SgtSpiderMan
Literotica Guru
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- Jun 3, 2003
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In 1987, 10 teens were killed when the river overflowed. As kids at a Christian academy attempted to flee, a āwall of water, estimated to be as much as half a mile wide, rushed upon the campers,ā according to a government report obtained by The Associated Press.
Since then, Eastland had been sounding the alarm about the dangers that Camp Mystic would one day face. Following the 1987 flood, Eastland successfully pushed for an updated flood warning system, and served on the board of the local river authority, CNN reported.
Despite Eastlandās work to improve flood warnings, the river authority shut it down in 1999 over what it called an āunreliableā system.
In 2016, local leaders debated a flood warning system designed to alert residents and out-of-town visitors to rising water, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Despite an engineering study recommending nearly $1 million in upgrades, including public sirens, the project was never funded, partly due to concerns that sirens might disturb residents while they slept. Then-commissioner H.A. "Buster" Baldwin, who died in 2022, dismissed the plan as excessive and joked that midnight sirens would drive him to drink.
"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," Baldwin reportedly said in 2016.
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.
Kerr County officials, who have come under increasing scrutiny for their actions as the Guadalupe River began to flood, eventually sent text-message alerts that morning to residents who had registered to receive them, according to screenshots of the texts. But The Postās review of emergency notifications that night found that even as a federal meteorologist warned of deteriorating conditions and catastrophic risk, county officials did not activate a more powerful notification tool they had previously used to warn of potential flooding. The National Weather Service sent its own alerts through this system, beginning at 1:14 a.m. on July 4.
That mass notification system, known as the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS, is used by National Weather Service meteorologists to warn of imminent threats. Warnings of life-threatening weather events sent on that system ā similar to Amber Alerts ā force phones to vibrate and emit a unique, jarring tone as long as theyāre on and have a signal. They also allow qualified local officials to send tailored messages to targeted areas.
So why didn't Kerr county or Kerrville authorities warn the people most in danger?The National Weather Service issued 22 alerts through IPAWS on July 4, sending increasingly dire warnings to swaths of Kerr County.
Experts say that county officials, by contrast, could have issued evacuation orders, described risks to specific neighborhoods or provided other, more location-specific guidance to stay safe. Such targeted information, especially from a known and trusted source, can help persuade people to take action, experts say.
even given a lack of cell coverage in some areas, this is still important:
the type and frequency of these warnings happen so often along 'flash flood alley' that residents often ignore them, but they might have listened to local authorities if it had been used by them:
IPAWS was used last summer, with a warning that the river might rise by 4'... it wasn't used by Kerr county officials the night of the flooding on July 4th but they did use it 2 nights later to warn of further danger.
they should have passed those warnings on more directly to their constituents, especially given the escalating threat they were being warned of by the NWSWowā¦
Criminally negligentā¦
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they should have passed those warnings on more directly to their constituents, especially given the escalating threat they were being warned of by the NWS
criminal negligence? understaffing? holiday staff shortages?
time will tell, but those dead will never hear.
"the Biden Administration defunded"?Are we talking about the siren system that the Biden administration defunded? That one?
Are we talking about the siren system that the Biden administration defunded? That one?
"the Biden Administration defunded"?
Flooded Texas County Turned Down Funds for Warning System From Biden Admin in 2021: 'We Don't Want to Be Bought'
Welcome to the Political Board.
you gotta love it when a so-called 'noob' suddenly appears trying to post all cool and throwing shade only to have their high-horse pulled right out from under them.
On July 5, a day after the devastating floods in Texas, FEMA's disaster assistance line received 3,027 calls and answered 99.7% of them, according to documents seen by the New York Times. The documents show, however, that hundreds of call center workers at four companies were fired the same day after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem failed to renew their contracts.
According to the documents, FEMA, which has been part of Homeland Security since 2003, answered only around 36% of the 2,363 calls it received on July 6. On July 7, FEMA received 16,419 calls and only answered 2,613 of them, around 16%. The call center workers' contracts were not renewed until Thursday, five days after they expired.
The Times notes that FEMA also failed to keep up with calls during disasters under previous administrations. According to E&E News, the call centers failed to answer around 50% of calls over the course of a week in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene last year. The agency was also overwhelmed after disasters in 2012 and 2017.
The State Department on Friday fired the remaining staff working in the office responsible for international climate policy, including annual U.N. negotiations related to climate treaties, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Most of the staff in the Office of Global Change had left voluntarily after President Donald Trump took office and moved rapidly to pull the United States out of international climate talks. Nearly a dozen people who remained on staff were fired Friday, and the office will be shuttered as part of the wider downsizing of the department, the people familiar with the firings said.
One hour warning???
Good thing if the guy died
The camp should be set up as a memorial park. No camping allowed
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2025/camp-mystic-alerts-texas-floods/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&carta-url=https://s2.washingtonpost.com/car-ln-tr/439bca9/687528c77867926b76393613/6739f9f6212ddc50bde24668/11/67/687528c77867926b76393613