kerr county officials asleep at the wheel when flood hit

“There’s nothing we could have done” is a phrase that rings hollow to me. This is what the Kerr County officials who were responsible for emergency management said about their lack of response to the flooding that killed over 100 people.

See this CBS News clip, Flood Response Answers

Kerr County is small like many other rural counties. It seems to have one person designated to do the work of emergency management for the county. That person was home sick in bed at the time of the flooding. I’ll grant you that everyone has the right to be sick…but, it is what you did “before a disaster” is what is important in times like this. If the principal official is not available, he or she must let their direct report (sheriff) know that they are not functioning. In this case, it is the sheriff’s job to pick up that responsibility…unless he delegates it to someone else.

Which brings me to the preparation needed for small emergency management organizations. You need to train people to be your back-up. They likely are not direct reports to you, but they need to have enough information to step in and have a functional disaster response in your absence. What is the plan for when you are gone on vacation to Hawaii?

At King County I arranged for a sister county to be prepared to “step in” and function for us when we went away to a one-week remote earthquake exercise. We did the same for them, when they had unit training that was remote.

I also made sure that my boss knew of the arrangement and had the appropriate contact information for the partner organization and visa versa. 

Another comment made was that while the county did not send out any warning messages using the system they had in place, “other agencies performed that function” and so it would just have been duplicative. Guess what, duplication is good! Multiple messages are important! The county likely had subscribers to their warning software, if it went beyond the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA)

Lastly, as I’ve written previously. There were many failures by government and organizations that allowed buildings to be in the floodway; that did not self-fund a warning system; that did not have functional flood gages operational, etc. And, when getting a warning, the girls camp leadership delayed evacuation of the cabins. All the deaths at Camp Mystic were preventable!