This Texas county asked for disaster resilience help. The flood came first.

[douglas9]

Flooding is a fact of life in Texas Hill Country, a region home to a flood-prone corridor known as “Flash Flood Alley.” Judge Rob Kelly, the top elected official in Kerr County, said as much on Sunday.

“We know we get rains. We know the river rises,” he said as a desperate search for survivors continued along the Guadalupe, a river that rose more than 30 feet in just five hours last week. “But nobody saw this coming.”

County records show that some Kerr County officials did see it coming and raised concerns about the county’s outdated flood warning system nearly a decade ago.

Their first request for help updating the technology was denied in 2017, when Kerr County applied for roughly $1 million in federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program aid from the Texas Department of Emergency Management. County officials tried again in 2018 after Hurricane Harvey swept Texas, killing 89 people and causing some $159 billion in damage. Again, the state denied the request, directing most federal assistance toward more densely populated areas, including Houston.

As neighboring counties invested in better emergency warning systems, Kerr County — the heart of Flash Flood Alley — never modernized an antiquated flood warning system that lacks basic components like sirens and river gauges. At least 110 people, including 27 children, have died so far in the deadliest floods the state has seen since 1921. Most of them drowned in Kerr County, largely because they didn’t know the water was coming. The search for at least 161 other people continues.

https://grist.org/extreme-weather/amid-historic-texas-floods-trump-retreats-from-disaster-preparedness/