State Senate, House joint committee on disaster preparedness held meeting in Kerrville

KERRVILLE, Texas – The recently created state Senate and state House joint committee on disaster preparedness and flooding held its second meeting in two weeks on Thursday meeting.

The meeting lasted for about 13 and a half hours.

The committee met for the first time on July 23 in Austin.

During the meeting, lawmakers grilled Kerr County officials on their response to the floods.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced the formation of the joint committee on July 10, six days after deadly flooding in the Hill Country was responsible for the deaths of 108 people in Kerr County.

An additional nine bodies were recovered in Kendall County. During a Tuesday news conference, Kendall County Judge Shane Stolarczyk said those bodies came from communities upstream.

According to the committee’s agenda, the members’ meeting began at 9:30 a.m. at the Hill Country Youth Event Center located at 3785 State Highway 27 in Kerrville.

The meeting’s topics of discussion included:

• State and local response to the flash flooding on July 4
• Meteorological data collection and modeling
• Post-disaster mental health resources

More recent coverage of the Hill Country Floods on KSAT:

• Kerr County discusses flood recovery, crime uptick and economic challenges in commissioners’ meeting
• Kerrville city manager referred to Kristi Noem as ‘basically homeland Barbie’ after flooding media briefing, texts show
• Hunt substation left under 8 feet of water after Hill Country floods, records show repairs could take months