Who would I point the finger at first? The people who give us the weather reports on our local TV and radio?
Why, it seems that almost every weather report is now like the boy who cried wolf. It’s not just going to rain; there will be strong possibilities of hail, and who knows what else they may add to that. They want clicks, so the best way to get that is to yell that the sky is falling.
The second group of people is taxpayers in Kerrville who are too cheap to install, at a minimum, a warning system to alert people. The sirens are a bit on the expensive side; tornado sirens can cost $20,000 to $30,000 each to install. And that doesn’t include yearly maintenance costs.
We do have alarms on our phones that go off, but they go off so often that if most are like me, they turn them off. If I could figure out how to turn off the Trump alarm, I would.
You probably got an emergency alert from President Donald Trump on your phone on Wednesday afternoon. It’s a test of a new alert system that’s supposed to be used in very specific circumstances to communicate with the public via cell phones
The wireless test message read “Presidential Alert” and included a clear warning that it was just a test, per FEMA: “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.” It was transmitted in both English and Spanish. Cell towers broadcast the test for about half an hour, during which time most cell phones that were switched on and within range of an active cell tower got the test message.
Gregg Abbott spent $11 billion on border patrol. How many lives did that save? A small amount of the taxpayers’ money could have made a significant difference.
The third group of people may be the most crucial ones: the owners of the camps and the people who live by the river. A worker at one of the camps stayed up to monitor the river, and when he noticed that the river was rapidly rising, he alerted the owner, and they managed to get everyone out safely.
It was about 1 a.m. on the Fourth of July when the facilities manager at a central Texas summer camp saw water from the Guadalupe River steadily rising amid a deluge of rain.
Aroldo Barrera notified his boss, who had been monitoring reports of the storms approaching Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly, a recreation destination where an intercultural youth conference had been called off early just hours earlier.
Despite an absence of warning by local authorities, camp officials acted quickly on their own, relocating about 70 children and adults staying overnight in a building near the river. With the kids safe, camp leaders including President and CEO Tim Huchton were able to avoid the catastrophe that hit at least one other camp near Hunt, where the 500-acre Mo-Ranch is located.
“They helped them pack up,” Lisa Winters, communications director for Mo-Ranch, told The Associated Press on Sunday. “They got them up, they got them out, put them up on higher ground.”
Finally, Trump and his merry men and women of incompetent fools. I mentioned above the presidential alarm; a timely presidential alarm may have saved many of the people who were swept up by the wall of water that washed them away. Most people don’t turn off their phones, and those alarms can wake up the dead. However, Trump is eliminating FEMA, so I’m unsure if those presidential alarms will be around for much longer. Would those vacancies that existed have made a difference? Trump would never admit it, even if he knew it were true.
Texas officials are now considering a warning system, will it be all talk but no action later? Time will tell.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News on July 7 that he and Gov. Greg Abbott have discussed paying for siren warning systems along river communities prone to flash flooding.
“Had we had sirens along this area, up and down … that would’ve blown very loudly,” he told the news channel, “it’s possible that that would’ve saved some of these lives.”
Dogs are not expensive, but I’m not sure if all of them would do as at least one of them did to save their owner.
Just saw an interview of a guy that was in a camper caught in the flood in Texas. The reporter asked him how he got out. He pointed and said his dog woke him up and wouldn’t leave him alone. So he decided to get up and check outside. If it hadn’t been for his dog, he probably would’ve been swept away. Thirty rvs in one park alone were washed away.
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