In deadly Texas floods, one town had what some didn't: A wailing warning siren

[Jirel]

30. What a ridiculous article.

I. Live. In. Comfort.
By. The. Guadalupe. And. Cypress. Creek.

This out-of-town reporter is so full of crap, their eyes are brown.

Fact: nobody here was saved by the sirens because we all had LOTS of warning from multiple sources long before sirens went off. Comfort residents take floods seriously because we’ve had a lot, including some infamous ones with deaths (the most recent one has a memorial built just up my street where she died), and we watch the weather, NOAA and USGS water gauges, etc. Everyone was glued to town gossip as well, in part because the 4th of July parade had been canceled. (Fun fact: the lineup area was right in the lowest area by the river.) The VFD and other first responders had door-knocked house to house well before that. Sheriffs, constables, etc. were all over the streets blaring warnings over their loudspeakers long before the sirens went. By that time, everyone was out of their homes. If anyone had waited until the sirens blew, they would’ve been in deep water, too late. Water had covered the escape route for homes along the river road an hour before that - we were monitoring the creek flow, and friends were in a big truck monitoring that area and had taken video of the highway in the process of being covered (not yet deep, but the road to it was) that early on.

Fact: Comfort is a HUGELY different situation than Kerrville, Hunt, or Ingram. We’re a small town 1/10 the size of Kerrville. Simply fewer people to flood. We don’t make bank off the tourist trade with RV parks, cabins, and camps on the water’s edge. So the most vulnerable people who don’t know the flooding situation and are not taking it seriously, weren’t here in town to make a fatal error. We did have flooding in one RV resort, but even that one is much farther away from water and much smaller than the behemoth in Kerrville where many died.

Fact: While Hunt had about 3 hours warning but it was the middle of the night (gotta be awake and willing to respond to warnings at o-dark-early for them to matter), Comfort had effectively 8 hours warning, and we were all already well aware of what had happened upriver for hours before we were smacked.

This is out-of-towner armchair quarterbacking at its finest.