Kerr County Failed And Everyone Knows It
What we learned in the first twenty minutes was enough.
The field hearings regarding the July 4th floods started this morning at 9:30 am and wrapped up at 11:00 pm. All day, the Select Committee on Disaster Preparedness & Flooding heard from local leaders and the public about what happened on that morning. Some of the testimony has been tragic, from mothers who lost children to property owners who found body parts in their yards. For obvious reasons, that isn’t included in this article. And while I listened to almost all of the testimony today, what we learned in the first twenty minutes was enough.
Some of you may be angry. You have good reasons. The revelations from today’s hearings are disconcerting. I want to remind people that the children who died didn’t have a party affiliation. Kerr County leadership dropped the ball, and they’re Republicans, and so were many of the victims. But the flood wasn’t red or blue, it was Texan.
We should demand basic accountability from everyone in office, regardless of party affiliation, and that includes at the local and state levels. We need to demand more from those in charge. Period.
Some of you may have already seen other news outlets talking about how the County Judge was sleeping when the flood happened, or you may remember my article last week, “They Let Texas Drown.” In last week’s article, we learned from Chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management W. Nim Kidd that no warnings were sent out locally.
Here are the first three minutes of Judge Rob Kelly’s testimony, when he admits that he was awoken to texts that something was wrong:
You may be thinking, “Surely, not just this one 70-year-old man is responsible for pushing the Oh Shit! button.” You would be right about that. There was also the Sheriff, who was also sleeping. And the Emergency Management Coordinator. And he was sick.
Even Republicans recognized this as a colossal failure.
For the record, we still hate Senator Bettencourt (R), but he was right. An emergency alert system could have saved lives, and the fact that Kerr County didn’t have one is indefensible.
Another thing he talked about, that other Senators have mentioned, and I’m not buying, is that Texans turn off their emergency alerts on their phones. In fact, that was shocking information to me. What about tornadoes? What about Zombies? It seems unusual that so many people would be turning off their weather alerts, especially in Texas.
The overall theme of this hearing, which was repeated over and over again by local leaders, was how no one could have ever predicted this flood. It was a 1,000-year flood, an act of God, it’ll never happen again.
How do you convince a room full of people who don’t believe that climate change is real otherwise? How do you convince them that the decades of propaganda they’ve been fed about fossil fuels and the weather are all lies, and this will happen again, in our lifetimes, and next time it will be worse?
Representative Ann Johnson (D) did a pretty good job of it.
Representative Johnson did not give these local leaders an inch, and she reminded them, We’ve seen deadly floods before. In Wimberley in 2015, there were Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and Tropical Storm Allison before that. There will be more. Who knows where it will be next time? While Johnson doesn’t invoke climate change directly (know your audience), the frequency of extreme weather occurrences will continue to increase in Texas because of it.
For those of us outside the county, understanding the political aspect involved is crucial.
Many victims of the July 4th flood, particularly those from Camp Mystic, came from prominent, old-money Texas families. If you know Texas, you know what that means.
It’s the only reason I can think of that explains what I saw today. For the first time in all my years watching the Texas Legislature, Dan Patrick sat on the dais during a committee hearing.
On the dias. (I’m not even sure that’s allowed under the rules.)
Wealth and politics in Texas have always been tightly intertwined. It may be quiet, but it’s unmistakable. To understand what Dan Patrick was doing on that dais, you have to know how deeply entrenched old money families are in shaping not just policy.
First, Senator Charles Schwertner (R) (we still hate him, too), reiterated how all three county officials failed to pull the trigger on issuing a warning that morning.
Then, when it came back to Schwertner, he tried to pin Judge Kelly down. He was cutting his eyes toward the end, and making a little smirk toward someone off-screen. It was Dan Patrick. Of course, there is no proof of this, but watch the look Schwertner shoots toward Patrick in the last second of this video. ⬇️
It was almost as if Dan Patrick set Schwertner up for those questions. Schwertner established a timeline of absence and ambiguity. The judge was still asleep. When he did wake up, his first action was to pack and check on his dogs, not to mobilize aid, not to issue a public alert. Even his presence at the governor’s press conference was fuzzy.
There are going to be a lot of lawsuits. Those wealthy families, who, as you’ll hear, now have the personal cell phone of Dan Patrick, are going to bury Kerr County, along with every other family who lost a loved one. Camp Mystic will likely be sued into oblivion, along with any RV Parks, private entities, or local government agencies that can be found liable in court. The testimonies from these hearings will be used as evidence.
Here was Patrick’s response:
He gave him one hell of a dressing down. I predict Judge Kelly doesn’t serve another term after this. Because if you know how Texas works, while Patrick said, “I’m not blaming you,” it was a definite signal the state was ready to let Rob Kelly take the fall.
Because when wealthy and powerful families lose their children, and those families have Dan Patrick on speed dial, someone’s going to be held accountable.
In the end, this hearing wasn’t just about what happened in Kerr County.
Accountability shouldn’t require connections. Preparedness shouldn’t depend on the ZIP code of the victims. And climate disasters shouldn’t be treated like once-in-a-lifetime acts of God when we know they’re becoming routine.
This was a failure at every level, local, structural, and political. And next time, it won’t just be Kerr County. It’ll be someone else’s backyard. Someone else’s child. Vote accordingly.
August 23: Last day of special session
November 4: Constitutional/TX18/SD09 Election
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"Because when wealthy and powerful families lose their children, and those families have Dan Patrick on speed dial, someone’s going to be held accountable."
Correct. The wealthy and the powerful will hold someone accountable using their own resources. I kept thinking about Uvalde as Abbott, Patrick and Trump tromped around setting up the way the narrative was going to go in Kerr County. It was pretty similar to how Abbott and Patrick set up the narrative in Uvalde. Austin could not be held responsible for this "senseless, unforseeabe, unpreventable" rampage by a young and alienated male with a weapon of war. They were obviously going to bury DPS failures and let the Uvalde ISD officer and other local officials take the fall.
But the difference in Kerr County is the wealthy and powerful will have pull with Granny Danny Patrick. And, of course, nothing happens in the Lege unless he deigns to allow it. Therefore, there will be some kind of gesture at state flood mitigation. When pushed into a corner, Patrick will go through the motions, but he does not care about that kind of stuff. He is only interested in Christian Nationalism and his own power and glory within that system.
I would like to see Vickie Goodwin drive a wedge into Republicans with both Uvalde and Kerr County as examples of how Dan Patrick does not care about Texans. I also think he should be given the Trump-like nickname of "Granny Danny" because that is what he looks like and what he acts like.
When the sirens stay silent and the rich whisper directly to the lieutenant governor, we don’t have a disaster response system—we have a caste system.
The flood wasn’t just water. It was revelation.
It showed us who gets warned, who gets protected, and who gets buried.
What failed wasn’t just Kerr County.
It was the lie that Texas leaders serve everyone.
Because if your kids weren’t at Camp Mystic, your grief doesn’t get a press conference.
Your rage doesn’t get a seat on the dais.
Your life doesn’t shift policy.
This wasn’t an act of God. It was an act of negligence, baptized in oil money and wrapped in the illusion of inevitability.
Vote accordingly.
And may the next flood carry away their excuses, not our children.