The catastrophe left Kerr County residents such as Marvin Willis, 67, wanting answers.
“I didn’t get one alert,” said Willis, a magazine publisher who lives a mile and a half from the Guadalupe River and typically receives them on his phone. “I haven’t talked to anyone I know who’s gotten one.”
He said complete transparency from leaders is needed: “If you don’t know what happened, you don’t know how to fix it.”
Even Kerrville’s mayor, Joe Herring, said he received no emergency alerts early Friday and was only awakened by a call from City Manager Dalton Rice at 5:30 a.m.
“If they had come,” Herring said of the alerts, “and we had a chance to save all the people we’ve lost and are missing — absolutely, we should have had them more. We should have had a warning.”
Herring said Tuesday on MSNBC that government leaders take threats from natural disasters seriously, but that the events that night unfolded very rapidly.
“The question is, ‘Do I wish we had warned those people?’ Absolutely. The question is, ‘Do I hope we warn people better in the future?’ Absolutely.”
Abbott, in a separate news conference later Tuesday, reiterated that the focus remained on the search and rescue effort and said officials would get into the whys and hows of the disaster after that phase was over.
Asked what local officials knew early Friday as the flood was bearing down, Abbott, a Republican, said: “You’d have to ask them.”
Ronnie Barker, who has lived in the unincorporated community of Hunt in Kerr County for 23 years, said he was among the residents who didn’t receive any alerts early Friday. But he’s looking at the positives, such as how first responders have mobilized.
“People from all over the country and the world, everybody wants to come in and do something,” Baker said. “We’ve just been flooded with people helping.”
Another resident, Rena Bailey, who has lived in Hunt since 1990, got alerts but said they could have been worded stronger.
“I’ve got notices all the time about whatever. There was no urgency in what I got,” Bailey said.
While she recalled one alert saying the weather was “life threatening,” she said people may have needed more guidance, particularly in a place where flooding is a way of life.
“If they had said there’s a wall of water coming or evacuate,” Bailey said, “but I didn’t take it that way. And they can blame me, but 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 from New York.