Who failed during the Texas floods? Alerts were issued, but evacuations never came

Emergency response teams are still scouring the wreckage of the Texas floods for survivors. The death toll, as of Sunday morning, sat at 70 people, with many more still unaccounted for.

The floods came suddenly, in the early hours of Friday morning. But while the scale of the destruction was unexpected they were not entirely without warning as Accuweather and the National Weather Service issued alerts about potential flooding risk.

The alerts started hours before the flooding began and some are questioning why more was not done to evacuate residents, particularly from the flood-prone Hill Country area. A statement from AccuWeather reads: “These warnings should have provided officials with ample time to evacuate camps such as Camp Mystic and get people to safety.”

The Camp Mystic summer camp, which has a capacity of up to 750 children, was in one of the worst-affected parts of the region. On Sunday officials announced that 11 children from Camp Mystic are still unaccounted for.

There is a sense that local authorities should have been better-prepared to deal with the heavy rainfall that was forecast from Thursday afternoon onwards. The scale of the flooding - with Guadalupe River rising by 22 feet in just two hours - was a surprise but the area is known to be susceptible to floods.

More than 1,000 responders are still out searching for survivors but thoughts are already starting to turn to emergency preparation, and how to learn the lessons of this disaster. Speaking on Sunday, AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter outlined why the situation had worsened so dramatically.

“This is perhaps the most flash-flood vulnerable part of the country,” Porter said. “Because of the fact that you have complex terrain, lots of hills and valleys that water can pour into and often times access to Gulf moisture and moisture from the Eastern Pacific.”

“And the Guadalupe River went from probably just a typical lazy river, a little bit of slow motion, to a wall of water with height rises of 30 feet of fast-moving water in less than an hour and there’s nothing worse than fast-moving water, it will destroy everything in its path.”

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