timeline for texas flooding
The Texas flood event is still in the news. Rescues have turned into searches and there has been more rain in the area. I noted that some elected officials said something like, “Now is not the time to figure out what went wrong.” That was early in the event. It reminded me of such statements following an incident of gun violence. I say, you need to capitalize on the event and learn from it, to ensure that the same mistakes are not made again, either by yourself or another agency who might just learn from your disaster.
CNN has this, What happened in the hours before, during and after a catastrophic deluge hit Texas Hill Country
There are some key elements in the timeline that jumped out at me. In no particular order:
There was plenty of outreach to state and local officials from the National Weather Service before the flooding
Texas emergency management responded appropriately (based on this one timeline)
River gauges don’t do you much good if they are not working—maintenance is key!
Camp Mystic got plenty of warning (an hour) to have saved all the girls that died that night
It is great to say you use the Incident Command System (ICS), but you need to activate it in a timely manner.
There was no mention of local emergency operations centers (EOC) being activated
Many people acted heroically, and still people died
I’ll add one commentary. I was stationed at Fort Hood Texas (Central Texas) very early in my military career. One of the messages that stuck in my mind was the warning that, “It does not need to raining where you are to have flood waters rise quickly.” People in that region should have understood that and not been acting as though it was rain “in their area” that mattered.
Texas also has many “low water crossings.” These are cheaper than building a bridge. When flooding occurs, the waters just sweep over these concrete structures—they also take any vehicles trying to cross with them.
To my point in the first paragraph above, there is this quote from the CNN article, “As searchers agonizingly scour the area for unaccounted flood victims, local officials have been adamant they could not have done more to prevent the tragedy.” I dare say that statement is never true, and in this case, blatantly untrue. For a minimum, there was a lack of a warning system that they knew was needed, they didn’t use warning systems that they did have.
