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

[Jirel]

33. Not the good idea you think it is.

I’m from the flood area that this article is talking about. As I mentioned in my own comment, the sirens were useful as legs on a snake. They blew AFTER people were out, or trapped. Comfort’s many types of warnings worked well, but sirens were the pro-forma afterthought, like blowing a tornado siren when the tornado is already cutting a path through town.

Now let’s talk about whether they would’ve mattered upstream. The answer is probably not. Out-of-towners imagine Hunt, Ingram, Kerrville, Center Point, and Comfort as small towns on a river, pretty close together. Nope. It’s more like a 50+ mile stretch of Guadalupe with MANY SECONDARY CREEKS that can be as nasty for flooding, even though many are dryish this year with the drought. The hardest hit people are nowhere near the towns, but on much less populated stretches in between. Many of those areas only get a lot of visitors seasonally in camps or RV parks, the closer to Hunt you go.

As for sirens, they are not designed to be heard everywhere, indoors. They are meant to be heard outdoors. That’s not where people were in the pre-dawn hours.

There are many more useful things you could do to improve safety, first and foremost through regulation and education. What works best indoors? Weather alert radios. A drive to supply residents and camps with those, and education about using them, would have been far more effective than sirens. They would’ve gone off MUCH earlier, for one. NOAA had warnings out before 2 am. The radios are not tied to politicians’ decisions on when to blow them, or different cities’ emergency protocols. Sirens are. Weather emergency radios explain what’s happening. Sirens just go off, and are ignored just like the annoying car alarms on a city street.

Additionally, a lot of the area has few zoning codes. Most of it is on unincorporated land. If you look at the large RV resort that got washed away, your jaw will drop. It’s a giant area of tightly packed RV slots, tent sites, and cabins, right there on the river bank on low ground, with one main (tight) road in and out. Evacuation itself would be difficult. Same with these camps. Camp Mystic was in a dangerous area that had flooded before, with no safe access out during a flood, yet they still hadn’t spent the money on safety planning and equipment in a hundred years of operation. They were locked in before sirens would’ve sounded for the river flood. These private operators are allowed to do more or less what they want. At minimum, there should be a requirement for businesses that host people on the banks to use weather radios for monitoring, and to have a safety plan for how they will evacuate their guests. Sirens wouldn’t have helped - 750 campers or hundreds of RV park guests all trying to get out in the relatively short time after a siren goes off would be disaster. If the operators had the warning HOURS ahead from a weather system (assuming they took it seriously), that could’ve saved most of those lives.