Trees emerge from flood waters along the Guadalupe River on Friday in Kerrville, Texas. Heavy rainfall caused flooding along the Guadalupe River in central Texas with multiple fatalities reported.
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As early as Wednesday, Texas officials were marshalling the state’s emergency response resources to prepare for the coming storm.
By Thursday afternoon, the National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio office had issued a flood watch for multiple counties, warning of “pockets of heavy rain” and the potential for flooding.
But when the storm unleashed its historic ferocity in the early hours of Friday morning, many were caught by surprise. Heavy downpours lifted the Guadalupe River 26 feet in just 45 minutes. First responders had to rescue hundreds of people who were left stranded by the rising waters, and at least 78 people died. Sixty-eight of those fatalities occurred in Kerr County. Many people are missing.
Judge Rob Kelly, the top-elected official in Kerr County, told reporters that flooding is common to the area, which he called the most dangerous river valley in the U.S., but it’s rarely this devastating.
“We didn’t know this flood was coming,” Kelly said. “Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming.”
A spokesperson for the National Weather Service (NWS), however, noted that the agency held forecast briefings for emergency officials on Thursday, issued a flood watch on Thursday and sent out flash flood warnings Thursday evening and Friday morning.
“The National Weather Service remains committed to our mission to serve the American public through our forecasts and decision support services,” NWS spokesperson Erica Grow Cei said in a statement.
In the aftermath of the storm, a division began to form between National Weather Service forecasters and some Texas officials who felt that their weather reports did not accurately predict the catastrophic power of the storm. But meteorologists say it is exceptionally difficult to guess exactly what a complex weather system will do and then convince officials and the public to prepare for the worst.
Extreme weather events can be tricky to predict
Michael Morgan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said precipitation forecasting remains “one of the most vexing problems” of his field.
But he said he believed the National Weather Service did its job by giving a general sense of the Texas storm and then providing more specific local forecasts as additional information became available to highlight the most serious potential threats.
“I think the [National] Weather Service forecasts were on point,” Morgan said. “Specifically targeting in locations that are going to receive the maximum rainfall is an incredibly challenging forecast problem.”
Search and rescue team members prepare their boat for operations on the flooded Guadalupe River on Friday in Comfort, Texas. The ferocity and sheer destruction of the flash flood caught officials off-guard.
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The NWS said it issued a flash flood warning with a “considerable” warning tag at 1:14 a.m. local time Friday morning for Kerr and Bandera Counties. That added warning automatically triggers an emergency alert to mobile devices in the area.
It wasn’t until 4:35 a.m. local time — or more than three hours later — that the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office first reported flooding at low water crossings, the NWS noted.
The agency said it upgraded the flash flood warning to a flash flood emergency for parts of Kerr County as early as 4:03 a.m. A flash flood emergency is only issued in “exceedingly rare” situations when weather conditions pose a severe threat to human life.
But in a press conference later on Friday, some criticism was lobbed at the NWS for its forecasts in the days leading up to the storm, most notably from Texas Division of Emergency Management chief W. Nim Kidd.
“The original forecast that we received on Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted three to six inches of rain in the Concho Valley and four to eight inches of rain in the Hill Country,” Kidd said. “The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts.”
In a press conference on Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott acknowledged that the NWS disseminated warnings about heavy rain and the potential for flash flooding.
“The problem with that is that, to most people in the area, flash flooding would mean one thing, not what it turned out to be, because they deal with flash floods all the time,” he said. “There’s the potential for flash flooding, but there’s no expectation of a water wall of almost thirty feet high.”
Pat Fitzpatrick, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, told NPR via email that he didn’t believe anyone was at fault, but rather that a rare and complex weather system happened to occur overnight on the long July Fourth holiday weekend.
“State officials followed proper pre-storm and ongoing storm-protocols. The National Weather Service also followed their proper protocols of warnings and a flood emergency statement,” Fitzpatrick said. “It’s an unfortunate, tragic event.”
Job cuts have diminished the National Weather Service workforce
Some critics have questioned whether the storm’s deadly impact was made worse by the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to shrink the federal workforce, including job cuts at the NWS and its parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The NWS lost nearly 600 workers earlier this year, but last month the agency said it was beginning to hire over 100 employees to “stabilize operations” following a backlash to the staffing shortfall.
On his way back to the White House from New Jersey on Sunday, President Trump was asked by a reporter if recent cuts to the federal government left key vacancies at the National Weather Service or in emergency coordination. “They didn’t,” he said.
“I’ll tell you, if you look at that, what a situation that all is. And that was really the Biden setup. That was not our setup,” Trump added. “But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it, either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe, and it’s just so horrible to watch.”
Asked if the government should hire back any of the meteorologists who had left, Trump said he didn’t know. “I wouldn’t know that, I really wouldn’t. I would think not. This was a thing that happened in seconds. Nobody expected it, nobody saw it. Very talented people are there, and they didn’t see it.”
Among those who left was Paul Yura, who had been the warning coordination meteorologist at the NWS’s Austin/San Antonio office. Yura spent more than half of his 32-year career in the office and took an early retirement offer in April, KXAN reported.
According to the NWS, duties of a warning coordination meteorologist include acting as a liaison to public safety officials, including emergency managers, and providing government officials with information on severe weather.
The Austin/San Antonio Weather Forecast Office currently has at least six vacancies according to a list of staff members on its website.
Morgan, who previously worked with NOAA as an assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction under former President Biden, said the Trump administration was also threatening to cut funding for research to improve weather forecasting.
A NOAA budget document for the coming fiscal year would eliminate funding for the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and the National Severe Storms Lab, both of which Morgan highlighted as institutions doing vital research and modeling of severe weather.
“I think it’s investments in that that are really going to help mitigate future tragedies like what unfolded in Texas,” Morgan said.
