"Kerr County failed to secure a warning system, even as local officials remained aware of the risks and as billions of dollars were available for similar projects." 

"The warning last fall was, in retrospect, achingly prescient.

“It is likely” that Kerr County “will experience a flood event in the next year,” city and county officials concluded in a report for the Federal Emergency Management Agency released last October. Such floods, they added, could pose a particular danger to people in “substandard structures” and result in “increased damage, injuries, or loss of life.”

One solution, county officials noted, would be a flood warning system that could alert residents to rising waters. They estimated the cost of such a system at less than $1 million, and noted that FEMA had grant programs that could pay for it.

But by the time floodwaters raged down the Guadalupe River last Friday morning, killing at least 121, including at least 36 children, no such alarm system had been installed in Kerr County. A week later, amid trees shorn of their bark from the force of the water, recovery crews were still cutting through towering piles of debris, in search of the missing.

The October warning, part of a 220-page “hazard mitigation” report that addressed a range of threats and that counties are required to send periodically to FEMA, followed years of failed attempts by local officials to secure funding for such a system, according to records and interviews with local officials."

Christopher Flavelle, J. David Goodman and Andrea Fuller report for the New York Times  July 10, 2025.  [2]