Texas flooding death toll hits 100 as experts say better early warning system could have reduced casualties

A flood warning system deemed too costly by the Texas county where last week’s rains killed at least 27 kiddie campers might have given the victims a fighting chance to get out of harm’s way, experts told The Post on Monday.

Officials in Kerr County, where at least 75 of the more than 100 known flood victims died, contemplated installing a flood warning system in 2017 — but rejected the plan on the grounds its price tag was too high.

The proposed system — similar to one in a neighboring town that ran $2 million — would have included river gauges, sirens and other modern communication tools along the Guadalupe River, known locally as “Flash Flood Alley.”

The river rose by more than 26 feet during a freak summer storm July 4, sending deadly torrents of water flooding the region — and experts said a flood-warning system such as the one proposed for Kerr might not have been perfect, but it could have at least potentially helped curb the devastation.

“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.

“Then there’s the question of, once you know that the flooding is imminent, how do you communicate that to the people who maybe aren’t able to be communicated to, like if they’re at a camp somewhere or something like that,” he said.

Camp Mystic, a Christian girls’ summer camp a few hundred feet from Guadalupe’s riverbanks in Hunt, lost at least 27 campers age 8 and 9 and one counselor — with 10 kids and a counselor still missing, officials said Monday.

Bassill said he would have been in support of an advanced warning system such as the one Kerr County officials eschewed in 2017 — adding that the setups don’t necessarily have to be high-tech or expensive to save lives.

“A really basic one that is probably close to a must-have in these sot of situations would be a NOAA weather radio [for residents], so if you’re in an area without Internet or cell phone service and there’s a flash flood warning in the middle of the night, you’ve got your radio on, you’ll be woken up by a sort of jarring alert from it. So that would be … a really obvious kind of low-cost solution,” he said.

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Follow The Post’s coverage on the deadly Texas flooding

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NOAA radios such as the one Bassill described can be found on Amazon starting at around $20.

Dr. Erik Nielsen, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University and an expert in extreme rainfall and warning communication, had a slightly different take, noting that even if an advanced early warning system was in place, extenuating circumstances could have limited their efficacy.

“Sirens are designed to be outdoor alerts. They’re not designed to be indoors, and they probably will not wake you up,” he said.

“And then it comes into the context. People would have to know what those sirens meant. So there would have to be some sort of educational thing beforehand, maybe at the campground or something like that to make sure people understood that if these sirens are going off, what does it mean and what does that look like?” he said.

Nielsen said the best approach is one that encompasses several different warning methods.

“You need layered ways to receive warnings. … Things like a NOAA weather radio, your cell phone alerts, things maybe in place locally like sirens. All those things work together to communicate information,” he said.

Nielsen praised the National Weather Service for helping get the word out, noting the Guadalupe had some gauges in place, “but likely not enough.

“You need to have river gauges that are showing you these things, so this is an area where the National Weather Service did a very good job. They had a warning out at 1 a.m., and if you look at the river gauges upstream of Hunt on the South fork, I don’t know that there are any to actually show you what that water rise is actually doing.”

Having a better gauge system in place would have “possibly” saved lives, he said, “but then it also still goes back to all of the challenges of communicating to people when they’re asleep at 2 to 3 in the morning. Your best alert system is great, but if you don’t get the people to hear it and understand it, it’s not going to do anything,” he noted.

“So that’s where the design aspect and the education aspect of such a system matters, especially to those who are not from the area.”