Texas officials chose sleep over 'disruptive' sirens before tragic floods

Efforts to implement an early warning system for weather emergencies failed nearly a decade ago in central Texas because some local officials and residents feared that sirens would disrupt their sleep.

That decision is being called into question this week after more than 100 people, including dozens of children, were killed by flash flooding in the region and officials in Kerr County have faced criticism for an apparent failure to issue evacuation orders as at least one neighboring county did in the early morning hours of July 4, reported CNN.

"There was objection by some people that a false alarm by sirens, sirens were going to be very disruptive to a lot of people for false alarms, so that was taken out of the first, in the first phase of such a program," said former Kerr County commissioner Tom Moser, who retired in 2021. "It was, you know, not a large amount of money, like $1 million, to do the system, probably without the sirens, a little bit more than that if we'd had the sirens in place."

Officials have long recognized the potential for deadly flooding in Kerr County, and Moser spoke out in favor of improving what he called an "antiquated" and insufficient early warning system at a 2016 meeting, but he acknowledged concerns about the noise.

“Some people didn’t like the concept of sirens going off and disturbing everybody,” Moser said at the time.

One of his colleagues at the time expressed those concerns at a 2016 meeting of the county commission.

“The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all,” said H. A. “Buster” Baldwin, who died in 2022, according to a transcript of the meeting.

Kerr County officials and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority applied the following year for $980,000 in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to build a flood warning system but were turned down. Moser said without the money, the project “just didn’t get to the top of the list” of priorities for the county.

Local officials pushed for more limited efforts to address the issue since then, and the river authority selected a firm in April to develop a data resource to improve flood warnings, but Moser said he believes lives could have been saved if the early warning system had been implemented long ago.

“You know, cell phones are good, okay, text messages are good," Moser said. "But at the same time, there are places in the Hill Country you can’t get a good signal."

Watch the clip below or at this link.