Kerr County officials waited 90 minutes to send emergency alert after requested, dispatch audio shows
At 4:22 a.m. on Friday, as Texas' Hill Country began to flood, a firefighter in Ingram – just upstream from Kerrville – asked the Kerr County Sheriff's Office to alert nearby residents, according to audio obtained by ABC affiliate KSAT. But Kerr County officials took nearly six hours to heed this call.
"The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on State Highway 39," the firefighter said in the dispatch audio. "Is there any way we can send a CodeRED out to our Hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?"
"Stand by, we have to get that approved with our supervisor," a Kerr County Sheriff's Office dispatcher replied.
The first alert didn't come through Kerr County's CodeRED system until 90 minutes later. Some messages didn't arrive until after 10 a.m. By then, hundreds of people had been swept away by the floodwaters.
Kerr County Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Texas Newsroom first reported on the dispatch recording on Tuesday.
At a Wednesday morning press conference, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha declined to answer a question about delayed emergency alerts, saying that an "after-action" would follow the search and rescue efforts.
"Those questions are gonna be answered," he added.
Records show Kerr County's CodeRED Emergency Notification System, which alerts subscribers to emergencies through pre-recorded phone messages, has been in place for at least a decade.
When CodeRED was first introduced by Kerr County and the City of Kerrville in 2014, a government press release claimed it could "notify the entire City / County about emergency situations in a matter of minutes."
CodeRED relied on the local white pages for users' contact information, the announcement explained, so "no one should assume his or her number is included." Residents had to sign up to ensure they would receive alerts.
In 2021, Kerr County incorporated FEMA's Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS) into CodeRED, so that messages could reach tourists and others not in the local database. The IPAWS system allows local officials to broadcast emergency messages and send text blasts to all phones in the area.
At the time, some county officials weren't sure about the change.
"What's the benefit?" Kerr County Commissioner Jonathan Letz asked at a May 2021 commissioners' meeting.
"It's just another avenue for us to notify people when we have an emergency," replied Emergency Management Coordinator William "Dub" Thomas.
Then-Commissioner Harley David Belew voted against adding IPAWS to the CodeRED system after noting that it would require switching out the county's equipment, which he said he'd done recently because of a federal policy change a few years earlier.
"I don't think it's going to change anything," Belew said.
Despite these doubts, Kerr County began using IPAWS alongside its CodeRED system in 2021.
When the area flooded on Friday, Ingram City Council Member Ray Howard told ABC News he got three flash flood alerts from the National Weather Service, but none from Kerr County authorities.
On Monday, Belew went on The Michael Berry Show to discuss the catastrophic flooding. On the show, he said Kerr County Commissioners had considered putting in an early warning system years earlier, but that there weren't enough cell towers to reach rural parts of the county, "so that idea was scrapped."
Records show that the topic of a flood warning system for Kerr County came up in at least 20 different county commissioners' meetings since it was first introduced in 2016 – months before Belew joined the Court.
Belew explained on the radio show that funding for a warning system was also a barrier to implementation, echoing issues he raised at the time, according to meeting minutes.
But even after last week's tragic flooding, Belew expressed concern over spending on such a system: "God only knows what's going to happen, what kind of government waste we might get going into an alert system," he said on Monday's segment.
"But if we can get any early alert system for the future, that'd give people some peace of mind here," Belew added. "It's always been needed."
Editor's Note:This story has been has been updated for clarity.
