FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors

Here's some local and national reporting I found interesting.

1. Kerr county balked at the cost of flood sirens. [0]

2. Kerr county didn't alert all cell phones of the emergency. [1]

3. Kerr county repeatedly asked the State of Texas for flood help and the state said no. [2]

4. Kerr county was in the bottom half of property taxes in the state of Texas in 2017. [3]

[0] https://www.wowt.com/2025/07/11/small-texas-community-where-...

[1] https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/fema-records-kerr-coun...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/us/politics/texas-flood-a...

[3] https://www.uttyler.edu/academics/colleges-schools/business/...

From that NYT article:

"Some residents argued that outdoor sirens blaring warnings in the event of a flash flood would ruin the natural feel of the area that many prized. “The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of the night,” one county commissioner at the time, Buster Baldwin, said during a 2016 meeting. “I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.” (Mr. Baldwin died in 2022.)"

I'm thinking hard here, but I'm reasonably sure this is at least in the top-5 most moronic short-sighted, selfish, brain-dead things I've ever seen in my life. Possibly even top-3. Yeah, I'd join Buster in the bar to drink ourselves in a coma.

In fairness, a similar issue has traditionally existed with tornado warnings, which they likely have in that part of the US. Most of the people affected by the warning are not actually at risk because the warnings are poorly targeted or the risk doesn’t meaningfully materialize. Over time, people get warning fatigue and they start ignoring them. It becomes a “boy who cried wolf” situation which makes the loud sirens that much more of a nuisance.

The spam-y nature of many disaster warning systems is widely understood to be an issue. If these people have existing experience with other low hit-rate warning systems like for tornados, it isn’t surprising that they would find even more warnings to be a nuisance. The false positive rates that people experience is too high by an order of magnitude to be an effective system.

If they have warning sirens that are ineffective at conveying real risk, they stop being warnings and become background noise.