Rain began to fall around midnight, and the first flash flood warning was issued by the NWS at 1:14 a.m. Friday, Fogarty said. That warning should have triggered a response by local emergency management and local media to spread the word to those in harm's way, as well as the Emergency Alert System that broadcasts warnings to televisions and radios, Fogarty said.
All NWS flash flood warnings, including the one issued after midnight on Friday, trigger Wireless Emergency Alerts, the emergency push notification sent through cellphone towers to all wireless phones in the emergency area, Fogarty said. That warning was updated nine times throughout Friday, each of which triggered separate alerts through the Emergency Alert System and the Wireless Emergency Alerts, Fogarty said.
The most serious warning came at 4:03 a.m. when the NWS issued a flash flood emergency, warning of an “extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation” and urging immediate evacuations to higher ground. Flash flood emergencies are issued using a mixture of rainfall data and on-the-ground reports: “Someone has told us we need to get people out of here immediately or people are going to die,” Fogarty said.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/05/texas-hill-country-floods-warning-forecast-nws/At least one independent meteorologist working in Texas echoed that statement, writing on his website that “we have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within NOAA and the NWS played any role at all in this event.”
The timing of the flood may have been a complicating factor. The alerts came out during the start of the Fourth of July weekend, when RV parks, cabins and homes are filled with tourists who might not be as familiar with the flood risks or the habits of the water.
Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice told reporters Friday that the suddenness and intensity of the flood caught city officials flat-footed.
"This happened very quickly over a very short amount of time that could not be predicted," Rice said. "This is not like a tornado where you can have a siren. This is not a hurricane where you're planning weeks in advance. It hit hard and things like this happen in a very strategic, very isolated area and when those two things converge you have what happened today."
Asked Saturday afternoon what kind of procedures the county had to warn the summer camps along the river about flooding emergencies, Rice said that each camp is private. This situation happened very fast, he said, so "there wasn’t a lot of time in this case as far as warnings.”
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