Devastating flooding in parts of central Texas has led to the deaths of at least 90 people, including 27 campers and counsellors at a Christian summer camp, after the Guadalupe River rose to a height of 26 feet in less than an hour.
The destruction and deaths are spurring questions about how things got so bad, so fast.
The conditions that led to the devastating storm began early last week, with Tropical Storm Barry’s brief stint over Mexico leading its remnants into Texas.
That moisture settled over the state, but the jet stream didn’t push it away.
“So then you basically had all of these really incredibly wet conditions in the atmosphere and then basically getting wrung out like a sponge over an individual area, and it just wasn’t moving a lot,” said Tom di Liberto, meteorologist with Climate Central.
That, combined with the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico and moisture from parts of the Pacific Ocean in the west, led to the perfect conditions for the storm.
More than 30 cm of rain fell in Texas’s Hill Country over a span of several hours early Friday, according to weather forecasting company AccuWeather.
The massive amount of rain sent water into the Guadalupe River, causing it to rise to a height of 26 feet in just 45 minutes, and a confluence of factors turning this disaster so deadly.
The terrain of Texas’ Hill Country, and an ongoing drought, also helped in creating the conditions.
“You have this intense rainfall on a landscape that you could characterize as being a thin layer of bone-dry soil,” said Michael Morgan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The ground was like concrete, but even beneath that thin layer of soil, it’s on top of that soil, rust on top of limestone and granite and that contributed to very rapid runoff into the river system that further accentuated the flooding and helping that big wall of water begin to get created.”
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Locals know the area as “flash flood alley,” but the severity of the storm and the fact it hit in the middle of the night caught many off guard even with warnings.
A map showing the Guadalupe River which overflowed in heavy rains on July 4. Camp Mystic, which was among the locations hit by heavy flooding is also pictured.
Global News
The National Weather Service said in an email to Global News that forecast briefings for emergency management were conducted the morning of July 3 and a flood watch was issued that afternoon.
Warnings were then given that night and the early morning hours of July 4, with “preliminary lead times” of more than three hours.
At 1:14 a.m. Central time, the warnings cautioned of “considerable” impact, a tag that indicates a high-damage threat to the region and triggers wireless emergency alerts on enabled mobile devices.
A flash-flood emergency was then issued for Kerr County as early as 4:03 a.m. local time, with another issued for the Guadalupe River at 5:34 a.m.
“What really turned this into even more of a nightmarish scenario was this happened at night, overnight, into a holiday weekend,” di Liberto said.
“So in a relatively rural area, sometimes it’s hard to get cellphone reception or it’s to get the word out for these things, flash floods coming down the river. It’s the sort of thing that keep meteorologists up at night and unfortunately, this nightmare was a reality.”
There have been some disagreements, however, between Texas and federal officials on the forecast.
“The original forecast that we received on Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted three to six inches of rain in the Concho Valley and four to eight inches of rain in the Hill Country,” said Texas Division emergency management chief W. Nim Kidd.
“The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts nonetheless.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday said the National Weather Service did warn of heavy rain and potential for flash flooding.
“The problem with that is that, to most people in the area, flash flooding would mean one thing, not what it turned out to be, because they deal with flash floods all the time,” Abbott said. “There’s the potential for flash flooding, but there’s no expectation of a water wall of almost 30 feet high.”
Meteorologists say the National Weather Service was mostly on point with its forecast, but said it can be difficult to predict a storm of this severity.
“It is such a unique set of circumstances that go into it,” said Global News chief meteorologist Anthony Farnell. “You can portray risk, and as it starts to unfold, you can issue those warnings and then it’s up to emergency managers to act on those warnings.”
Farnell said the wording of the warnings is also important, comparing flood warnings to flood emergencies and the idea that it can be “life and death, get out now.”
There have also been questions about whether cuts to the National Weather Service may have impacted the response and the forecasts it provided.
“I’ll tell you, if you look at that, what a situation that all is and that was really the Biden setup, that was not our setup,” U.S. President Donald Trump said in comments to reporters on Sunday. “But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it, either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe, and it’s just so horrible to watch.”
Farnell and Morgan said staffing levels did not appear to impact the response, but noted funding for meteorological research can help improve forecasts.
“A lot of people are saying … the amounts were off, but there are certainly limits to predictability,” said Morgan, who previously worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the Biden administration.
“But there’s also further that we can do to improve the quality of the forecast.”
Farnell said warnings about tornadoes or hurricanes are ones that people often take seriously.
But with flood warnings, it’s possible more work needs to be done to figure out how to get people to take those just as seriously as a warning about other severe weather events.
“There’s a lot more that maybe we can do or at least study to figure out how do we get these warnings out when it’s not a category 5 hurricane or an EF4 tornado,” Farnell said.
“When it’s a flash flood setup, how do we portray that risk to the public and maybe get them out of harm’s way?”
