Jeff Evans spent his entire career predicting severe weather and protecting those in its path. He called the deadly floods along the Guadalupe River inevitable.
HUNT, Texas — Jeff Evans spent his entire career predicting severe weather and protecting those in its path.
He called the deadly floods along the Guadalupe River inevitable, especially at Camp Mystic, which is nestled between converging waterways in a hazardous flood-prone zone.
“It was a ticking time bomb — Camp Mystic,” Evans said. “It was bound to happen.”
Evans, who spent 34 years with the National Weather Service, including the past 10 as the meteorologist in charge at the NWS Houston office, said building summer camps along the river doesn’t make any sense.
“The terrain and the way those creeks converged, it was just a matter of time for what happened on the Fourth of July to happen,” Evans said.
Time and history reveal the risk at the 99-year-old Camp Mystic. Newspaper headlines from the Kerrville Mountain Sun and Fort Worth Star showed severe flood damage back in 1932. As recently as last year, the Kerr County Hazard Mitigation Action Plan predicted that “jurisdictions will experience a flood event in the next year.”
Evans said for any community in harm’s way, the challenge is getting the risk to resonate.
“The agency, the National Weather Service, has been looking at this for decades,” Evans said. “How do we get people to understand and then take proper action?”
Evans said his review of NWS warnings on July 4 showed they were timely and should have been effective for evacuations. A KHOU review of a FEMA database that tracks public alerts shows NWS sent out six flash flood warnings from 1 a.m. to 10 a.m., and 16 updates. The unanswered question, he said, is what happened on the ground in the early morning hours at Camp Mystic.
“What plans and protocols were in place and should have been in place, and then were those protocols followed?” Evans said. “I don’t know what they did and the timeline that will come with time.”
Evans cautioned against jumping to conclusions or pointing fingers this early after the event. He encouraged patience to allow for a full assessment of the response that ultimately will help communities better prepare for the future.
Youth camps in Texas are required to have disaster protocols and follow other health and safety requirements under the oversight of the Texas Department of State Health Services. KHOU 11 Investigates obtained state inspection reports for Camp Mystic for the past five years. They do reveal it had a required emergency plan, but details of what that included were not immediately known. The state does not keep copies of camp emergency plans on file.
Local officials sidestepped questions about how it alerted residents of flood dangers at a Tuesday morning news conference. KHOU 11 Investigates searched a FEMA database that tracks public alerts. Those records reveal Kerr County did not send any out on July 4. The county only used its CodeRed alert system to call for evacuations on July 6, two days after the Guadalupe River swept so many away.