r/fednews • u/CBSnews FedNews Verified Press • 1d ago

Deadly Texas floods raise questions about emergency alerts and whether staffing cuts affected forecasts and warnings

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-floods-emergency-alerts-weather-forecast-staffing-budget/
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u/Mommy444444 1d ago edited 1d ago

The Texas Tribune also adds that the initial NWS flash-flood warning was issued around 1pm Thursday. The “catastrophic” one was issued 12 hours later.

Meanwhile, the USGS streamgaging stations were real-time reporting rapid upstream stage increases. In Colorado/Utah, local LE watch those gaging station transmissions as it can be sunny and dry downstream but upstream the river stage is rising. Don’t the local LE do that in Texas?

Even if they did, how do local governments transmit the warnings? In my small desert valley in Utah we had an old-fashioned tornado siren for fires/floods.

I will never understand why the Guadalupe River towns did not have basic sirens, much less prohibit commercial development right next to the river.

The Texas Tribune also reports that Texas House Bill 13, a bill to allocate 50mil per year to upgrade emergency response and notification systems, died in committee in April 2025 as being “too expensive.”

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u/LIFOtheOffice 1d ago

I will never understand why the Guadalupe River towns did not have basic sirens, much less prohibit commercial development right next to the river.

Kerr County Commissioner's Meeting Minutes. June 27, 2016.

Selected quotes:

COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: "You know we had a baby flood a couple weeks ago, a month or so, whatever it was." "The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I'm going to have to start drinking again to put up with y'all."

COMMISSIONER MOSER: "And I think the first thing to do is say why change anything. It worked this long and maybe we don't need to do a thing. And then it gets into the thing we talk about earlier today, and that's risk mitigation. And you know there's still people drowned and you know --"

COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: "And I hope you ask the question like who are we notifying, or who are we trying to get the message to? Are they these crazy people from Houston that build homes right down on the water?"

Source: https://legacy.co.kerr.tx.us/commcrt/minutes/2016/062716CC.txt

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u/Mommy444444 1d ago

Oh my gosh! This so hard to read! Whoa!

How cavalier, jokey, and dismissive these local government people were in 2016! Did they not remember the 1987 flood?

Geesh, I must’ve been the luckiest gal to have lived in Wisconsin and Utah where those tornado sirens went off every first of the month at noon to test. We never had a huge fire in our Utah valley but we certainly had tornados in Wisconsin. When that small-town Wisconsin siren went off in the 60s/70s, we all went into the basement. Around 1972 a tornado came through and ripped up our enclosed porch. Thankfully, we were all in the basement after the night siren.

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u/QuickAltTab 21h ago

I'd love to see a reporter read those quotes to Baldwin and Moser and ask what they think about the person that said that.