When longtime Houston Senator Paul Betencourt walks into the state Capitol on July 21, he’s going to have a plan in his briefcase that he says will reduce the number of lives lost in a catastrophic flood like the one that occurred on the Guadalupe River over the July 4 weekend.
The plan doesn’t have a bill number or a catchy name — yet — but it will involve “civil defense sirens” that alert people in a wide radius to seek higher ground when floodwaters rise, eliminating reliance on cell phones for emergency notifications.
As of Wednesday afternoon, authorities had recovered at least 111 bodies in Kerr County and the surrounding area, including 27 girls and counselors at Camp Mystic. More than 160 remained missing.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced earlier this week that flash flooding and improvements to weather alert systems will be discussed in a special legislative session that starts July 21. Bettencourt, a Republican who chairs the Senate’s Committee on Local Government, said he’ll be ready.
“Abbott said on Sunday that the call would be expanded to look at this, so on Monday, I started my local government committee working on what I consider the marriage of old tech with new tech,” Bettencourt said.
People get text messages all day about banking, security, package deliveries, Amber alerts, and road closures, so they ignore the texts, and they switch their phones to silent when they go to bed, the senator said.
“We’ve got to come up with a way to get their attention,” he said. “Sirens work in Tornado Alley and they’ll work here as well.”
Bettencourt’s proposal is tailored to flash-flood-prone river watersheds like the Upper Western Guadalupe River. It won’t have an immediate impact on Harris County alert systems, but plenty of locals vacation and go to camp near Texas rivers, Bettencourt said, noting that at least 13 Houston-area residents were among the Hill Country flood victims.
The cause is close to the senator’s heart. His grandparents survived a 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston and killed about 8,000 people.
“One went to the second floor of The Strand, and the other swam through the wreckage wall to safety,” Bettencourt said. “When you have a 20-foot wall of water headed toward you, the only thing you can do is get everybody out of the way. That’s the only way you can save their lives for sure.
“In 1900, if they could have, they would have used a siren once the first wall of water came through and smashed the first 10 blocks of the city. If they’d had a siren, they would have used it.”
Bettencourt acknowledged that sirens don’t stop floodwaters from rising, but they do alert people to evacuate.
“The problem in the Hill Country is, you put a trillion gallons of water on what is effectively limestone bedrock and caliche soil, it’s going to roll as fast as it can down to the gulf, so you’ve got a flash flood problem,” he said. “It’s not just the Western Guadalupe, you could say it’s for the Frio and the Llano and you could go up central Texas.
“After discussing it Sunday night with my church group, they told me they turn their phones off at night. Then my wife and I were talking and she said we may need to go back to sirens, and I told her she was right.”
Civil sirens already exist in regions of Texas but are typically used to signal tornadoes, Bettnecourt said. Some small rural government officials have grappled over the costs in recent years, facing pushback from taxpayers. Kerr County opted out of including sirens in a $980,000 federal grant proposal in 2017 because “too many people said they did not want sirens.”
Bettencourt said it’s a worthy investment, and local governments like Comal County have already agreed to do it in preparation for next summer’s storms.
“I think there’s a lot of developing support for it,” he said. “The costs will be variable depending on how many watersheds we try to cover but the idea of having sirens on towers is a good solution to get people’s attention and tell them literally to go to higher ground.
“This is probably millions of dollars to do many of them, but I think it’s important because you need to have layered alerts to get people’s attention. If they’re turning off their cell phones, then you’ve got to use an auditory signal at night.”
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News earlier this week that if cities can’t afford it then “the state will step up and we need to have these in place by next summer.”
Bettencourt said he’s shared his ideas with Governor Abbott and Patrick.
“The governor’s office had already been working with the Lower Colorado River Authority, which has a monitoring system, so I think we’re going to be able to pull together a package that works that we can file by the time the special session starts,” Bettencourt said.
Lawmakers will look into the technicalities of ensuring the local governments are communicating and have a plan in place to trigger the system, Bettencourt added.
“Water doesn’t care if it falls on Kerr County versus Comal County,” he said. “It’s going to fall in a watershed and it’s going to get heavily concentrated and move from dangerous to deadly. The bottom line is you just have to give people every chance to get out of the way of a flash flood.”
The senator scoffed at the assertion that by the time the special session rolls around in less than two weeks, people will have moved on to another issue.
“I’ve been through all this. The Texas Senate has made significant changes because of Winter Storm Yuri,” he said. “I think we’ll pass legislation. There may be more bills than just mine and, importantly, I think we’ve got a technology solution that will work.
“It’s a recognition of the obvious,” he added. “Whenever you have a natural disaster and a catastrophe of this magnitude, you can’t save everybody. Some people will literally drive into a stream and get washed down even though they’ve been told, turn around; don’t drown. You just want to get everybody’s attention to get them to higher ground. If you can get them up 25 feet, you’ve got a very good chance of saving them.”
