El Paso Fire Department Water Rescue Team continues to help in Texas floods
The specially-trained members of the EPFD Water Rescue Team have been deployed since Friday, July 4. The team is currently working in Burnet County with agencies from across Texas searching for persons missing after the flash floods, the city of El Paso said in a news release on Monday, July 7.
Burnet County is located northwest of Austin.
More: Here's how to help those affected by the devastating Texas floods
"Our personnel are not assigned to fixed shifts, which means they remain mission-ready around the clock," EPFD Water Rescue Coordinator and Battalion Chief Kris Menendez said in a statement. "The team's commitment, resilience, and hope are unwavering — we're here to help our fellow Texans, no matter the challenge."
The El Paso team, as part of Texas Task Force 1, has assisted in rescue efforts in areas of Marble Falls and Burnet, the city said.
The El Paso team, which is based in Llano, is currently set for a operations in central Texas through July 15, but additional water rescue personnel can be mobilized if needed, the city stated.
EPFD Water Rescue Team members helped in swift-water rescues of two people clinging to trees after their vehicles were swept away by floodwaters in Marble Falls, city officials said.
The team also assisted in emergency evacuations of victims from a flooded RV park. Teams members helped about 35 to 40 people and pets get to safety, the city of El Paso stated. Some residents were rescued off the rooftops of RVs by a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter.
The EPFD Water Rescue Team trains year-round and is regularly utilized in water rescues and body recoveries in the fast-moving canals next to the border alongside Rio Grande.
The team also assists in regional rescue emergencies, including recently during flooding in Ruidoso, New Mexico.
Daniel Borunda may be reached at dborunda@elpasotimes.com and @BorundaDaniel on X.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Texas flooding: El Paso FD Water Rescue Team continues search help
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The Verge
2 days ago
- The Verge
How to design an actually good flash flood alert system
Flash floods have wrought more havoc in the US this week, from the Northeast to the Midwest, just weeks after swollen rivers took more than 130 lives across central Texas earlier this month. Frustrations have grown in the aftermath of that catastrophe over why more wasn't done to warn people in advance. Local officials face mounting questions over whether they sent too many or sent too few mobile phone alerts to people. Some Texans have accused the state of sending out too many alerts for injured police officers in the months leading up to the floods, which may have led to residents opting out of receiving warnings. And hard-hit Kerr County, where more than 100 people died, lacked sirens along riverbanks to warn people of rising waters. These are all important questions to answer that can help keep history from repeating itself in another disaster. Failing to translate flood forecasts into timely messages that tell people what they need to do to stay safe can have tragic consequences. In Texas and elsewhere, the solution is more wide-ranging than fixing any single channel of communication. The Verge spoke with experts about what it would take to design an ideal disaster warning system. The solution is more wide-ranging than fixing any single channel of communication When you have a matter of hours or maybe even minutes to send a lifesaving message, you need to use every tool at your disposal. That communication needs to start long before the storm rolls in, and involves everyone from forecasters to disaster managers and local officials. Even community members will need to reach out to each other when no one else may be able to get to them. By definition, flash floods are difficult to forecast with specificity or much lead time. But forecasts are only one part of the process. There are more hurdles when it comes to getting those forecasts out to people, an issue experts describe as getting past 'the last mile.' Doing so starts with a shift in thinking from ''what will the weather be' to 'what will the weather do,'' explains Olufemi Osidele, CEO of Hydrologic Research Center (HRC), which oversees a global flash flood guidance program. The technical term is 'impact-based forecasting,' and the goal is to relay messages that help people understand what actions to take to keep themselves safe. In the hours leading up to devastating floods in central Texas, the National Weather Service sent out escalating alerts about the growing risk of flash floods. But not everyone received alerts on their phones with safety instructions from Kerr County officials during crucial hours, according to records obtained by NBC News. While meteorologists can say there's a life-threatening storm approaching, it typically falls to local authorities to determine what guidance to give to specific communities on how and when to evacuate or take shelter. 'Emergency responders need to know what are the appropriate actions to take or what's needed in the case of a flash flood before an event happens so that they can react quickly, because the time to respond to that event is likely very short,' says Theresa Modrick Hansen, chief operating officer at HRC. 'Time is really the critical issue for disaster managers.' Without prior planning, local alerting authorities might be stuck staring at a blank screen when deciding what warning to send to people in the heat of the moment. Many alerting platforms don't include instructions on how to write that message, according to Jeannette Sutton, an associate professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany, SUNY. Sutton is also the founder of The Warn Room and consults with local organizations on how to improve their warning systems. 'When you sit down at the keyboard, you have a blank box that you have to fill in with the information that's going to be useful to the public,' Sutton says. 'And when you are in a highly volatile, emotional, chaotic situation, and you all of a sudden have to create [a] message very quickly that is really clear and complete and directed to the right people at the right time, it's really hard to think of all of that in the moment.' There aren't national standards for how a flood alert system should work in the US, so practices vary from place to place. Sutton recommends an end-to-end warning system that connects each step of the process and the people along the way. It includes forecasters and hydrologists who collect data and run it through predictive models to understand the potential impact on communities — identifying which specific populations or infrastructure are most vulnerable. They need to get that information quickly to disaster managers who can then reach people most at risk with safety instructions using channels of communication they've thought through in advance. Ideally, those alerts are tailored to specific locations and give people clear instructions — telling them who should evacuate, when, and where, for instance. A strong message should include five things, according to Sutton: who the message is from, what the hazard is doing, the location and timing of the threat, and what actions to take to protect yourself. 'If you are receiving a warning that's statewide or county wide, it can be difficult for some people to understand if they should act or evacuate,' says Juliette Murphy, CEO and co-founder of the flood forecasting company FloodMapp. 'Or if a warning states that a river will reach 30 feet, that might not mean much to some people if they don't have a hydrology understanding.' Murphy's company is now using its mapping tools to help state and federal agencies find dozens of people still missing since the July 4th floods. FloodMapp hadn't worked with counties affected by the floods prior to this disaster, but Murphy says she'd like to work with local agencies in the future that want to improve their warning systems. Kerr County is under scrutiny for lacking flood sirens, even though county commissioners had been talking about the need to upgrade its flood systems — including adding sirens — since at least 2016. The county sits in an area known as 'flash flood alley' because of the way the hilly topography of the area heightens flood risk during storms. Sirens in neighboring communities have been credited with saving lives. 'If I were to envision a really good, robust warning system in flash flood alley, I would say that there would be sirens in these very rural, remote areas,' Sutton says. Sirens can be critical for reaching people outdoors who may not have cell service and are hard to reach. Even so, it's no silver bullet. The sound doesn't necessarily reach people indoors who are further from the riverbanks but still in harm's way. And it doesn't provide clear instructions on what actions people need to take. Along with sirens, Sutton says she'd recommend making sure communities are prepared with 'call trees' in advance. That means people are physically picking up the phone; each person is responsible for calling three more people, and so on. 'It's the human touch,' Sutton says. In worst-case scenarios, that might include going out to pound on neighbors' doors. And that human touch can be especially important for reaching someone who might be skeptical of a government agency sending an alert but might trust a friend or fellow church member, for example, or for those who speak a different language than what officials use. Wireless emergency alerts are also critical; Sutton considers them the most powerful alerting system across the US because it does not require people to opt in to get a message. But there are also warning systems that people can opt in to for alerts, including CodeRed weather warnings. Kerr County used CodeRed to send out warnings to people subscribed to that system, and audio recordings from disaster responders on July 4th have raised more questions about whether those messages were too delayed to keep people out of danger. In an email to The Verge, a Kerr County spokesperson said the county is committed to 'transparency' and a 'full review' of the disaster response. State lawmakers start a special session next week and are expected to consider legislation to bolster flood warning systems and emergency communications. One Senate bill would let municipalities gather residents' contact information to enroll them in text alerts that they could opt out of if they don't want to receive them. People opting out of notifications has also been a concern — particularly after a deluge of 'Blue alerts' sent after a law enforcement officer has been injured or killed. Frustrations have flared up on social media this month over a statewide Blue alert issued for someone suspected of being involved in the 'serious injury' of a police officer at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Alvarado, Texas. 'Texas can't adequately warn people about deadly floods, but it can immediately let me know that a cop got hurt 250 miles away from me,' one post with more than 20,000 likes on Bluesky says. The FCC has received thousands complaints about the Blue alert system in Texas, CBS News reported in October of last year. 'Alert fatigue' is a concern if it pushes people to ignore warnings or opt out of receiving them altogether. That can be an issue during extreme weather if authorities include Blue alerts and extreme weather warnings in the same 'imminent threat' category of wireless emergency alerts. Again, this can vary from locality to locality. 'It's really frustrating when they choose to send a Blue alert through an imminent threat channel,' Sutton says. To stop getting those pings about police officers, someone might opt out of the imminent threat category of wireless emergency alerts — but that means they would also stop getting other alerts in the same channel for weather emergencies. 'This is exactly what we don't want to have happen, because when you turn it off you're not going to get the message for that flash flood. So it's really dangerous,' Sutton says. 'This is exactly what we don't want to have happen' Even so, we still don't have data on who might have missed a lifesaving alert because of frustration with Blue alerts. Nor do we know the extent to which people are just ignoring notifications, or why. The number of public safety alerts sent in Texas has doubled since 2018 for a wide range of warnings, including Blue alerts, Silver alerts for missing elderly adults, Amber alerts for missing children, and more, the Houston Chronicle reports. And when it comes to warning people about flash floods in particular, experts still stress the need to get warnings to people via every means possible. If someone misses a wireless emergency alert, there should be another way to reach them. There are likely going to be gaps when it comes to any single strategy for alerting people, as well as other complications that can impede the message getting out. (On July 4th, floodwaters rose in the dead of night — making it even harder to notify people as they slept.) That's why a 'Swiss cheese' approach to warning people can be most effective in overcoming that last mile, Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist and manager of the Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains. (And it's similar to an ideology used to prevent the spread of disease.) 'You know you got slices of Swiss cheese and they've got holes in them. Nothing is ever perfect. But if you layer enough pieces of cheese, it reduces the risk because something might go through one hole, but then it gets blocked,' Vagasky says. 'We always want people to have multiple ways of receiving warnings.'
Yahoo
2 days ago
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Gov. Greg Abbott visits San Angelo, praises flood response, promises continued recovery aid
Texas Governor Greg Abbott visited San Angelo and held a press conference at the Spur Arena on Thursday, addressing Texas' ongoing response to severe flooding that impacted the state earlier in July. Prior to the press conference, Abbott received a briefing on the flood recovery efforts in Tom Green County and visited the Disaster Recovery Center at the Concho Valley Transit Annex to meet with families, first responders and volunteers. State Sen. Charles Perry, State Rep. Drew Darby, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Tom Kidd, Tom Green County Judge Lane Carter, San Angelo Mayor Tom Thompson, San Angelo Fire Department Chief Patrick Brody and other state officials joined Abbott for the briefing and press conference. 'In a disaster, saving lives is the first and foremost thing that anybody should prioritize,' Abbott said. 'Our first responders have stepped up and saved so many lives across the entire region. We will continue the search for everybody that was affected by these devastating floods. More: What to know about assistance and flood recovery in San Angelo: FEMA declares disaster More: San Angelo city council approves $1 million task force for debris clean up 'At the same time, we are working with local officials and the community to go through the many stages of the recovery process. Texas is going to remain working in Tom Green County and across the state until the recovery is complete.' Abbott noted the individual and public assistance available from the state and federal government for Texans who have been impacted by the recent devastating flooding. During the press conference, Abbott mentioned the agenda for the upcoming special session, which includes legislation to improve early warning systems and emergency response communities across the state. 'We're gathering information that helps us understand the way the response was undertaken here,' Abbott said. 'And I gotta tell ya, we've not seen a better response in the state of Texas (than Tom Green County), and there are articulated reasons for that. One, there was a great deal of collaboration at all levels from the very first minute, all the way until this moment in time. The response by local officials was extraordinary.' 'In talking to TDEM Chief Kidd, we consider the way Tom Green County, and I say the County, and it obviously involves the city, your mayor, every local official at every level. We consider (the response) to be a model for the way that communities need to respond to disasters like this.' Paul Witwer covers high school sports and Angelo State University sports for The San Angelo Standard-Times. Reach him at sports@ Follow him on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, @Paul_Witwer. This article originally appeared on San Angelo Standard-Times: Abbott praises San Angelo flood response, vows continued state support
The Hill
3 days ago
- The Hill
Texas ‘economic miracle' crashes into new reality of extreme weather
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas leaders' dreams of unlimited development and a rush of AI data centers are on a collision course with a new reality of extreme weather, as this month's flash floods hammer a landscape plagued by long-term drought. Heading into the summer, the region faced perhaps its worst drought on record, until the dregs of Tropical Storm Barry poured torrential rain over Central Texas. With Texans now facing both the aftermath of floods and a referendum that could release billions into new state water supplies and flood control projects, experts told The Hill, the state faces a critical question: Can it make the necessary investments in time to keep the economic miracle growing — and can it do so without either getting washed away or sucking the environment dry? When it rains, it pours The July 4 deluge funneled through limestone canyons, swelling rivers that tore through the Hill Country west of Austin and San Antonio and killing at least 132, with more than 100 others still missing — a death toll that makes the floods among Texas's deadliest weather disasters of the last century. Nor was that the end. Last Sunday, parts of the Hill Country that flooded Independence Day weekend were hit again by rainfalls that topped 10 inches, leading local leaders to call for mandatory evacuations. But all this, experts say, was not enough to definitively break the grip of drought. Instead, they point to a new reality of chronic scarcity of water — punctuated, but not broken, by its sudden, terrifying abundance. 'It's not a matter of 'if' there is another drought, but 'when,'' said Robert Mace, director of the Meadows Center at Texas State University, a regional mecca for the study of water. 'And the question is: Is that 'when' tomorrow? As soon as the rains stop, does the next drought start?' For Austin, at least, the prognosis for its water supply has become less 'scary,' Mace noted. The equivalent of more than 17,000 Olympic-sized pools worth of water thundering into the reservoir on Lake Travis took it from 41 percent full in April to 74 percent full by mid-July — inflows which have been matched or exceeded on the city's other reservoirs. But the rains, Mace noted, may have been less an end to the drought than a freak parentheses within it: a perfect storm of 'three firehoses of moisture colliding over the Hill County' amid a broader reality in which Texas is getting drier. Even after the floods, reservoirs on the San Antonio and Nueces rivers, critical for cities including San Antonio and Corpus Christi, remain near historic lows. Water fights On the eve of the floods, local attempts to stop the drawdown of Hill Country aquifers were stymied at the highest levels of the state. In late June, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) vetoed a bipartisan law that would have allowed a Central Texas water district above the rapidly depleting Hays-Trinity Aquifer to begin charging fees for groundwater withdrawals. That veto came amid an array of water fights playing out across Texas, with a wave of more than two-dozen new data centers planned for water-stressed parts of the state and hundreds of thousands of new residents — on balance the most in the country — moving to the state each year. On the one hand, the state is 'looking into the abyss,' said Rice University environmental law professor Gabriel Collins. 'But what you see next to us is a partially assembled jetpack — where with a bit of tinkering we can fly out of here,' Collins said. In the Hill Country region west of Austin, rivers are at their lowest levels 'since record keeping began over 100 years ago,' Charlie Hickman, executive manager of engineering with the Guadalupe Blanco River Authority, told local station KXAN last month. In May, the Edwards Aquifer, a key source of water for San Antonio, dropped to its lowest level since the 1950s — driving local regulators to cut permitted pumping by nearly half. Driving this dynamic is, above all, a planet heated up by the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels, which has created a hotter, thirstier atmosphere that sucks moisture from the land, and increasingly replaces soaking rains — which replenish soil and aquifers — with torrential storms that run right off them. Climate change has plunged the state into a new reality, said Mace. In the past when a drought ended, he said, 'You could say, 'Woohoo, it's over. We're not gonna have to do that again.'' But now, less than a decade after the worst drought in the region's history, 'here we are back in it.' Mace said that 'this is probably the new normal going forward: that we keep experiencing droughts worse than the previous drought.' The downstream effects are playing out in legal battles across Texas, including lawsuits in Bryan-College Station and East Texas over aquifer pumping rights. In the near term at least, that reality means shortage and conflict — at least regionally. In April, a private water supplier announced it was cutting off supplies to nine planned developments in Central Texas; in June, a municipality west of Austin considered banning bulk sales of water, a key lifeline to exurban residents whose wells have gone dry. In Montgomery County in East Texas — one of the 10 fastest-growing regions in the country — the cities of Magnolia and Conroe have halted the permitting of new commercial or residential wells. 'So anxious for my cities' The downstream effects of shortages are playing out between cities as well. Last week, the city of Bryan-College Station — home of Texas A&M University — settled a lawsuit over a permit its groundwater authority had given to a landowner selling water from the aquifer to a rapidly growing suburb of Austin. Similar legal fights are playing out in Houston County and the city of Jacksonville, in East Texas. Making the picture more difficult for cities is a 2023 state law that makes it easier for residents — or developers of subdivisions or data centers — to remove themselves from a city's jurisdiction and tax base. That law could allow developers of data centers or real estate to effectively secede from city authority, allowing them to drill their own wells into the city water supply, without the city being able to charge them taxes or impact fees. While cities have the potential to get ahead of that problem by signing preemptive development agreements with new entrants — effectively getting them to help fund the new civic water infrastructure they need — the prospect of the new rush 'makes me so anxious for my cities,' environmental lawyer Toni Rask said. Most of the cities and water districts she represents, Rask said, 'are just tiny, and it's easy for them to get pushed around by big, fancy tech companies.' Floods mark the other extreme of development risk, as worsening rains meet a largely uninsured populace — raising the risk of financial death spirals, as totaled mortgages cut into the financial health of municipalities, which largely rely on property taxes for their financial lifeblood. The Independence Day floods brought at least $22 billion in property damage — losses that were largely uninsured, leading to risk of foreclosure and stark drops in the revenues of towns such as Kerrville. After the floods, 'it's hard to imagine how fundamentally altered these communities are going to be,' said Jayson O'Neill, who studies climate at the Focal Point Strategy Group. For small Central Texas towns where most residents are on the hook for damages, 'you just lost your entire property tax base. There's no value there anymore.' Only 1 to 2 percent of inland Texans have flood coverage — with permissive building codes that have allowed 5 million state residents to build their homes in floodplains. The state even allows citizens to build their homes in floodways — land immediately adjacent to a watercourse — leaving it up to municipalities to set stricter limits. Many may not be aware they are at flood risk — Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood maps are both outdated and incomplete, with large swaths of Texas, including many flood prone areas, with no flood data at all. Property owners can also challenge FEMA to have their properties removed from maps, which relieves them from the responsibility of buying federally subsidized flood insurance — as did the owners of Camp Mystic, the girl's camp where 27 died when the Guadalupe River spilled its banks. Voters get a say this November When it comes to water scarcity, rather than flood, Texas has taken some action. Like most experts interviewed by The Hill, Rice University's Collins argued that while Texas towns and cities have to wake up to a new reality of drought, the state is far from running out of water — and notes that it may be about to get a huge infusion of new resources. In November, voters will get a chance to approve a referendum advocates have billed as a generational investment in water infrastructure that would unlock a $20 billion public investment in new water supplies, conservation and recycling. Once federal, local and corporate investments are added in, that's a 'meaningful bite' of the approximately $154 billion the state needs to safeguard its water supplies, said Jeremy Mazur of Texas 2036, a nonpartisan think tank focused on the state's long-term future. This year, Mazur said, 'the legislature recognized that the water supply issue access is one of the more substantive policy issues informing the continuation of the Texas economic miracle.' The bill enabling the referendum wasn't unanimously popular in the legislature — conservative advocacy group Texans for Fiscal Responsibility urged members to vote 'no,' warning that it represented a new, permanent expense that risks 'growing government bureaucracy without guaranteeing outcomes.' A handful of members voted against it, including state Rep. Brian Harrison (R), who argued that Texas's budget surplus should instead be spent on property tax cuts. But it passed the state Senate unanimously and the House by a factor of more than 10 to 1. If voters approve the referendum in November, a new funding will head to water projects across the state, ranging from desalination of seawater and briny water to the reuse of wastewater and the repair of leaky pipes — as well as flood control projects, which have taken on new public importance in the wake of the July 4 disaster. The state's towns and cities, Collins said, should think about water not in terms of something to be mined and ultimately depleted — like copper or oil — but in terms of a shifting, balanced portfolio of supplies. The gold standard for this approach, he argued, is the city of San Antonio, which combines aquifer pumping, underground storage, desalination and the state's largest recycling program. But the state's municipalities face significant risk if they get the calculus wrong, Collins said. 'People and companies move to Texas,' he said, because it's 'attractive' and they want to, 'not because they have to.' 'And if we ever do something, have a set of circumstances emerge that changes that analysis, we will suffer for decades and generations as a result.'
