At Texas Flooding Hearing, State Officials Look Elsewhere for Blame

Texas’ emergency management chief on Wednesday defended his agency’s actions in the July 4 floods that ravaged the Texas Hill Country, suggesting at the first legislative hearing on the disaster that local emergency officials were not adequately trained to respond.

At several points during the hearing on the state’s handling of the catastrophic floods that killed at least 136 people statewide, W. Nim Kidd, the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, directed attention to the role of local emergency managers in disaster response in Texas.

“The responsibility of being in charge rests with local officials,” Mr. Kidd testified at the hearing of State Senate and House committees for disaster preparedness. He also pointed to the lack of specificity and urgency in National Weather Service forecasts until shortly before floodwaters began surging early on July 4.

While Mr. Kidd did not describe any particular failures by local officials, he stressed the need for “a deliberate conversation about the credentialing of emergency managers at the local level.” At the moment, there are no requirements for credentials.

“We can do better than that,” he said.

The testimony opened a daylong hearing at the State Capitol in Austin, part of a special session called by Gov. Greg Abbott to address the flooding, as well as to redraw congressional maps to benefit Republicans in response to pressure from President Trump.

The state is still reeling from the flooding. At the hearing on Wednesday, the director of the state police, Freeman Martin, told lawmakers that another person missing in the flood, an adult woman whom he did not identify, had been found dead. Two people, including a child from Camp Mystic, remain missing in Kerr County, he said.

Texas leaders have sought to avoid any finger-pointing over potential government failures that may have contributed to the flooding’s staggering toll, particularly in Kerr County, where over 100 people died. Mr. Abbott has said that those looking for whom to blame were “losers.”

“Our select committee will not armchair-quarterback or attempt to assign blame,” said Senator Charles Perry, the chair of the Senate’s special committee on disaster preparedness.

But local officials in Kerr County have faced questions about their failure to secure funding for a flood warning system in recent years, and the apparent lack of local government action amid increasingly dire weather alerts in the early hours of July 4.

No one from the Kerr County government or the city of Kerrville, the county seat, was invited to testify in Austin on Wednesday. Residents of the areas hit by the floods were also not permitted to speak. But they will have a chance to testify before lawmakers next week at a legislative hearing in Kerrville.

Democrats at the hearing mostly refrained from harsh questioning, though at one point, Representative Joe Moody said the response could have been better “before, during and after.”

“That’s not a blame game,” he said. “That’s accountability.”

The hearing began with lawmakers watching a 10-minute video clip from a Houston television news meteorologist who called the confluence of weather factors that led to the severe river flooding a “freak event.” The idea, Mr. Perry said, was to underscore just how unusual the event was.

“I’m hearing from the old-timers, this is a 500-year event,” Mr. Perry said.

Mr. Kidd said the forecasts leading up to July 4 predicted significant storms, but were not specific about the areas that might be most affected and required state officials to spread out resources over a large region. He said that the “area of concern” the day before the flooding stretched across 44 counties and that his agency convened a weather call with local governments in which well over 400 people participated.

The lawmakers mostly thanked the state officials who testified for their agencies’ work in responding to the flooding. Several appeared interested in taking action to improve systems of communication between emergency responders, and, after Mr. Kidd’s comments, of improving the training and credentialing of local emergency officials.

But there were a few moments of tension.

Senator José Menéndez, a San Antonio Democrat, asked whether more could be done by the state to make sure local officials received important weather warnings.

“We know we can share the information,” Mr. Kidd said. “But we really have no way of knowing whether they have received the message.”

“You do see the problem with that?” Senator Menéndez asked.

“I do,” Mr. Kidd replied. He added that part of the issue was that local emergency officials, who supply their contact information to the state, sometimes provided only office numbers or generic emails.

Later in the hearing, Senator Charles Schwertner, a Republican from northeast of Austin, asked Mr. Kidd whether he or his aides had tried to alert the local officials in charge of the emergency response as the flooding became apparent on July 4.

Mr. Kidd said that he was first told that people needed rescuing from rooftops at 4:46 a.m. local time, and that he quickly jumped in his car and began driving to Kerr County.

“On the drive down to Kerr County, I do not recall trying to reach the mayor or the judge,” he said. “I was more interested in communicating with the responders that were in the field.”

Mr. Schwertner did not appear satisfied. “We can’t just rely on the National Weather Service,” he said, saying it was “incumbent” on the state to make sure the person in charge was aware of an emergency, particularly in the middle of the night.

“You wake up the president right when there’s an attack,” the senator said. “In this case, the president of the United States is the county judge.”