Kerr County officials said on Monday that they were receiving death threats amid lingering questions about the county’s preparation and response to the recent flooding.
“It’s sad to see the evil that’s out there,” Rich Paces, a Kerr County commissioner, said at the commission’s public meeting after disastrous flooding this month left 103 people dead in the county. “I’ve been getting death threats. Can you imagine? People cursing us for decisions that we never had a chance to make. They’re just playing a blame game.”
In a separate meeting Monday morning of the City Council of Kerrville, Brenda Hughes, a council member, lamented “targeted threats” made to individual staff members and asked for increased security measures.
Victims of the flooding included more than two dozen at the Camp Mystic girls camp in the town of Hunt, while another 161 people were still missing across Kerr County. The sprawling rural county in the Texas hill country, with about 50,000 residents, was hit by far the hardest. Local officials have deflected questions for more than a week about why they were not more immediately responsive to warnings issued by the National Weather Service overnight on July 4, as they have grappled with a continuing effort to find bodies and clear debris.
Officials at the Weather Service were actively reaching out to emergency management officials in the region after the agency issued a 1:14 a.m. warning of “life-threatening flash flooding” in the area. But in the first three hours after that, while the Guadalupe River rose 20 feet, local leaders would remain largely unheard from and did not make use of technology that was available to send out warnings. The mayor of Kerrville has said that he was awakened only at 5:30 a.m., despite several more flood warnings that had been automatically sent to cellphones and weather radios.
County officials have repeatedly been asked for a timeline of the county’s response, but have not provided one, saying their focus is on search and rescue. In a joint statement, the city and county said they “maintain 24/7 emergency services, which allowed responders to act immediately on July 4th.” They also said they were “committed to a transparent and full review of processes and protocols.”
President Trump has also declined to focus on whether any warnings were neglected. During a visit to Kerr County last week, he was asked about complaints from families of the victims that people along the river were not notified in time to safely evacuate.
“Only a bad person would ask a question like that, to be honest with you,” Mr. Trump replied. “This was a thing that has never happened before and nobody’s ever seen anything — I’ve never seen anything like this.”
There is a long history of flooding in the region, known as Flash Flood Alley. And in recent years, federal regulators approved a series of appeals that removed many of Camp Mystic’s buildings from official federal flood zones.
Frustration was clear among county leaders on Monday. Don Harris, one of the Kerr County commissioners, said that “every day I’m stomping out false rumors.”
Mr. Paces also addressed questions that have arisen over how the county spent $10 million in funds from the American Rescue Plan Act, which was passed under the Biden administration during the coronavirus pandemic. Most of the local share of that money was spent on a new communications system. The county had previously considered a flood warning system but rejected the idea, saying taxpayers wouldn’t want to pay for it.
“Joe Biden didn’t give us $10 million for a flood warning system, that’s just false information,” Mr. Paces said on Monday. “We did get $10 million in ARPA funds, OK? And we used it for a radio system to help with emergency response.”
Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.
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