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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
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.”

 

 

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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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Posted
34 minutes ago, troph said:

Just because he said it doesn’t mean it’s true. 

This American Life episode on lies

 

this is a fantastic episode and one of the acts focuses on how this type of lie is becoming pervasive among government officials 

They interview Masha Gessen who wrote a book called Surviving Autocracy 

 

Quote

The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show I can say what I want, when I want to.

Everyone there knows it’s a lie. “Now what are you going to do about it punk?”

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Posted
52 minutes ago, troph said:

Just because he said it doesn’t mean it’s true. 

he's the elected County Judge and chief executive for the county. His lies are going to lead to more Texans getting killed by avoidable disasters. There WAS ample warning.

Don't excuse his chickenshittery. His shit planning and maladministration directly led to worsening this already titanically bad disaster. Doing nothing to change their practices only ensures a repeat performance as our climate worsens and becomes more extreme.

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Posted
Everyone there knows it’s a lie. “Now what are you going to do about it punk?”

This point and post are very, very important. Because that is absolutely where we are: lies are displays of absolute power. They are not told to create an alternate truth, they are told because fuck you what are you gonna do about it?
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Posted
15 minutes ago, Captainant said:

he's the elected County Judge and chief executive for the county. His lies are going to lead to more Texans getting killed by avoidable disasters. There WAS ample warning.

Don't excuse his chickenshittery. His shit planning and maladministration directly led to worsening this already titanically bad disaster. Doing nothing to change their practices only ensures a repeat performance as our climate worsens and becomes more extreme.

Come On What GIF by MOODMAN

Posted
Just now, troph said:

Come On What GIF by MOODMAN

Sorry. Just a little tired of seeing chief executives get away with lying to the public and us all dangerously sweeping it all under the rug in the name of unity.

We're all hearing so many lies, we're collectively losing the ability to recognize the truth. 

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Posted

Everyone knows about windspeed differential in doppler velocity mode.  It replaced the hook echo 25 years ago as the strongest indicator of a rapidly rotating mesocyclone.  It is the first indication of spin turning from horizontal to vertical (i.e. pointing down at the ground).  As we know, mesocyclones don't always touch down.  My understanding is that this is the trigger for the NWS to issue tornado warnings.

The flooding equivalent of this does not require human intervention or cell service or landlines.

By my count on the topo map there are ~100 upstream tributaries above Hunt on the South and Central branches of the Guadalupe.  Tributaries is really the wrong word, they are giant rain gutters carved from granite.

Let's speculate that there was a gauge measuring 1) flow in cubic feet per second and 2) the speed of the rise in water level.  If that data stays logarithmic for all gauges you have X amount of time before the river rises to Y level at speed Z downstream.  We don't need AI to predict the results.  It's basic fluid dynamics and hydrology.  In a logarithmic situation there is "more" time and you might not need sirens to stop death in the ancient river channel (which is half a mile wide).  Anything in that channel, as we witnessed, is toast.  It would be common sense not to build structures or sleep in them anywhere in that half-mile-wide channel, but that's another topic.

I've kept this clean, and used capitalization and punctuation, which as everyone knows, is not my forum style.  But I have to break with civility for a moment.

A quick aside to address the KerrCo "people" who resisted sirens.  You dumb sonsofbitches, you live in fucking TEXAS, where we have TORNADOES ALL THE FUCKING TIME, and you don't want storm sirens?  "Sirens wouldn't have helped in time" is a LOSER EXCUSE (TM-wheels).  KerrCo "leaders" LOST a lot of innocent tourists and LOST 2-dozen+ young girls.  Kerr County and Kerrville leaders and their base are LOSERS.

"Sirens wouldn't have helped in time" grinds my gears.

The Prestige: if more than, say, 4 or 5 of those gauges show data going linear, i.e. exponential, the gauge should fire off a "distress signal", a "radio beacon", it could even use off-the-shelf ADS-B commercial aviation transponder hardware.  No cells.  No landlines.  No humans.  The beacon goes off, the sirens turn on.  Why?  Because God has sounded the alarm.

 

linear_log.webp.c9c9c6757cfe23c002e89dca328c04ef.webp  

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Posted
30 minutes ago, Captainant said:

he's the elected County Judge and chief executive for the county. His lies are going to lead to more Texans getting killed by avoidable disasters. There WAS ample warning.

Don't excuse his chickenshittery. His shit planning and maladministration directly led to worsening this already titanically bad disaster. Doing nothing to change their practices only ensures a repeat performance as our climate worsens and becomes more extreme.

i repped this however my take is that this event has nothing at all to do with global warming or cloudseeding

the topomaps tell the story of the guadalupe, and google street view seals the case

the floodplain maps are pure comedy - the river channel is a half-mile wide, some places wider

global warming was not responsible for this rain event - the same flood has happened hundreds of times over thousands of years

Posted

fyi - i just caught my mistake - i didn't pay attention and just grabbed the first graphic i found - i have linear and log BACKWARDS because the graphic has them mislabeled

linear is 1:1

log is exponential

too late to edit

post self-reported

Posted
5 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

i repped this however my take is that this event has nothing at all to do with global warming or cloudseeding

the topomaps tell the story of the guadalupe, and google street view seals the case

the floodplain maps are pure comedy - the river channel is a half-mile wide, some places wider

global warming was not responsible for this rain event - the same flood has happened hundreds of times over thousands of years

I agree - climate change didn't make the flood occur. That area is naturally where excess rainfall is gonna flow.

However, the intensity of the storm and volume of water was absolutely made worse from climate change. Greater than Niagra Falls' 24hr flow volume is absolutely bonkers and insane, and is unlike anything we've recorded in Texas before.

I would bet that if the rain were half of what it were there would have been fewer than half as many deaths, along the lines of your log curve model reasoning. The maladministration created the possibility for unmitigated flood deaths, and the extreme flood goosed that number even further.

Posted
On 7/25/2025 at 5:11 PM, BearSchlong said:

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.

This is a news story on the guy who makes the custom caskets.

 

On 7/30/2025 at 12:15 PM, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

Also, @King George is a sad, sad person.  If this is Rex, who asked to have his account removed, them promptly came back under this name, well, that is just pathetic.

image.thumb.png.fdecf337b193183cd58202fff86e4162.png

You asked him to not contact you via DM. He continues to contact (and insult you, no less) you via DM. I'm sure imma can tell if it's Rex or some other shit-bag's sock. I would think this would be cause for banning King George's handle if not a total IP ban.

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Posted
On 7/24/2025 at 11:43 AM, West Kerr Horn said:

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.

Man, not sure I agree with that simply because they got a good number of the girls out and to safety. I think some made it because they got the mess hall and were able to get up onto the roof or a second floor and that building had a wall blown out but otherwise was still structurally intact. Now whether this is NWS, Kerr County or Camp Mystic's fuckup to own, I can't say for sure. But I think if Mystic had reacted just a little sooner, they would've been able to get the 8-year-old girls out of harm's way for the most part.

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Posted
2 hours ago, Captainant said:

unlike anything we've recorded in Texas before

for avoidance of doubt, the Country of Texas Fisher-Miler land grant was sold to the Adelsverein in 1842

the upper Guadalupe was first settled sometime between 1851 and 1856

this is the 1847 Adelsverein map of Texas:

image.thumb.png.3aedba99d31a97a0c4a2a8408d876594.png

this is a link to the 1851 map, it also shows no data for the upper guadalupe:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Adelsverein_Karte_des_Staates_Texas_1851_UTA.jpg

kerr county was founded in 1856

The Centerpoint News was first published remotely in 1908

a press was moved to Kerr County in 1926 and the paper changed it's name to The Kerrville Times publishing periodically

the paper went daily in 1949

we know about the 1931 flood - a trip to the library to request the relevant 1931 editions of the KT would be useful

a review of every edition from 1908 to 1931 should be suggested to a scout looking for an eagle project

post-graduate work to study all of the primary sources in kerr county, such as government minutes and documents and local diaries would be meritorious

a full dissertation or book on the subject would require a thorough review of the full archives in the libraries in new braunfels, seguin and gonzales, up to the beginning of construction of the Canyon Dam in 1958

dotting i's and crossing t's would require a full read of the san antonio express first published in 1865

and finally, going completely medieval requires combing through the Spanish colonial records for Texas y Coahuila in the Bexar County Archives, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC), and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

+++

the catastrophic portion of the july 4th event lasted hours not days, and before the ubiquity of television in the 1950s regional, statewide and/or national awareness of 'similar' prior events relied on dissemination of the printed news

in my opinion the statement "ever recorded" is not absolute at this time

 

 

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