Dying for austerity
By 
Investigations into the Guadalupe River flood and its horrible aftermath will have to try to determine why the accurate information about this impending flooding the NWS had did not reach enough people. This will certainly be one factor:
A former sheriff pushed Kerr County commissioners nearly a decade ago to adopt a more robust flood-warning system, telling government officials how he “spent hours in those helicopters pulling kids out of trees here (in) our summer camps,” according to meeting records.
Then-Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer was a proponent of outdoor sirens, having responded as a deputy to the 1987 floods that killed 10 teenagers at a camp in nearby Kendall County. He made the comments in 2016, after deadly floods ravaged a different part of Texas the year before.
“We were trying to think of, what can we do to make sure that never happens here?” Hierholzer, who served as Kerr County sheriff from 2000 to 2020, recalled in an interview Sunday with The Wall Street Journal. “And that’s why we were looking at everything that we could come up with, whether it be sirens, whether it be any other systems that we could.”
That suggestion, from him and others, was never adopted.
Officials in Kerr County, where nearly 70 people are dead from floods, and many others are missing, including girls from Camp Mystic, have debated the use of outdoor warning sirens since at least 2016, even as other Texas cities and counties adopted them to sound loud alerts ahead of floods and other natural disasters, according to a review by the Journal. Minutes of their public meetings showed an inability to get state and federal funds has been a delaying factor.
These outdoor-warning sirens have been installed in other flood-prone Texas counties, including Comal and Kendall, which also sit along the Guadalupe River. Sirens went off in the Kendall County community of Comfort when floodwaters approached there after inundating Kerr County early Friday.
[…]
Moser said in an interview Sunday that Kerr County considered picking up the tab itself but didn’t include the cost in the annual budget. “It was probably just, I hate to say the word priorities,” he said. “Trying not to raise taxes.” Officials took other steps, he said, such as adding barriers over low-water crossings and flood gauges.
“We just didn’t implement a sophisticated system that gave an early warning system,” he said. “That’s what was needed, and is needed.”
Meanwhile, a bill introduced earlier this year in the Texas Legislature to create a statewide program to help fund the use of outdoor sirens and other emergency alerts died in committee.
This has to be seen as a major leadership failure — it’s not like there isn’t anti-tax sentiment in the Texas jurisdiction that did implement better warning systems.