County Emergency Official Says He Was Ill and Sleeping as Texas Floods Hit

New York Times

4 days ago

The emergency management coordinator of Kerr County, which bore the brunt of the deadly July 4 floods in the Texas Hill Country, testified on Thursday that he was sick and asleep when the floodwaters rose in the middle of the night, eventually killing 108 people in the county.
The admission by the official, William B. Thomas IV, came at the start of an extraordinary hearing held by state lawmakers in a packed convention center in city of Kerrville, a short walk from the banks of the Guadalupe River, which surged to record levels in the predawn darkness of July 4.
Hundreds of residents attended the hearing, and many of them hoped to testify in what was expected to be an emotional session lasting for more than 12 hours.
The hearing began with statements from county officials, including Mr. Thomas, the county's emergency management coordinator since 2015. Mr. Thomas had not spoken publicly since the flood, as questions were raised about his whereabouts and why neither he nor anyone else in the county had issued more warnings about the rapidly worsening situation along the river.
'I want to directly address questions about my whereabouts,' Mr. Thomas said. He explained that he had always planned to be off work on July 3 'to fulfill a commitment to my elderly father,' and that because of a 'progressing illness,' he had stayed home.
'I stayed in bed throughout July 3 and did not participate in the regularly scheduled 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Texas Emergency Management Coordination Center coordination calls,' he said.
Those calls included hundreds of participants, according to state officials, and went over the impending severe weather for the holiday weekend. At that time, it was not clear where the strongest rains would fall in the Texas Hill Country and Central Texas.
Mr. Thomas said his supervisors were aware that he was off that day. He testified that he slept through most of July 3; awoke briefly around 2 p.m., when he said there was no indication of local rainfall; and then went back to sleep again until his wife woke him up at 5:30 a.m. on July 4.
By that point, the worst of the flooding had already surged through low-lying communities in the county, including the unincorporated town of Hunt and the summer camps and recreational vehicle parks that sit near the river's banks.
Mr. Thomas said more alerts from the county would have been duplicative since the National Weather Service had already triggered several alerts as the water rose, and that those seemed sufficient. As the county's emergency management coordinator, Mr. Thomas oversees the area's preparations and response to fires, floods and other natural disasters along with the county's judge, Rob Kelly, who is the top ranking official in Kerr County.
Mr. Thomas has years of experience in disaster response, having previously worked at the Texas Department of Public Safety and helped coordinate the response to Hurricane Katrina.
But the criticism did not abate.
'The three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable,' Representative Ann Johnson, a Houston Democrat, said at the hearing.
The judge was away at a second home in Lake Travis, she said, the sheriff didn't wake up until 4:20 a.m., and the emergency management coordinator was sick.
The contrast with neighboring Kendall County, Texas, seemed striking as officials from both counties testified. Kendall County's top elected official, County Judge Shane Stolarczyk, testified on Thursday that his county's emergency manager, Brady Constantine, was on the July 3 state coordination calls and came away with 'an uneasy feeling that night about the weather conditions.'
Mr. Constantine began making phone calls around 4 a.m. July 4, Mr. Stolarczyk said.
Even by then, much of the water's deadly force was at work. Witnesses at the hearing testified that a call for help from Camp Mystic, outside of Hunt, came in at 3:57 a.m. At least 27 Mystic campers and counselors would perish in the floods, most of them from two cabins near the river.
The hearing on Thursday as the second held by a select committee of the State Legislature, part of a special legislative session called by Gov. Greg Abbott to address a range of issues, including flooding response but also partisan redistricting.
Among those attending the hearing were Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who leads the State Senate, and the speaker of the Texas House, Dustin Burrows. Both men promised action and said they would be listening to what residents asked for.
Mayor Joe Herring Jr., of Kerrville called for a flood warning system, potentially including sirens, to be designed and installed before next summer, and asked the state lawmakers for assistance.
'We will need your help to achieve this goal,' he said.
But some local officials doubted that an improved warning system with sirens would have made a meaningful difference on July 4.
'I don't know if sirens would have changed the outcome,' said the Kerr County sheriff, Larry Leitha. 'The water came too fast.'