The catastrophe left Kerr County residents as Marvin Willis, 67, who wanted answers.
“I did not receive an alert,” said Willis, a magazine editor who lives at a mile and a half of Guadalupe and generally receives them on his phone. “I have not talked to anyone who knows that you have received one.”
He said that a complete transparency of leaders is needed: “If you don’t know what happened, you don’t know how to solve it.”
Even the mayor of Kerville, Joe Herring, said he did not receive emergency alerts on early Friday and was only awakened by a call from the Dalton Rice City administrator at 5:30 am
“If they had come,” Herring said about the alerts, “and we had the opportunity to save all the people we have lost and we lack, absolutely, we should have had more. We should have had a warning.”
Herring said Tuesday in MSNBC that government leaders take the threats of natural disasters, but that the events developed so quickly.
“The question is: ‘Would you like to have warned those people?’ Absolutely.
Abbott, at a separate press conference later on Tuesday, reiterated that the approach remained in the search and rescue effort and said that the officials would enter the why and how the disaster ended after that phase was over.
When asked what local officials knew on early Friday when the flood was knocking down, Abbott, a Republican, said: “You would have to ask them.”
Ronnie Barker, who has lived in the unbalanced community of Hunt in Kerr County for 23 years, said he was among the residents who did not receive alerts early Friday. But he is looking at the positive aspects, such as how the first to respond have mobilized.
“People from all over the country and the world, everyone wants to enter and do something,” Baker said. “We have just been flooded with people who help.”
Another resident, Rena Bailey, who has lived in Hunt since 1990, received alerts, but said they could have been written stronger.
“I have notices all the time about whatever. There was no urgency in what I got,” Bailey said.
While an alert recalled that the weather was “threatening in life,” said people may need more guidance, particularly in a place where floods are a way of life.
“If they had said that there is a wall of water that comes or evacuates,” said Bailey, “but I didn’t take it that way. And they can blame me, but they don’t blame me, because I live here, and I know what I get all the time.”
Minyvonne Burke and Suzanne Gamboa reported from Hart and Erik Ortiz in New York.
