Federal leaders spar on NWS flood warning response, pose safety review after Texas disaster

KERR COUNTY, Texas (KXAN) – In the aftermath of deadly Hill Country flooding, Texas’ junior Republican U.S. Senator is defending the National Weather Service, as questions surface over the agency’s forecast timing, urgency and communication.

“I think there have been some eager to point at the National Weather Service and say cuts there led to a lack of warning,” Sen. Ted Cruz said during a press event with Gov. Greg Abbott Monday in Kerr County, where dozens died after the Guadalupe River tumbled over its banks July 4. “I think that's contradicted the facts.”

Also on Monday, U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer urged the Commerce Department to investigate NWS vacancies and whether they contributed to the death toll and affected the agency's ability to coordinate with local emergency officials.

“This is a national tragedy which people across the country are mourning," Schumer wrote to Duane Townsend, the Commerce Department’s acting inspector general. "The American people deserve answers."

The Trump administration made cuts to the federal workforce an early priority in the president’s second term this year, and those reductions extended to the NWS.

KXAN has previously reported six vacancies in the NWS Austin/San Antonio, according to its online staff roster and the NWS Employees Organization. Those include three meteorologists, two technology staff members and a science officer. The office has 26 employees when fully staffed.

“They had additional manpower,” the Cruz said. “In fact, they had three additional people working that night, anticipating that it was going to be a very dangerous weather situation.”

The NWS Austin/San Antonio office issued a flash flood warning at 1:14 a.m. Friday for a portion of the county. At about 4 a.m., the river rose over 30 feet in less than two hours, according USGS data.

While the NWS has not answered KXAN’s specific questions about its timeline and staffing, it has provided additional details about notifications leading up to those critical hours:

• The National Water Center Flood Hazard Outlook issued on Thursday morning indicated an expansion of flash flood potential to include Kerrville and surrounding areas.
• A flood watch was issued by the NWS Austin/San Antonio office at 1:18 p.m. on Thursday, in effect through Friday morning.
• The Weather Prediction Center issued three Mesoscale Precipitation Discussions for the excessive rainfall event as early as 6:10 p.m. Thursday indicating the potential for flash flooding.
• The National Water Center Area Hydrologic Discussion #144 at 6:22 p.m. on Thursday messaged locally considerable flood wording for areas north and west of San Antonio, including Kerrville.

On Monday, White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson responded to KXAN’s inquiries, calling NWS operations surrounding the flood “successful.”

“The NWS leveraged advanced tools like the Amber Alert software to send critical flood warnings directly to wireless devices, ensuring widespread awareness,” Jackson wrote in an email. “While we mourn the tragic lives lost in this disaster, the NWS’s early and frequent warnings saved countless others.”

Questioning warnings

Critics have questioned the effectiveness of those specific warnings in rural and remote areas of Central Texas. Representing the administration on Saturday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited the area along the Guadalupe River, calling the amount of rain in the flooding event “unprecedented,” broadly referencing the administration’s goal to “fix” aging technology within NOAA – the parent agency to the NWS.

“I do carry your concerns back to the federal government and back to President Trump,” Noem said, acknowledging the need for upgraded technology so “families have as much warning as possible.”

What the NWS put out was also information used by the state and its emergency management team – alerts, or warnings, about heavy rain and the potential for flash flooding, Abbott said in a Sunday press event. Even with an expectation and warning, they didn’t expect “a water wall 30 feet high,” he said.

“A problem with that is that to most people in the area flash flooding would mean one thing, not what it turned out to be; because they deal with flash floods all the time,” Abbott said.

Abbott said he discussed NWS alerts with Noem during her visit over the weekend. In the upcoming special session – starting in two weeks – the Texas Legislature would address the response to weather events like this deadly flood, he added.

KXAN has reached out to Abbott’s office to see if he has been briefed on the NWS’ staffing and has further comment. At the Sunday press conference, KXAN asked the governor if he had any concerns about NWS vacancies affecting warnings ahead of the recent flood.

Abbott said he knew “nothing about the staffing,” but did know the chronology of alerts from that office.

On Monday, Cruz said the local NWS office actually had three additional people working during the time leading up to the flood but also acknowledged the “limits” of a flash flood making earlier detection challenging.

“Everyone would agree, in hindsight, if we could go back and do it again, we would evacuate particularly those in the most vulnerable areas, the young children, the cabins closest to the water,” Cruz said. “We would remove them and get them to higher ground. If we could go back and do it again, obviously, everyone would.”

He also warned against “partisan” finger-pointing at this stage, suggesting a broader public safety review after rescue and recovery has wrapped would eventually be needed to “make sure that critical roles are maintained.”

“I think it is reasonable overtime to engage in a retrospective and say at every level what could have been done better, because all of us would want to prevent this horrific loss of life,” Cruz said. “But I think just immediately trying to use it for either side to attack political opponents… that's cynical and not the right approach, particularly at a time when we're dealing with a crisis.”

Staffing impact

In an interview with NBC, Tom Fahy, legislative director for the NWS Employees Organization, defended the Weather Service’s forecasting alerts leading up to the flood, while also acknowledging staffing cuts have significantly whittled down manpower in offices across the country.

“The staffing that we had in both San Angelo and San Antonio offices, we had adequate amount of staff to get out the alerts and warnings to the public,” Fahy said. “The flood warning was issued 12 hours in advance of the event.”

Predicting the exact severity, and that a 30-foot wall of water would come down Guadalupe, isn’t possible for a forecast, he said.

While the NWS has faced staffing shortages for years, the level of losses this year is far more pronounced and concerning, he said.

About 600 people have left their NWS posts from the beginning of the Trump administration to April 30, a change with “dramatic impact,” said Fahy. That’s as many people as the NWS lost in the last 15 years to retirement and attrition, but the agency was able to hire and fill those vacancies immediately, unlike now, Fahy said.

When Trump came into office, he instituted a federal hiring freeze through July 15 of this year. NWS can’t immediately refill its vacancies, but they have asked for special consideration to get that done, Fahy said.

“We're a tightly knit organization delivering outstanding results for the American public,” said Fahy. “This comes down to the math. It comes down to budget numbers, and we are short staffed.”

‘Fury of rainfall’

Dr. Venkataraman Lakshmi, professor of engineering at the University of Virginia and president of the hydrology section of the American Geophysical Union, also said forecasting the number of feet the Guadalupe would rise near Kerrville would have been nearly impossible.

“Predicting rainfall is more difficult than predicting the stock market,” Lakshmi said. “It's based on physical equations. It's based on atmospheric dynamics. It's a very complicated mathematical model.”

Lakshmi said he had no knowledge of the staffing vacancies at NWS, but, for the past 40 years, the NWS has led worldwide progress on weather forecasting. While the storm was predicted in advance, the location of the Kerr County tragedy was so close to the source of the water it left little reaction time.

“As hydrologists, we are very concerned about lead time, but if you're sitting at the source of the water, it's very difficult,” he said. “There is, sadly, no answer to the fury of rainfall and the fact that this fell right at the most terrible place.”