Texas town with flood alerts had zero deaths from flooding

A small Texas town recorded no deaths in last weekend’s flood disaster after it recently upgraded its emergency alert system — the kind of equipment that state and county officials repeatedly balked at installing just a few miles away in storm-ravaged Kerr County.

The system in Comfort, Texas included a newly installed siren that blared a warning for residents to evacuate well before the Guadalupe River breached its banks

At least 87 people — including 30 children died in the floods in Kerr County. Comfort is right next door to the Kerr County line, and about 22 miles down river from the worst of the flooding.

The unincorporated community of around 2,300 residents, lost 10 young campers at the Pot O’ Gold Christian Camp when the Guadalupe River overflowed in July 1987 after a severe rain storm, a tragedy eerily similar to last week’s disaster at Camp Mystic.

The Comfort Fire Department announced the improvements to its outdoor warning system in a social media post in March.

“We have upgraded our fire station siren and added another siren at the Comfort Park. These sirens enable early warnings for natural disasters or civil defense matters and are substantially louder than our previous siren,” the department’s Facebook post read.

“When a flood warning is issued, and the USGS censors at Cypress Creek reach a certain water level the sirens will automatically execute a 3-minute steady wail cycle.”

The first non-test use of the new siren was ahead of the July 4 floods, alerting residents who missed push notification warnings or evacuation announcements made by firefighters who were driving around town.

“People knew that if they heard the siren, they gotta get out,” said Danny Morales, assistant chief of the Comfort Volunteer Fire Department told NBC.

But proposals and plans to put a similar system in place in the county — which is locally nicknamed “Flash Flood Alley” — were repeatedly shot down dating back to 2016.

At a Kerr County commissioners’ meeting that year held soon after deadly flooding in neighboring Hays County, then-Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer urged officials to step up their emergency alert apparatus to include sirens.

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But the estimated $1 million price tag for the proposed system — as well as the possibility of the sirens going off accidentally — didn’t sit well with some officials, including then-commissioner H.A. “Buster” Baldwin, who called the system “a little extravagant for Kerr County, with sirens and such,” a meeting transcript reveals.

Tom Moser, a former Kerr County commissioner who had pushed for the proposed warning system, said the county lacked the funds to pay for it themselves, and disaster relief grants they were seeking from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help cover the costs never materialized.

The county board considered kicking in the money itself but then ultimately scrapped the plan, then-commissioner, Moser, told the Wall Street Journal.

“It was probably just, I hate to say the word priorities. Trying not to raise taxes,’’ Moser said.

Kerr County officials instead relied on a word-of-mouth system to pass messages about raging floodwaters downriver from the camps upstream.

The river rose to more than 29 feet during the freak summer storm, and experts said a flood-warning system such as the one proposed for Kerr County might not have been perfect, but it could have at least potentially helped warn some of the victims earlier.

“No one is ever going to complain about having more data when it comes to hazardous weather,” said Nick Bassill, director of the New York State Weather Risk Communication Center.

In 2017, Kerr County applied for funds under FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance program — which provides money for preventative measures to states upon request.

However, the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which picks and chooses which applications to approve — denied the application. It did so again the following year after more federal funds became available following Hurricane Harvey.

The TDEM did not respond to The Post’s request for an explanation.

Last year, the Texas state legislature proposed House Bill 13, which would have formed a new government council to establish an emergency response plan and administer the state’s grant program. Its ultimate goal would have been to facilitate better communication between first responders during an emergency, the Texas Tribune reported.

The bill was criticized for its nearly $500 million price tag, and failed in the Texas Senate.

Under the bill, the plan also would have included “the use of outdoor warning sirens,” like those used in Texas counties frequently hit by tornadoes, and develop new “emergency alert systems.”

When asked if the bill would be resurrected in the legislature following the floods, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded, “it’s going to be something that will be looked at,” according to KXAN.

The vast majority of the 105 confirmed deaths in the Texas Hill Country flooding were in Kerr County, including 27 girls ages 8 and 9 from Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer camp in the town of Hunt.

Questions are being raised about the state’s emergency response to the devastating Fourth of July storm, and officials have remained tight-lipped when pressed for details about what went wrong.

During a tense press conference, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha was unable to answer direct questions about who was in charge and whether they were asleep early Friday morning when the flooding began

“As I’ve told you several times, that is not my priority this time,” the sheriff said. “There are three priorities, that’s locating the people out there, identifying, notifying the next of kin — that is what I’m taking as my job as sheriff.”

He also gave a testy response to a question about whether the emergency manager was awake when the flooding started, and “push[ed] the button to issue an emergency alert” to all cellphones in the area.

“It’s not that easy as you just push a button, OK,” he said. “There’s a lot more to that, and we’ve told you several times.”