another alert and warning gone wrong. this time in texas

The head line tells the story, Camp Mystic’s leader got a ‘life threatening’ flood alert. They evacuated an hour later

It is literally a “read it and weep” story. The National Weather Service did its job to the best of their ability. The storms were detected. Flood watches and warnings were sent in a timely manner. The final aspect of warnings that I’ve written about time and again was the fact that people/leadership did not act on the warnings that they did receive.

I can only imagine their thinking. We’ve had watches and warnings before. We have had flood events before. Maybe they didn’t have a well thought out plan to evacuate the children in their charge. Or, they failed to act on the plan they had established. Either way, dereliction of duty is something that come to mind.

Then, as an aside, the county did not issue their own warning messages. They had the capability to do so—but failed to send out warnings using their systems. What can cause that type of failure?

• It was a holiday time period

• Inadequate planning for staffing emergencies

• Inadequate knowledge of their system from a lack of training

• A potential failure of the system they do have—equipment

Likely it was one or more of the first three bullet points. Again, a sad, sad testament to what emergency management is supposed to do.