(Houston) Almost a week after the devastating floods in Texas which caused the death of 121 people, the local authorities face many questions about their management of the crisis and the functioning of the alert system on Thursday.
A first alert was launched by national weather services shortly after 1 a.m. Friday, July 4, national holiday in the United States. But a number of residents of the County of Kerr, epicenter of the tragedy, slept or had cut their phone.
County’s sheriff, Larry Leitha, was alerted “around 4 or 5 am” Friday by calls for rescue services, he said on Tuesday during a press conference.
While the waters of the Guadalupe river, fed by torrential rains, rose dangerously – eight meters in 45 minutes – a local firefighter requested at 4:22 a.m. the sending of “red code” alerts, an emergency message on the phones of the inhabitants of Hunt, the most affected locality, according to the KSAT Texan chain.
However, according to the local media affiliated with CNN and ABC, the sheriff’s office would have asked the firefighter to wait, the time to obtain the authorization of a superior. The “red code” alerts were reportedly sent at least 90 minutes later, around 6 a.m. And according to KSAT, the message took up to six hours to reach some Hunt residents.
Asked about this this week, the Sheriff Leitha assured that a “chronology” of the responses to the floods during the night would be established, claiming that “priority” was for the time to “bring people home”.
Local authorities were again pressed for a press conference on Wednesday, to which police sergeant Jonathan Lamb replied that “this tragedy, as horrible as it was, could have been much worse”.
Flood zone
Thursday, research continues to try to locate 173 people who are still lacking in the call and whose list “could most likely be lengthened,” according to the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott.
In total, at least 121 dead linked to floods were identified in center of Texas, according to local authorities.
Photo Ashley Landis, Associated Press Archives
Trees and debris cover the soil after the floods in Hunt, Texas.
The county of Kerr, the hardest hit, deplores 97 dead, including 36 children, according to the Sheriff Larry Leitha.
Among these victims are 27 children and monitors of the Christian vacation camp for girls from Camp Mystic, located on the banks of the Guadalupe River, which hosted some 750 people.
According to several American media, including the New York Times Who analyzed satellite images of the camp, 19 sheds where the girls were sleeping were built in the flood zone.
More than 2,000 rescuers, police and specialists converged on the place of the disaster, said Jonathan Lamb on Wednesday, where helicopters, drones and cynophile teams have been mobilized for several days.
President Donald Trump has to go to Texas on Friday, a week after the tragedy, accompanied by his wife Melania.
The sudden floods that hit the region were caused by torrential rains. It fell 225 millimeters of rain, more than a quarter of the average annual precipitation.
Sudden floods, caused by torrential rains that the dry soil cannot absorb, are not uncommon.
But according to the scientific community, climate change caused by human activity has made meteorological events more frequent and more intense such as floods or droughts.
