In a Sunday afternoon press conference, Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice indicated for the first time that officials would review their protocols.
SAN ANTONIO — As Kerr County continues to hold out hope that families may be reunited with missing loved ones after Friday’s catastrophic flooding, questions and scrutiny are mounting over whether officials did enough to prepare the public amid warnings of potential flooding from the National Weather Service.
On Friday, as the scope of the devastation was just starting to become clear, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said he didn’t know why numerous area camps weren’t evacuated. He also said “we do not have a warning system.”
“We didn’t know this flood was coming,” he said. “Rest assured, we didn’t know this kind of flood was coming.”
Local authorities have since shifted to largely keeping the focus of their ensuing briefings to ongoing search efforts, despite being asked multiple times this weekend about reports from local residents who said they weren’t told to evacuate before the Guadalupe River rose to some of its highest-ever levels.
Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice has repeatedly shared that he was running along the Guadalupe River at 3 a.m. on Friday, at which point he said there was still no indication of what would transpire in the coming hours.
“(Rice) told us earlier that he was jogging at 3 in the morning along the river and there wasn’t a drop of rain falling,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also said on Friday. “Within a few hours, the Guadalupe had risen about 26 feet.”
On Sunday afternoon, Rice – one of the most visible Kerrville-area officials since the onset of the natural disaster – for the first time pledged the city would look into its protocols.
“We know questions are being asked about the emergency notification,” he said. “And while it is not the time to speculate, local and regional partners are committed to a full review of the events and systems in place. At the appropriate time, we will take clear steps to strengthen our future preparedness.”
>>WATCH: Full afternoon press briefing with Kerr Co. officials on Sunday, July 6, 2025
What those steps could be remains to be seen.
But in a Friday evening news conference alongside Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders, Rice said the process of considering whether or not to evacuate is “very difficult,” pointing to the possibility of “chaos on the road.”
“This is the Hill Country, there’s a lot of low-water crossings,” Rice said at the time. “If you spark an evacuation at the wrong time or create an evacuation, you can create a mass panic (and) get people on the road, which could be even more deadly by having vehicles be swept away. So there’s a very fine balance between sheltering in place (or) getting to the high grounds.”
The Austin/San Antonio office of the NWS shared to social media at 2:35 p.m. last Thursday – more than 12 hours before the rain began in Kerrville – that the county was under a Flood Watch, adding there was a potential for “flooding in low-lying areas.”
“Can’t rule out isolated (amounts of) 5 to 7 inches,” the alert said.
According to Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, the state was aware of the potential for flooding in parts of South-Central Texas and even pre-emptively deployed resources to certain areas on Thursday night.
“(NWS forecasts) did not predict the amount of rain that we saw… they were warning of 3 to 6 inches of rain,” Kidd said, adding that state meteorologists observed a potential for higher amounts, “which caused us to activate additional resources and have them in the area just in case.
“Those were put immediately into use as soon as the rain fell and the calls started coming in,” Kidd said of the Friday morning response. “They were already here.”
As much as 8 to 10 inches of rain ultimately fell in parts of Hunt, Ingram and other Kerr County communities, and the Guadalupe River crested to dangerous levels in a stunningly brief span of time.
As of Sunday evening, officials said they have recovered 68 bodies in the Kerr County search area, including 28 children. Eleven remain unaccounted for from Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas.
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