Kerr County officials waited 90 minutes to send an emergency alert after requesting the audio office.
At 4:22 am on Friday, when the country of Hill Country of Texas began to flood, a firefighter in Ingram, just above Kerville, asked the Sheriff’s office of the Kerr County Sheriff to alert the nearby residents, according to the audio obtained by the ABC KSAT affiliate. But Kerr County officials took almost six hours to listen to this call.
“The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on state highway 39,” said the firefighter in the dispatch audio. “Is there any way to send a encoded to our hunting residents, asking them to find a higher land or stay at home?”
“Support, we have to approve it with our supervisor,” said a dispatcher of the Kerr County Sheriff’s office.
You can see a bus on the side near a damaged building along the Guadalupe River after a sudden flood swept the area, on July 5, 2025, in Hunt, Texas.
Julio Cortez/AP
The first alert did not arrive through the Kerr Counting system up to 90 minutes later. Some messages did not arrive until after 10 in the morning, hundreds of people had been swept by the waters of the flood.
The Kerr County Sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to a comment request.
At a press conference on Wednesday morning, Kerr County Sheriff, Larry Leitha, refused to answer a question about delayed emergency alerts, saying that a “subsequent action” would follow search and rescue efforts.
“Those questions will be answered,” he added.
The records show that the Kerr County Emergency Notification System, which alerts emergency subscribers through pre -recorded telephone messages, has been in force for at least a decade.
People see damage along the Guadalupe River in Kerville, Texas, on July 5, 2025.
Dustin Safranek/EPA through Shuttersock
When Kerr County and the city of Kerville introduced for the first time in 2014, a government press release said he could “notify the entire city / county on emergency situations in a matter of minutes.”
Codered was based on local white pages for user contact information, the announcement explained, so “no one should assume that their number is included.” The residents had to register to make sure to receive alerts.
In 2021, Kerr County incorporated the Integrated Public Alert of Fema & Warning system (IPAWS) in Codered, so that messages can reach tourists and others not in the local database. The IPAWS system allows local officials to transmit emergency messages and send text explosions to all phones in the area.
At that time, some county officials were not sure of change.
The waters of the flood left debris, including vehicles and equipment scattered in Louise Hays Park, on July 5, 2025, in Kerville, Texas.
Eric Vryn/Getty Images
“What is the benefit?” Kerr County Commissioner Jonathan Letz asked at a meeting of commissioners in May 2021.
“It’s just another way for us to notify people when we have an emergency,” said Emergency Management Coordinator William “Dub” Thomas.
The then commissioner Harley David Belew voted against adding IPAWS to the coded system after pointing out that he would require changing the county team, which said he had recently done due to a federal policy change a few years before.
“I don’t think it’s going to change anything,” Belew said.
Despite these doubts, Kerr County began using IPAWS along with his system coded in 2021.
When the area was flooded on Friday, the member of the City Council of Ingram, Ray Howard, told ABC News that he received three sudden flood alerts of the National Meteorological Service, but none of Kerr’s County authorities.
On Monday, Belew went to the Michael Berry program to discuss catastrophic floods. In the program, he said that Kerr County commissioners had considered putting a warning system early years before, but there were not enough cell towers to reach rural parts of the County, “so that idea was discarded.”
The records show that the issue of a flood warning system for Kerr County emerged in at least 20 different meetings of county commissioners since he first presented in 2016, months before Belew joined the Court.
Belew explained in the radio program that the financing for a warning system was also a barrier to implementation, echoing problems that he raised at that time, according to the minutes of the meetings.
But even after the tragic floods of last week, Belew expressed concern about spending on that system: “God only knows what will happen, what kind of waste of the government we could obtain in an alert system,” he said in the segment on Monday.
“But if we can obtain an early warning system for the future, that would give people some tranquility here,” Belew added. “It has always been necessary.”
