KERR COUNTY, Texas – Kerr County is moving forward with a multi-phase flood warning system designed to provide life-saving alerts to residents in flood-prone areas of the Hill Country.
The Kerr County Commissioners’ Court discussed the system, along with draining Ingram Lake and resuming recreational activities along the Guadalupe River following the July 4 floods, during a meeting on Monday.
“We need to do this right now,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said about the flood warning system. “We need to have this in place before next summer. We need to be able to entice our tourism business and campers business back to Kerr County next year and tell them we got a state-of-the-art floodwork system.”
The commissioners court unanimously approved Kelly’s motion for Kerr County, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority (UGRA), the City of Kerrville and the City of Ingram to present a plan for the system within a month.
They have six months to implement a solution.
What would a flood warning system look like?
Tom Moser, previously a Kerr County commissioner and a project manager for NASA, described the flood warning system as an engineering project.
He outlined a plan for the proposed system, broken down into separate phases.
The first phase establishes and maintains a system with “fully automated capability” that provides adequate warning of an impending, life-threatening flood in “sufficient” time for people who could be affected.
“And by sufficient time, I would envision something like no less than 15 minutes when you know a flood is getting ready to happen,” Moser said.
The second phase gathers “lessons learned” from catastrophic flood events in the past.
The system’s requirements would include predictions based on the National Weather Service, rainfall data, as well as water flow levels and velocities.
The third phase is the construction of the system, which could take more than a year to build, Moser said.
It involves creating requests for proposals (RFPs) and contracts to establish a system module that could identify a flood through predictions and project the warning to the public.
The fourth phase includes daily testing, emergency management personnel and continued maintenance, he said.
Kerr County, Ingram, Kerrville and the UGRA will be responsible for different tasks, including flood prediction and projection.
Areas prone to flooding could receive barriers or sirens as part of the system, but that’s still to be determined, Moser said.
He added that the entire flood warning system could cost approximately $5 million, potentially less.
“It’s a complex project. It’s not a huge project. It’s an important project,” Moser said.
The system would likely not be able to save 100% of people — 90% would be more reasonable, he stated.
“We need to get this done,” Kelly said. “These are essential things that we have to do. I’m worried about the budget, but people’s lives are more than the budget.”