You’ll have to follow the link, here. You may need to search for the week: June 30 -July 7.
The river starts at .18 feet on July 2nd. It begins rising after midnight on July 4th, and goes almost straight up to 34 feet shortly thereafter. The gauge doesn’t show it, but that was between 2 and 7 AM. On the graph, the high water mark is well into the “major flood” stage. It drops off almost as quickly, ending at 5 feet (below “action level”) by midnight on the 4th.
Flash floods are terrible, but they don’t tend to last long. It’s the only good thing you can say about them.
And while tout le internet is bandying about the term “flash flood alley” for this portion of the Hill Country, I’ve never heard that term in my life. Like “Tornado Alley,” which my family and family members lived in (live in), it’s a term somebody far from here made up and attached as a label. Tornadoes were/are just part of the landscape, like hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, and earthquakes and mudslides in California. We never thought of ourselves as living in an “alley” of them.
It’s a small thing, but it’s a chickenshit term. You think it’s enlightening, or explanatory, but it’s not. It’s something somebody just made up, to make themselves sound knowledgeable. Chickenshit, as I said.
And here: pictures of the gone world.
Adding: how quickly?
A flash flood watch was issued by the National Weather Service by Thursday afternoon for the region. Then, in the middle of the night, at 1:14 a.m. Friday, a flash food warning was issued as possibly “catastrophic,” for Bandera and Kerr Counties, according to the NWS. Those alerts would have automatically triggered Wireless Emergency Alerts on enabled mobile devices, the weather service said.
But because the alerts went out when most residents and visitors were asleep, coupled with the fact that many of those children attending summer camp as well as their counselors were without cell phones, the alerts likely went unheeded by many.
Residents who were up before daylight on Friday 4 reported rain misting by 3 a.m. but nothing out of the ordinary. That changed quickly by 5 a.m. Friday when flooding was detected on roadways in Kerr County.
The flooding reached its peak at around 6:45 a.m. in Kerrville, hours after warnings were first issued, according to the local flood gauge.
I appreciate your providing perspective on this horrible situation.
ReplyDeleteMy heart breaks for these people. I have family members who spent summers at Mystic. It makes me think what it would mean if this had happened then.
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