Kerr County officials failed to follow certain aspects of disaster plan during Texas floods

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A five-year-old emergency management plan, obtained by The Texas Tribune late Thursday, shows that Kerr County and Kerrville officials were operating from a generic disaster response template that, in some cases, officials failed to follow when 30-plus feet of floodwaters swamped the Guadalupe River banks on July 4.

The plan, which all counties must file with the Texas Division of Emergency Management, serves as a disaster playbook for local officials.

Emergency management plans spell out who is in charge of the entire response to a mass disaster that could result in serious injury and death, and designate which tasks — evacuations, medical treatment tents, sanitation and the recovery of bodies — go to which county and city administrative leaders to keep confusion at a minimum and bureaucratic bottlenecks from occurring.

It’s not known if Kerr County and Kerrville officials used the plan. A request for comment was not immediately returned late Thursday.

But if they had, there was a clear set of instructions on when to increase monitoring of weather once a flood watch was issued, the first sign that trouble may be approaching, and also at what point evacuations should begin. And the plan indicates that all of the top officials in the area considered flash flooding and flooding as the greatest threat to Kerrville and Kerr County.

“Our cities of Kerrville, Ingram and Kerr County is (SIC) exposed to many hazards, all of which have the potential for disrupting the community, causing casualties and damaging or destroying public or private property,” the November 2020 plan begins.

Key points in the plan that seemed to have been disregarded included calls for evacuation training ahead of a disaster and a simple four-step guide on when to increase monitoring of weather.

A flood watch was issued for the area on July 3 at 1:18 p.m. At that point, according to the plan, “readiness actions may include increased situation monitoring, reconnaissance of known trouble spots, deploying warning signs.” And once a flash flood warning was issued at about 1:14 a.m. on July 4, local officials could have started informing the public about the warning and begun evacuation of low-lying areas as well as opening shelters to house evacuees.

The plan puts the the county judge and the mayor in charge of offering general guidance to disaster response. It puts the emergency management coordinator or the city manager as the lead to direct the overall response. Initially city officials had to take lead because the top three county officials were out missing when the flooding began.

According to testimony earlier Thursday at a legislative hearing, both Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha and William “Dub” Thomas, the county’s emergency management director, were asleep when the flooding began pouring into homes and Camp Mystic, which resulted in more than 100 people killed. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly was out of town the day of the flooding.

Local officials told lawmakers that they received little warning about the flood, that it came too quickly for an adequate response. Thomas admitted to state Sen. Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican, that Kerr County and Kerrville first responders had never conducted a countywide evacuation exercise ever.

“We have not done a full-scale evacuation exercise,” Thomas admitted.

But the 55-page plan, indicates that local officials should have been better prepared. The plan was released to the Tribune by the Texas Division of Emergency Management in response to a public records request. Kerr County officials have not responded to a similar request made earlier by the Tribune.

“Proper mitigation actions, such as floodplain management, and fire inspections, can prevent or reduce disaster-related losses,” the plan states. “Detailed emergency planning, training of emergency responders and other personnel, and conducting periodic emergency drills and exercises can improve our readiness to deal with emergency situations.”

One attachment to the plan lists 12 types of emergency management training courses and boxes to be filled in detailing the number of personnel requiring training and the number of personnel that have completed the courses. All are left blank.

A grid showing which emergency task is to be performed by a list of 33 Kerr County and Kerrville employees by one of three initials: P for primary responsibility of that task, S for support responsibility and C for coordination responsibility.

According to the grid, the Kerr County sheriff had the primary role of warning residents of the emergency with the Kerrville mayor, fire chief, police chief, Kerr County judge, emergency management director, justice of the peace, and constables having supporting roles.

Evacuation duties were supposed to have fallen to the county emergency management director to coordinate and the Kerrville police chief was to have a primary role.

“It is possible for a major disaster to occur at any time and at any place,” the plan warned. “Some emergency situations occur with little or no warning.”

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