City manager of Kerrville: "We were reluctant to "cry wolf....."

[lostnfound]

10. "Fear of crying wolf" is a combo of personal ego and societal shaming?

Personal ego: I don’t want to be embarrassed by giving a false alarm and being perceived as over-reacting
Societal shaming: The guy who got us out of bed for a little rain is a scaredy-cat or doesn’t know what he is doing
Fear of making a mistake runs pretty deep.

I don’t understand why there wasn’t an old fashioned siren system that could have been a fallback option when the $975,000 grant was denied.
Resilient, redundant, decentralized solutions are part of the answer to climate change survival.

As a Girl Scout 150 years ago (haha) I was taught emergency procedures and briefed upon arrival at camp with things like “if you hear the siren, everyone is to immediately meet at…”. I can’t speak for the boys, but the girls would have followed instructions.

Instead of a loud siren, you had 9 or 10 year old boys crossing flood waters to go from one cabin to another to warn another cabin or to find their brother. That’s what I heard in an interview. I wondered, why was there no siren? Regardless of the $975,000 grant denial (for which I blame the Trump 1 administration) and the absence of an Weather Coordinator (for which I blame the Trump 2 administration), a more primitive but loud siren system could have been pursued as a Plan B.

Ask a class of Texas A&M engineering undergrads to design inexpensive systems, downselect and prototype, and choose the best system among them.