rising.”
Apparently, it's still 1885 in Kerrville, where a city official can only react to something he can see with his own two eyes.
“This came at night when people were asleep, in bed,” Kerrville’s mayor, Joe Herring Jr., said at a news conference. He later told CNN that he had not received the weather alert and was not awakened until 5:30 a.m.
Your local tax dollars at work.
The county does have access to a private system known as CodeRED that sends out alerts to residents’ phones, but it is not clear to what extent it was used. At 4:22 a.m., a firefighter asked on an emergency channel if there was “any way we can send a CodeRED out” to residents in the town of Hunt, where Camp Mystic and the Presbyterian camp are located, “asking them to find higher ground or stay home,” according to a report by Texas Public Radio.
But it appears that the first CodeRED did not go out for about an hour. Louis Kocurek, a resident of the town of Center Point, told The Times that the CodeRED text message he received had come in at 10:07 a.m.
There is a theory that small towns suck because the young, smart people figure out what is going on and GTFO as soon as possible.