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Posted
Yes.  The trees on the right side of the road are no more.

Jesus. I’ve driven over that crossing a zillion times, although it’s been a few years. I’m sure whenever I pass that way again, it’ll be overwhelming. And I’m just a person who spends time there. The trauma so many folks must feel. It breaks my damn heart.
Posted

I agree flood alarms along the river probably would have helped people downstream from Hunt/Ingram evacuate.  The Camp Mystic kids, I am not so sure.  If you look at the cabins map at Camp Mystic, the cabins are between the Guadalupe River and Cypress Creek, essentially on an island.  IMO, those kids/counselors were doomed when they went to bed that night.

This is a report from Charlie Hastings, who is the Kerr County engineer:

 

Flood Timeline at the river gauge, which is 10 miles down stream from the south fork of the Guadalupe River:

July 4th Midnight - 53 gallons/second

Rained 3 hours straight

3 am - 264 gal/sec

3:30 am - 125,000 gal/sec

4 am - 950,000 gal/sec

In comparison, Niagara Falls flows 75,750 gal/sec.

The river rose as high as 55' in places.  

For those familiar with the headwaters of the two forks of the Guadalupe, the south fork is solid rock, basically concrete.  That is where 90% of the rain fell.  It was a tsunami flowing on a non-porous substrate.  A ton of water in a short amount of time.

A good friend of mine works as security for the Bass family ranch in the Hunt area.  At midnight, he was parked under the Hunt Store canopy watching the river and decide to drive home, which is behind the Hunt Store.  He said that he didn't observe anything out of the ordinary.  He said at 3:30, he and his wife woke up to water in their home.  No one was expecting this around here.

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Posted

950k?

That's about a quarter of the Mississippi river’s average flow at Baton Rouge.

On the Guad. Hard to wrap my head around that.

I am absolutely dreading a visitation/funeral tomorrow.

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Posted (edited)
2 hours ago, BearSchlong said:

950k?

That's about a quarter of the Mississippi river’s average flow at Baton Rouge.

On the Guad. Hard to wrap my head around that.

I am absolutely dreading a visitation/funeral tomorrow.

I always find cross references to be helpful for understanding massive numbers like 950k gallons per second.

Here is a 400,000 gallon water tank

400000-gallon-tank-bg2.jpg.765c3a35360414c5d3e9b7abccf2dc5d.jpg

950,000 gallons is close to 4000 tons. Here is crane that can lift 4000 tons

XCA4000__the_world_s_largest_and_heavist_wheeled_crane__marks_the_7th_time_that_XCMG_has_outdone_the_world_record_kept_by_itself.6613f4fa6072e.thumb.jpeg.208ad19047378d6cf1fcc96b5e9d0df9.jpeg

Here is Para' Falls in Venezuela. The largest waterfall in South America which flows right at 950,000 gallons per second.

21b2e14ef2ac788dfdc2a79e9379c2f8.jpg.ca7b72734f751b8b92d88e4acacdc094.jpg222794688_04e29c1d64.jpg.16f37f143e471248d8d1c9052753d107.jpgimages(3).jpeg.2f3f7216bf139622b4b722cb78d8d44c.jpeg

images (2).jpeg

Edited by BurntEyes
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Posted
11 hours ago, Wally Pryor said:

Man, mother nature is some bullshit sometimes.

Posted
1 minute ago, wildcat09 said:

Man, mother nature is some bullshit sometimes.

And the amount of fucks she gives is perpetually pegged at "zero."  She doesn't give a shit about you.  She's coming, and ain't nothin' gonna stop her.

That's why you should prep and plan for when she will show up to give you the bidness, because she IS gonna show up.  It's just a matter of when.

Posted

I didn't ask for the details, but Ella’s casket was hand-painted with a yellow rose motif, and someone said that Texas artist adorned similar coffins for many of the victims. Danged it was gorgeous, but I was not about to take a photo.

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Posted
8 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

And then out of the blue today...

image.png.29bf839a799dc22f601530026d93f85d.png

If it isn't Rex, it is a sock of someone like Johnny Sack of Shit.

Was this a DM after you expressed your wish to have no direct communication?

His mushroom has deliquesced.

Posted

It's been a month. Are we allowed to talk about how all of this was so unbelievably fucked up now, who's accountable, and what should be done?

County Emergency Official Says He Was Ill and Sleeping as Texas Floods Hit
At a hearing in hard-hit Kerr County, an emergency management coordinator for the first time explained his whereabouts when the Guadalupe River burst its banks.

The emergency management coordinator of Kerr County, which bore the brunt of the deadly July 4 floods in the Texas Hill Country, testified on Thursday that he was sick and asleep when the floodwaters rose in the middle of the night, eventually killing 108 people in the county.

The admission by the official, William B. Thomas IV, came at the start of an extraordinary hearing held by state lawmakers in a packed convention center in the city of Kerrville, a short walk from the banks of the Guadalupe River, which surged to record levels in the predawn darkness of July 4.

Hundreds of residents attended the hearing, and many of them hoped to testify in what was expected to be an emotional session lasting for more than 12 hours.

The hearing began with three-and-a-half hours of testimony from county officials, including Mr. Thomas, the county’s emergency management coordinator since 2015. Mr. Thomas had not spoken publicly since the flood, as questions were raised about his whereabouts and why neither he nor anyone else in the county had issued more warnings about the rapidly worsening situation along the river.

“I want to directly address questions about my whereabouts,” Mr. Thomas said. He explained that he had always planned to be off work on July 3 “to fulfill a commitment to my elderly father,” and that because of a “progressing illness,” he had stayed home.

“I stayed in bed throughout July 3 and did not participate in the regularly scheduled 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Texas Emergency Management Coordination Center coordination calls,” he said.

Those calls included hundreds of participants, according to state officials, and went over the impending severe weather for the holiday weekend. At that time, it was not clear where the strongest rains would fall in the Texas Hill Country and Central Texas.

Mr. Thomas said his supervisors were aware that he was off that day. He testified that he slept through most of July 3; awoke briefly around 2 p.m., when he said there was no indication of local rainfall; and then went back to sleep again until his wife woke him up at 5:30 a.m. on July 4.

By that point, the worst of the flooding had already surged through low-lying communities in the county, including the unincorporated town of Hunt and the summer camps and recreational vehicle parks that sit near the river’s banks.

cont'd

Quote

 

Mr. Thomas said more alerts from the county would have been duplicative since the National Weather Service had already triggered several alerts as the water rose, and that those seemed sufficient. He said only six of the 19 camps in the county had submitted emergency management plans. He did not say whether Camp Mystic, where 28 died, was among them, though according to state inspection records, the camp had a plan.

As the county’s emergency management coordinator, Mr. Thomas oversees the area’s preparations and response to fires, floods and other natural disasters, working under the county’s judge, Rob Kelly, who is the top ranking official in Kerr County and directs emergency management.

Mr. Thomas has years of experience in disaster response, having previously worked at the Texas Department of Public Safety and helped coordinate the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Kelly testified Thursday that he had been at a second home in Lake Travis when the flooding hit, but that he returned to Kerr County when the scale of the floods became apparent on July 4.

But the Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who was sitting in on the committee hearing, assailed Mr. Kelly for what he said was his absence that day from the emergency operations center where other key officials, such as the Kerrville mayor and the county sheriff, had gathered.

“Judge Kelly, I never saw you on day one,” Mr. Patrick said, addressing Mr. Kelly. “I came here from Austin, in this room, I talked to the sheriff multiple times, I talked to the mayor multiple times, we had a meeting when we got here.”

“You should have been here, you should have been here directing that response,” Mr. Patrick said.

Earlier in the hearing, Representative Ann Johnson, a Houston Democrat, observed that “the three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable” at the height of the emergency, before dawn on July 4.

The judge was away, she said, the sheriff didn’t wake up until 4:20 a.m., and the emergency management coordinator was sick.

The contrast with neighboring Kendall County, Texas, seemed striking as officials from both counties testified. Kendall County’s top elected official, County Judge Shane Stolarczyk, testified on Thursday that his county’s emergency manager, Brady Constantine, was on the July 3 state coordination calls and came away with “an uneasy feeling that night about the weather conditions.”

Mr. Constantine began making phone calls around 4 a.m. July 4, Mr. Stolarczyk said.

Even by then, much of the water’s deadly force was at work. Witnesses at the hearing testified that a call for help from Camp Mystic, outside of Hunt, came in at 3:57 a.m.

The hearing on Thursday was the second held by a select committee of the State Legislature, part of a special legislative session called by Gov. Greg Abbott to address a range of issues, including flooding response but also partisan redistricting.

Among those attending the hearing were Mr. Patrick, who leads the State Senate, and the speaker of the Texas House, Dustin Burrows. Both men promised action and said they would be listening to what residents asked for.

More than one lawmaker suggested dissolving the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, whose officials had come under criticism at the first legislative hearing. The authority had tried and failed to secure funding from the state for a flood warning system over the years, and lawmakers suggested it could be folded into a larger, neighboring water authority.

Mayor Joe Herring Jr., of Kerrville testified on the need for a flood warning system, potentially including sirens, to be designed and installed before next summer, and asked the state lawmakers for assistance.

“We will need your help to achieve this goal,” he said.

Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican, suggested a siren system was likely to be approved by the legislature. “We’re probably going to pass these bills and get these systems out,” he said at one point.

But some local officials doubted that an improved warning system with sirens would have made a meaningful difference on July 4.

“I don’t know if sirens would have changed the outcome,” said the Kerr County sheriff, Larry Leitha. “The water came too fast.”

 

 

Posted

i would love to see the full transcript of the hearing to see if there was any discussion about deciding to not take money for early warning systems funded by not-republican administrations

i would also love to see the exact discussion regarding the county commissioner's claims the "water came to fast so sirens wouldn't have worked"

full nyt article in the clear:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/us/politics/texas-floods-hearing.html

Posted (edited)

Some of their testimony runs counter to previously established facts. ABC also has reporting, no paywall:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/kerr-county-texas-lead-emergency-management-official-asleep/story?id=124237644

 

"We received no alerts suggesting an extreme weather event was imminent [referring to July 3]. For context, we received hundreds of alerts during the summer. This past July, we had over 80. My first indication that this storm was different came when I woke up to texts and calls from Chief Kidd, Sheriff Leitha and Dalton Rice," Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly testified.

"We now know that by that time, the flooding had already overtaken Camp Mystic, part of the hills in La Junta and several other upriver camps, something I could never have imagined. This extreme weather event was not forecast by the National Weather Service in a timely manner. Based on the volume and tone of the messages, I recognize that something more serious and potentially tragic was unfolding," Kelly continued.

...

Alicia Baker, shaking with emotion and holding back tears, described the horrors of losing her daughter and parents.

Baker told the committee she had spent her summers on the Guadalupe River since 1990, and her parents owned a cabin there for nearly 20 years.

Baker described the harrowing hours of not knowing the fate of her daughter and parents.

"I waited there for over 12 hours for news, and literally no one could tell you anything at all," Baker said. "Literally, no one was in charge."

She added, "We need to do better for the people in this community, for the people that are suffering."

Edited by Captainant

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