Heckuva Job, Kristi! F*ck Up Texas Flood Response Badly Enough, And Texans Will Want FEMA Abolished!

A special committee of the Texas Legislature held hearings last week — that’s before Democrats fled the state to deprive Greg Abbott’s new Democrat-murdering maps of a quorum — on the deadly flash floods that hit the state on July 4

When members of the public testified at Thursday’s hearing in Kerrville, many people spoke of waiting for help that never came.

Local contractor Bud Bolton, who lives just downstream from the RV parks on the Ingram-Kerrville border that suffered heavy losses of life, testified that he saw 108 RVs swept downstream, some of them with families still inside. Bolton, who woke up on his own when there was water on his doorstep around 4:15 a.m., said 20 fire trucks and rescue vehicles were parked near his home but no one knocked on his door to warn him. When Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, halted Bolton’s testimony, he seized the mic again saying, “I lost 27 people that I knew” before being cut off for exceeding his time limit.

Gosh how rude of him to keep talking.

Multiple survivors from the Sandy Creek area of Travis County said that county officials didn’t bring emergency supplies in for days, giving residents the opportunity to fend for themselves, although some people didn’t seem to appreciate being free from the burdensome grip of government … well, not overreach, just no reach at all.

“Nobody came, nobody came, nobody came for us,” Auburn Gallagher, a 25-year resident of Sandy Creek said through tears, describing how no emergency management personnel showed up in the hardest-hit Windy Valley area for more than 24 hours after the flooding. “We had Travis County employees tell us they were warned at midnight that we were going to flood, but nobody came. No fire, no EMS, no sheriff. Nobody came for us.”

Ms. Gallagher really seems not to have appreciated what a terrific example that was of how America is supposed to work, as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem explained at a Cabinet meeting days after the disaster, when she explained that “We, as a federal government, don’t manage these disasters. The state does. We come in and support them, and that’s exactly what we did here in this situation.”

Besides, the really important thing is that a disaster brings out the best in people who have to rely on each other, as Noem reminded us. The way people left on their own helped each other proved that “God created us to take care of each other.” It’s inspiring, really.

At least one fellow at the hearing, Mike Richards, arrived 30 minutes early to make sure he could sign up to testify. He sounded like a big fan of Trump and Noem’s plan to do away with FEMA altogether. The state, too.

[Richards] told The Texas Newsroom that after the flood he found 10 bodies on land he owns in Center Point, an unincorporated area in Kerr County.

“I didn’t get no help from the state or the government,” he said. “FEMA’s a joke and it needs to be abolished. The state is broken.”

Looks to us like Mr. Richards will get his wish, whether he wants it or not.

At the hearing held in Kerrville Thursday, Kerr County Emergency Management Coordinator Will Thomas and Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha testified that they had both been asleep until they were called by employees to tell them about the flooding.

Thomas was home sick on July 3 (he’d already planned to take the day before the holiday off, but not to be sick) and missed two regularly scheduled calls for state emergency managers.

Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, who’s supposed to be in charge of emergency management, was away at a vacation home on Lake Travis, where he planned to have family over for the holiday, and slept through calls from the sheriff, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd, and Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice. But he did eventually wake up, sometime between 5 and 6 a.m., and that’s when he saw the messages they left.

“The three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable,” said Rep. Ann Johnson, D-Houston. “Am I hearing that right?”

Well look, it’s Texas. Government is supposed to be small, for freedom. The heavy hand of government has no place waking people up and telling them a flood’s coming, and that goes double for county emergency management people.

Sheriff Leitha commended dispatchers who were handling so many emergency calls that some had to be routed to other towns, including the dispatch system in Seguin, nearly 100 miles away from Kerr County. (The technology is impressive, but the local TV article on the hearing didn’t go into detail on what kind of help Seguin dispatch could provide.)

Leitha said that one dispatcher “remained on the line for 24 minutes with two young children as their cabins filled with water. She stayed with them until the end.” Which is equal parts heroic and heartbreaking, but also we can’t help thinking it would have been better to have emergency systems that would have alerted adults to get the kids out of there instead.

As for the potential for a siren system along the river, Leitha didn’t think that would have made any difference, telling lawmakers “I don’t know if sirens would have changed the outcome. […] The water came too fast.” We don’t know about that — at Camp Mystic, most of the older girls survived, but the younger girls, all of whom perished or are still missing from cabins built in a hazardous flood zone, might at least have had enough warning to run to higher ground.

In any case, as the Houston Chronicle reported last week (gift link), a decade ago, the board of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority chose not to spend a $3.4 million surplus on a flood alert system, deciding instead to reduce property taxes. But hey, they had good reasons, like not even being sure that was something they had the power to spend money on, and, apparently not being inclined to find out. Maybe the special session of the Lege will decide whether the river authority can do that.

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Kristi Noem’s Feral Emergency Management Drives Search And Rescue Chief To Resign

[KUT / Texas Tribune / KXAN / Texas Tribune / Houston Chronicle (gift link)]

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