This was the technology they needed, and apparently, they had it. They didn't use it.
Hulyo 11, 2025
"The Texas county where nearly 100 people were killed and more than 160 remain missing had the technology to turn every cellphone in the river valley into a blaring alarm..."
"... but local officials did not do so before or during the early-morning hours of July 4 as river levels rose to record heights, inundating campsites and homes, a Washington Post examination found."
Mga Post
52 komento:
You know you got it... Shout if it makes you feel good!
I get that the job of the media is to generate controversy. And I'm sick over these deaths. And, as a lawyer, proximate cause comes into play. But I don't like these stories. From the East Coast media, it seems like taunting.
The Texas Supreme Court recently reversed the Texas Court of Appeals in a case involving Omaha's Werner Trucking. Verdict for something like $70 million. On an icy day, a vehicle crosses the median and hits the Warner truck that was driving under the speed limit. The allegation was that the Werner truck should have pulled off the road and not be in the position of being hit by the vehicle that crossed the median.
The point here is that there will be lawsuits. The county government is the ostensible deep pocket as Camp Mystic certainly doesn't have enough insurance for something like this.
Just sick over this whole thing.
Is this flooded part of Texas near the part of Texas where they had that school shooting and the men were all afraid to go in so it dragged out longer and more folks died?
I'm so glad I never had to live in Texas. Northern Wisconsin with the ingrained old men in political power is the closest I got, and I was pretty well immunized growing up in Cook Co. Illinois and covering local government meetings early on...
Fight the power in Texas indeed.
The life you save might be your own...
"Shout if it makes you feel good!"
Interesting but I question the effectiveness, especially at the camps with the young boys and girls.
At Scout camp outs, we collect kids phones (if they bring them- most do) so they aren’t glued to their phones. We usually put them in the Troop trailer locked in one of the compartments. These camps have similar procedures. So really, only the adults would have had phones.
I’ll add that I wake up after storms have moved through and see where I’ve had notifications about severe weather in the area. I sleep through them and I don’t drink or do anything that would otherwise make me really out of it. I’m just a heavy sleeper. Likewise, I have an actual weather siren that is probably 150 yards away from my house. I notice it when they test monthly during the day, but it would never wake me when it went off at night.
The cell phone blasts further downstream in the RV sites likely would have saves lives. Those were adults or families with adults and no restrictions on cell phone usage. Not everybody would have slept through the blaring and Texans being Texans, they’d have woken folks in campers and tents around them.
Weather radios are the way to go really. They are on the AM band which can easily reach many of those rural areas where cell phone coverage is spotty or non-existent. After there there will be a concerted effort to get additional river sensors, sirens, new alert plans, etc but the simplest solution in addition to all the new systems is the $20-30 NOAA weather radio with hand crank battery charger and built in flashlight off of Amazon or at a Army Surplus store.
You might prefer to be without warnings. With warnings come false alarms, and the alarm agency is going to protect itself by issuing alarms all the time in case something does happen.
The kids didn’t have phones but others at the camp must have had phones.
Sirens is the way to go. Every 10 miles or so.
I used to have a weather radio, decades ago, and it would sound an alarm that would wake you up at night, but I had to get rid of it because it would go off too often. I didn’t need to be woken up to be told there might be a thunderstorm, but that’s how over-alerting it was. That said I plan to go to sleep tonight before the tornado warning is over. But I’m going to assume there will be a siren and I’ll hear it. And yet there could easily be a tornado that nobody sees because it’s night time so the siren never goes off.
We happen to live 200 feet from a tornado alarm. That thing would wake the dead.
"And yet there could easily be a tornado that nobody sees because it’s night time so the siren never goes off."
They can see tornadoes with radar.
Which may or may not have provided an effective warning. There are two issues. One, to assess and report conditions. They did. Two, to predict a flash flood of catastrophic character, in that location. How many times have there been false positive pronouncememts? This was an unpredictable tragedy with short notice of its progress. RIP
Everybody would like an alert system that only went off when the lack of such would result in serious injury or death.
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for one.
Tornadoes.
Potatoes.
Yes, Phradus. And to hell with those who politicize this tragedy.
I am a bit surprised that in a camp with over 700 campers that there is not an over night staff working. At least security team in an ATV roaming the campgrounds looking for anything out of the ordinary. Or monitoring for alerts and alarms.
FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors, Documents Show ~ NYT
The NYT is reporting that FEMA let call center operator contracts expire on July 5, the day after the Texas flood, and calls answered went from 99.7% that day to 36% the next to 16% the next.
"I am a bit surprised that in a camp with over 700 campers that there is not an over night staff working."
Posted by Vonnegan, 7/8/25, 6:26 PM here:
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2025/07/and-you-could-have-my-two-daughters-on.html
Chuckles, do you want to know what the night watchman was doing at Mystic the night of the flood? He was in one of the cabins saving the lives of all of the girls in there*. When he realized the cabins never flooded in 99 years were flooding, he raced down and made the girls get on their mattresses. He then floated with them into the rafters of the cabin, keeping them calm and saving them all. The 2 cabins where girls were lost didn't have rafters - they had dropped ceilings, which is why they had to try to evacuate.
*this has been verified to me by the mother of one of the girls in that cabin. it happened.
A thoughtful commenter noted the other day to problem with the technology. You can provide it, but then who has access to it. As Althouse notes, and many of us in Texas noted, false alarms are very common, and such that most people ignore warnings, if they don't find a way to silence them completely. The issue with slow alarms is exactly what happened in the town of Center Point, TX during this very event, because it took too long for the right official to work the system (long enough for the VFD itself to be flooded by 4' of water).
What I suspect most of you don't see are the articles written, many on Facebook, by local news meteorologists. Besides trying to counter the fake news being spread by people (such as cloud seeding being the cause); they make a very simple point. None of the forecasters predicted this much rain in that amount of time, nor do they have the ability to do so. 15" of rain in a drought area was not expected. Flash Flooding was expected, but +30 ft in a dry riverbed? That's not what the experts thought was going to happen.
Does that clear the Camp (and really camps all over the area, but it is the one with young children, or perhaps Christians because of the bigoted ghouls on the left, that makes the news) of responsibility? Nope. But damn, the area is devastated, and areas loved by the very people who were harmed, are now gone.
What is left is massive devastation, with things that normally belong on the ground are sitting in trees 30ft above rescuers on the ground. Buildings, RVs, livestock, and human bodies; in trees, buried in mud, miles from wherever they began, such that nobody knows who owns these things and what their status may be. That's what Texans care about right now.
Also, not just Texans. Days later, North Carolina was hit by floods that killed 6. That area experienced rivers that jumped 45 feet. I guess they'll never get the coverage they want and deserve. Also 9 lost in West Virginia flooding this week. Not many stories about those areas and their loses. Wonder why?
If only they had had more government - cellphone alarms, fired meteorologists - the rain would have passed them by and the rivers would not have risen.
All of the Ukraine experts switched professions to become bunker-buster experts a couple of weeks ago, and have now picked up expertise in Monday-morning quarterbacking the disaster of the century. Some are more obnoxious than others, but all are obnoxious, telling us all how obvious it was. I wish they would really impress us with some useful stock market predictions.
Every county has an AM transmitter that puts out the NOAA / NWS warnings to the area. Anybody that has a weather radio will be treated to it coming on, automatically, with a warning tone and message. Some of them have flashing strobe lights, too. Cell phones might receive the warnings too - if you are in an area with cell phone reception, and have your phone charged and on hand.
I predict that air raid-type sirens will make a resurgence in rural areas in the flash flood-prone areas, as they are in the tornado belt. They still manufacture them, and they're cheap by comparison.
"None of the forecasters predicted this much rain in that amount of time, nor do they have the ability to do so.
Until that problem is solved, somebody needs to be blamed.
Oh and the red button there, kid, don't ever, ever touch the red button.
WK said...
I am a bit surprised that in a camp with over 700 campers that there is not an over night staff working. At least security team in an ATV roaming the campgrounds looking for anything out of the ordinary.
At the Scout Camps I've been at for summer camp- there has been one person on duty in the main building at night. There are (a minimum) two trained adults per campsite. Many were like me- up 2-3 times randomly throughout the night to head for the latrine. So some areas of the camp were always being observed. By trained adults.
I've no idea how it works at commercial campsites. At Scout camps- two advantages. One is the trained adults. The second is the Scouts themselves- from just joined to Eagle. Scouts in the troops attending camp, and Scouts in camp as merit badge counselors. With merit badges- that is- training- in things like Emergency Preparedness, First Aid, Lifesaving, Swimming, and Basket Weaving. The last is likely NOT to be useful in an emergency...
A few years back in our area a leader was hit by lightning. Scouts kept his heart going with CPR until the ambulance arrived with defibrillators and EMTs.
Difficult to duplicate all that with other types of camps.
Althouse, cell service is pretty spotty out there. It’s mostly ranches outside of the towns and the towns are kind of one tower locations. So even adults with cell phones may not be getting signal. I imagine the main houses at Mystic, Heart of the Hill Country, La Junta et al have internet and can connect their cell phones over wifi but any adults on staff may or may not be so lucky. Usually their is a little wifi area for adults and leaders at those places, like at the dining hall or main office but otherwise service is spotty or non-existent
Leland makes a great point. These camps have plans for flash flooding, but not floods that hit them with only 15-20 minutes to spare. This was an outlier as far as flooding goes and based on private texts, some of my social media feeds from N Dallas/Park Cities, and what’s been reported in the news, once leaders at all these camps realized this was more than a dump and go flood they were all hands on deck to the demise of several trying to rescue those girls as well as other downstream in the RV parks.
I’ve seen a little bit of info about my HP classmate who was down at mystic and what she did was heroic and her survival is a miracle. She be my age, around 60 and has been going down there since the 70’s as a camper, counselor and then adult staff. There was the 87 flood and plenty of other events that she and other adult leaders in that camp would have been trained for, but again, this was just unprecedented.
So sad and it’s all recovery now. I think Trump and Melania did well down there and join them in prayers for all. I pray they get everyone, from the youngest little angel to the oldest adults doing all they could to save those around them home to their families
The deaths of the victims of the Kerr County flood were tragic and preventable. But saving them would not have been worth the cost.
The alarm doesn’t have to wake everyone up. It has to wake enough people up that they wake up their friends and neighbors.
But who is the guy who wakes up the guy who wakes up enough people that they wake up their friends and neighbors?
Late night two nights ago my husbands phone went off with one of those vaunted alarms. I have them disabled. It was a “blue alert”, searching for a perp a few counties away who had assaulted a police officer. Usually it’s an amber alert that almost always turns out to be the child’s daddy, an estranged boyfriend baby daddy situation. So I disabled the alarms, because they are irrelevant or meaningless. Make alerts urgent again.
But didn't a lot of people intentionally have their cell phones turned off?
That river went from a dry trickle to a record breaking crest in less than 40 minutes. There is literally nothing that would have materially changed the outcome short of not allowing people to sleep in the river's known flood plain. For the next 10-20 years, people in the area will take the warnings seriously but, over a longer period of time, the memory of this will fade and it will be repeated in the future on a lesser or greater scale.
Of course, the ghouls like Bich above are so fucking sure they have all the answers but if the river Bich lived nearest suddenly burst out of its historic range in the middle of the night in 30 minutes he would drown too.
My brother-in-law once gave us some kind of tornado warning device. We got rid of it. Decided we’d prefer to perish in our sleep instead spending our last minute knowing we were about to die
First the ice storm then Uvalde now this. You know that if Texas was a blue state trump would be epileptic blaming Gavin. . But since it’s red it’s God’s will. So why dos God want to punish MAGA?
Nice troll, Kak. Short and punchy. Yanked Yancey pretty good.
jim 5301just showed us what an asshole looks like. YOU are a ghoul.
'The Texas Flood is overblown. We all have to die sometime.' ~ Yancey Ward
That’s how the Amber Alert works.
How does anyone know the cost to save them? How much money did progressives pump into Infrastructure Improvement that did nothing but make the politically connected rich? How many rural areas got the enabling internet technology that would allow a complex monitoring system to provide timely and accurate warnings? That’s right, zero. Billions allocated and seemingly spent but nothing was actually done. What people claiming they would have done better are actually doing is trying to profit off others death. People that care about the victims are volunteering their time and money to solve the problem directly in front of them.
Leland for the deflection 😉
New Mexico has had floods and fires in the last month or so. Ruidoso was overrun with two major floods, the second worse than the first, and the horse track at Ruidoso Downs was covered in mud. Roswell, where we lived for a time, had damaging high water on the north side of town, not close to the Pecos River, but local streams and storm channels were overwhelmed. It's monsoon season, but the strength of localized heavy downpours is unusual.
Some of the fires were of unknown origin, probably caused by people, but unknown if by accident or by design.
The deaths of the victims of the Kerr County flood were tragic and preventable. But saving them would not have been worth the cost.
Luckily, Texas is a deep red state, so the people there deserve to die.
They failed to use the technology they had. They needed sirens, but would they have used them?
The don't politicize it crowd here doesn't want to evil compost to even look at these questions.
Poor jim lives a life in which he fears everything. If you just give him an alarm, he’ll react every time as if it is the end of the world. Spooks easily, you might say.
Real people keep their senses and seek to trust them, rather than some artificial sense. Unfortunately, in the real world when natural events can occur at a rate not previously experienced, the time to trust your senses may not be available.
Maybe if you were trained to immediately react with a flight response to any scary noise, you would have survived this event. However, I have no idea why anyone would want to go through life living with such fear as Jim does. After all, many did survive without having the panicked reaction of Jim.
Madtown guy: “ Some of the fires were of unknown origin”
Are you a BOC fan?
https://youtu.be/80FTZpzsvP8?si=PyI6jVQ9CHYJGrK2
RR
JSM
'The Texas Flood is overblown. We all have to die sometime.'
Not overblown, Bich, but a decent human being wouldn't be using this day after day to try to score political points. Seriously- what the fuck is wrong with you that makes you do shit like this?
I got one of those Blaring warning yesterday. The 911 system in my entire STATE went down. (I had no idea they were all connected) We were told to call the non-emergency numbers. I have received tornado evacuations on business trips this way, too. (tornado emergencies they are called. It means it is heading right at you, take cover)
@John Mosby, the link went nowhere for me, but Blue Öyster Cult isn't my thing so I don't get the reference.
One fire that damaged historic properties in Fort Stanton, NM (WWII vintage) was suspected to be arson. The others - origin undetermined - are presumably under investigation.
Good friend from growing up, a Civil Engineering PhD teaching at TAMU, is convinced that they needed a system of emergency sirens. And that funding for them was recently cut off by both the state and the Feds. Youngest sister of a GF of mine 50 years ago opined that it was horrible that the money wasn’t spent to save those lives. My response is that government money is limited, and should be spent optimally. And it’s not clear that those sirens would have been a good use of those funds. What I didn’t say to her was that the Obama Administration saw FEMA as a pot of money to be diverted into the pockets of their friends and allies.
He had an interesting career. He was an early expert in optimizing heating and cooling through computer modeling. We are talking maybe 45 years ago for his dissertation (CU Boulder) optimizing heating at the Rocky Flats unclear weapons plant. Then, at TAMU, he moved to air conditioning. It was quite humorous when he was controlling the air conditioning from his lab in College Station of arch rival UT in Austin. Wouldn’t be surprised if he had turned it off for UT/A&M football games. Just like they are always trying to steal Beevo the UT mascot (well hidden in the Beeve herds surrounding Austin).
You can know that there are going to be very heavy rains, with likely flooding--as the counsellors and operators of Mystic apparently did.
But you don't know that there is going to be 30 feet of water. Because it never happened before.
As for phone alerts - this spring we were flying from Las Vegas to PHX. Extremely weather alerts went off twice during the flight. I just turned them off. Didn’t concern us. She has a dumb flip phone that she really can’t read. And until acknowledged, they effectively locked up the phone. She got off the plane first, with a wheelchair, due to the walk on a hard floor at the airport. She wasn’t by the gate where we meet after flights. Looked all over the secure part of the airport, almost running back and forth. When I would call, she would answer but we couldn’t talk. Similarly when I would call her. IT took over a half an hour to connect up, with the help of gate agents and others. Turns out that she had gone to the nearby restroom, and I was off by the time she got out. And resetting her phone cleared the lock the emergency broadcast system had imposed on her phone. Of course, I’m the one who did that, after we reconnected, and she has no idea of how to do it. Or that it might be helpful. The point is that these alerts might have been useful. But they don’t take into account that the alerts might turn cell phones of the sight impaired into lumps of plastic and circuitry.
Also, it’s BS the nonsense they use to get you to shutdown your cell phones when in flight. Yes, early cell phones might have possibly interfered with the airplane’s electronics. That was 20-30 years ago. They are on very different frequencies, and the airplane’s electronics are too well protected. The reason for the rule is that cell systems have a hard time passing off the cell phones fast enough to the next cell tower, when an airliner flies across them at several hundred miles an hour.
Phaedrus, Aggie:
NOAA weather broadcasts are not AM (not that the modulation type matters) but much more significantly they are not in the commercial broadcast AM band but rather are VHF and thus are subject to the line-of-sight limitation characteristic of those frequencies.
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