Before the waters of Texas’s Guadalupe River rose more than 33 feet over the course of five hours, the National Weather Service sent out a series of alerts. The first one that included Kerr County, where most of the fatalities would ultimately take place, warned of “considerable” flood threat and went out just after 1 a.m. on July 4. It triggered push alerts on people’s phones. It set off alarms on any weather radio tuned to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s frequency. More alerts from the weather agency would follow.
But in a situation like this, weather alerts are not enough: Evacuation orders and other instructions mostly come from local governments. But the Kerrville Police Department posted its first evacuation order to social media just after 5 a.m., hours after the warnings from NWS began, and Kerr County and Kerrville posted theirs even later, according to a KXAN investigation.
“Move to higher ground now,” the police department said. “Be safe and move to higher ground,” said the county. The water had risen catastrophically by then.
The swiftness of the oncoming danger meant that even the fastest municipal response would have met major challenges. But what’s clear is that the alerting system failed many people—whether because they had spotty service, weren’t checking social media, had “alert fatigue” in an area where flash-flood alerts are common, or were vacationers unsure of where higher ground might be. Kerr County had considered installing a system of sirens along the river years earlier, but the project had been passed over because of cost. In the end, very little in the way of a meaningful warning system was in place for the area, and many who needed to evacuate didn’t. The death toll from the flooding now exceeds 100. (Kerr County and Kerrville officials did not return a request for comment at the time of publication.)
This Texas tragedy is unique in its details and devastation. But cellphone alerts and emergency warnings more broadly keep failing people in high-profile ways: During the Los Angeles fires earlier this year, a software issue resulted in evacuation orders being sent to millions of people who didn’t need to evacuate. (My colleague in Los Angeles County received 11 evacuation push alerts to her phone, likely all of them sent in error.) In Maui, during the catastrophic Lahaina fires, the authorities sent out evacuation orders over the wireless emergency-alert network, which is meant to reach everyone’s cellphones—but some residents said they’d never received the orders, delaying their evacuation until the last minute or leaving them in harm’s way.
These are failures of technology—messages sent but not received, or messages received by the wrong people. But they are also errors in human judgment, reflecting gaps in training. Before any alert goes out, someone has to write one, then decide how and when to send it. A lot can go wrong there, and often does.
In Texas, the National Weather Service has defended its forecasts, and meteorologists agree that it accurately predicted the risks. Staffing didn’t appear to be an issue, despite the cuts, buyouts, and early retirements that the Trump administration has pushed at the agency; its Austin/San Antonio forecast office had staffed up in anticipation of a potential storm. But the position of warning-coordination meteorologist there was vacant, along with a science-and-operations-officer post. Both positions are responsible for liaising with local authorities. The warning-coordination meteorologist in particular helps local agencies understand what forecasts mean and when to make evacuation calls. “They’re the connectors,” Jeannette Sutton, a social scientist at the University at Albany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, told me. “Without them, there’s a gap.”
Kerr County appears not to have used its access to the federally administered Wireless Emergency Alerts system—which can send out messages to cellphones—until the afternoon of July 6, when flood risk on the Guadalupe was still present but past its peak. Even then, the message was scant on details. It read: “High confidence of river flooding at North Fork of river. Move to higher ground.”
Writing a good alert message is harder than it might seem, Sutton told me, and many local officials across the country don’t know how. An alert message should include at least three basic elements—the affected location, plain-language instructions on actions to take, and the time by which people should act—yet many lack one or more. Authorities who use the Wireless Emergency Alerts system aren’t required to be credentialed or trained; too often, Sutton said, in the moment of a dire event, facing a blank screen, people in charge of writing the alerts can freeze.
She has trained some 500 local officials on best practices for alerts, but the program’s funding, from FEMA, lapsed in May. She and her colleagues have also developed a “warning lexicon” that governments can use to write clear and actionable warning-message templates in language regular humans can understand. San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, is one of the few governments to have officially adopted that system.
Shruti Dhapodkar, the director of emergency management for San Mateo County, told me that December 5, 2024, was a wake-up call. Her county was suddenly under an active tsunami warning. A major earthquake had struck off the California coast, and across the area, a message from the National Tsunami Warning Center popped up on people’s phones. Then things started to devolve: About 30 minutes later, San Mateo County mistakenly sent out a message on social media that said the warning had been canceled. But it hadn’t; the cancellation applied only to Hawaii. Officials issued a corrective, sowing confusion. Even the correct message was difficult to understand: Its directive to “move to high ground” was functionally meaningless to people who didn’t know how high their property was or where higher ground would be. Some local governments, including San Mateo County, decided not to sound their tsunami sirens. Some, like Berkeley, issued mandatory evacuation orders; others didn’t.
Within about an hour, the National Weather Service determined that the danger had passed. But if this had been a dress rehearsal for the Big One, the Bay Area’s crisis plans had flopped.
Since then, San Mateo’s emergency-management department has worked to coordinate across the 32 local agencies that have power to send emergency alerts; the next time a potential disaster strikes, they will all have a unified voice, Dhapodkar said, to cut down on conflicting information and the resulting erosion of trust. When residents look to a second or third agency for confirmation of any instructions they received, they’ll get it immediately. Alert templates are now pre-written for several scenarios, in clear, jargon-free language. And the county has built a website to show if an address counts as “high ground,” and is teaching residents to use it.
In a disaster, people need to hear in multiple ways that they’re in real danger, and that requires thinking beyond cellphone alerts and social media. “The more opportunities you have to receive a message, the more likely you are to receive it and act on it,” Mary Jo Flynn-Nevins, the chief of emergency services for Sacramento County, told me—so putting a community’s entire messaging effort into a single technology is “just increasing the odds of failure.” In rural parts of Sacramento County, her department has implemented a landline-alerting system too, and people from the sheriff’s department can drive around announcing emergency messages through loudspeakers. Drones with speakers can alert people from the air.
But none of this guarantees that the county will reach every last person. Emergency management “really requires people to understand their basic risks and believe that they’re at risk,” Flynn-Nevins said. She thinks everyone should have a weather radio, the kind enabled to receive NOAA weather alerts. They don’t rely on the power grid, and if the National Weather Service issues a warning in the middle of the night, it will wake you up with a loud tone. People are naturally complacent in assuming that important information will come to them, Dhapodkar said, but simply paying attention to the weather forecast and considering how you’d deal with an impending risk goes a long way toward keeping out of danger. As the planet warms and the frequency and intensity of several kinds of weather disasters in the United States climb up, and as the Trump administration indicates that it will pull more resources from the federal safety apparatus, the onus of emergency preparedness will grow only more local, down to each of us.
