When floodwaters tore through the Texas Hill Country again last week, Kerr County officials say they were ready, thanks to advanced warning and the significant amount of resources now available to them.
The overnight storm that began July 15 dropped enormous amounts of rain on the county and claimed the life of one local man, according to Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha. John Mark Steward, 63, was in his mobile home when flood waters swept it away in the Goat Creek Road area. Steward’s body was discovered in Center Point.
“Last I heard, we had 29 and a half inches of rain,” Leitha said of the rainfall total he had been given, adding that he drove through town for the first time this week and “saw stuff I couldn’t believe.”
Leitha, Kerr County Precinct 1 Commissioner Tom Jones and Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly described in an interview how the county mobilized two days ahead of the storm, a stark contrast to July 2025, when a similar flood on the Guadalupe River claimed the lives of 119 people in the county with almost no advance warning.
“Last year, I got the first call at 3:40 in the morning. We had no idea. There was three to five inches of rain forecasted, with five to seven in isolated areas,” Leitha said. “This year, we had two-plus days notice, and we’re out and about. The EOC is up and operating. So we were prepared for it.”
Kerr County activated an incident command post, a precursor to a full emergency operations center, on Tuesday evening at 7:30 p.m. and remained on site through Wednesday night before the flooding intensified overnight into Thursday, Jones and Leitha said. The incident command was located within the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office training room, complete with large digital screens, allowing for monitoring of flood gauge levels, weather predictions and other important information.
Gov. Abbott signed a state disaster declaration on Tuesday, a step officials said allowed the county to draw on state resources while it was already communicating and planning through its command post.
“We converted into a full EOC within half a day,” Leitha said. “We were prepared and ready to go until we got flooded out and lost electricity.”
After losing power at the EOC, Leitha said it took 30 minutes to relocate to the Hill Country Youth Event Center.
Kelly praised the joint effort of Kerr County officials, including emergency management coordinator Shorey Harmon, for their efforts.
“I arrived at the incident command post on Wednesday morning and they had the TVs assembled. They had them up on the wall. Here were the weather TVs, here were the gauges, rain gauges,” Kelly said.
Kelly returned at around 3:40 a.m. Thursday morning and signed the county disaster declaration.
Jones said the county had discussed simulating an incident command center, but had not expected to stand one up so quickly.
“We were 100 percent prepared because we were able to get ahead of the curve,” Jones said.
Leitha spent Tuesday through Friday morning at the incident command post and EOC, sleeping briefly in his office when time allowed.
State resources arrived ahead of the storm
Officials said the two days of advance notice allowed them to request state assets before the flooding began. Texas Parks and Wildlife game wardens stayed with the county the first night, bringing personnel who had already been deployed to Medina and Uvalde counties before being shifted to Kerr County, Leitha said.
“I was just looking for about five troopers, and next thing I know, I got 30,” Leitha said, describing state trooper deployments from the Texas Department of Public Safety. He also credited the state with sending additional personnel, including a Texas Task Force 2 swift-water team and helicopters.
Leitha said the county also positioned volunteer fire departments in advance rather than calling them from home.
“They (VFDs) were at the station calling people out,” he said, adding that some crews had recently acquired swift-water rescue gear purchased with a $100,000 donation from The Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country. Six people were trained to use the equipment, he said. Leitha said the county has also purchased a boat for his office with grant funding that will not be available until October, Leitha said.
Jones said the county lost much of its natural flood buffer during last year’s disaster, which he said contributed to how fast this storm hit populated areas.
“We’re pretty sure a lot of the reason that it hit differently is because we lost all of our riparian cover,” Jones said. “Out west, that water — it was just really fast.” He said the loss of vegetation meant “nothing could slow it down,” worsening flooding in Kerrville and Center Point.
New radio system tracked deputies, flood gauges in real time
Kerr County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Matthew Reusser, who manages the department’s radio and communications systems, demonstrated a mapping platform called Motorola Command Central Aware that the county has integrated with river-gauge data from the Upper Guadalupe River Authority.
“I can literally click on a little blue dot, and it tells me the level of the water. It tells me the cubic feet per second, and it shows exactly where it is on the map,” Reusser said. He said the system also tracks the location of every deputy’s portable radio in real time and can pull up floor plans for area schools that his office has loaded into the platform, allowing dispatchers to guide deputies through a building during an incident.
The system additionally provides live access to deputies’ body-worn camera video, Reusser said, which commanders used to monitor rising water during the storm.
Reusser said the mapping platform was not in place during last year’s flood. “We got the Aware program. It was a couple, like maybe two days after the Fourth of July flood,” he said, adding that the county used it heavily once it was installed.
The technology is part of a $7.2 million radio system upgrade funded with federal American Rescue Plan Act money, according to Leitha and Kelly, who said the project was designed to modernize the county’s communications for at least the next decade. The new radios include a feature called Smart Connect, Reusser said, which automatically switches a radio to the FirstNet cellular network if land-mobile-radio coverage is unavailable, and then to Wi-Fi as a third option. Reusser said he worked with the county’s IT department to load Wi-Fi network credentials for a regional radio system into every county building and has arranged for Starlink satellite internet units to be deployed in patrol vehicles to extend coverage further.
Reusser also said his office now shares real-time location data with neighboring agencies, including Bexar and Comal counties, as well as other agencies along the middle Rio Grande, so that visiting mutual-aid units can be tracked on the same map as Kerr County personnel.
Leitha said the interoperability was a marked improvement over last year, when visiting agencies took three to four days to coordinate on the correct radio channels. This time, he said, most outside units were on the county’s system within minutes. “The ones that didn’t have it, we had spares,” he said. Kelly and Leitha said the county did lose four radios, worth about $15,000, when a fire truck responding near Center Point was lost.
Officials credited the county’s public information officers, Clint Morris and Lisa Walter, with keeping residents updated overnight through official channels and social media, which Leitha said helped push out warnings well before floodwaters arrived.
Kelly said this week’s flooding caused more physical damage than the 2025 disaster.
“We don’t have the casualties. We don’t have the fatalities, and that was a pause on everything last year. It just broke everybody’s heart,” Kelly said. “This one, I would say the damage is probably more, the physical damage, but it’s not near as heavy on our hearts as it was last year.”
Kelly also said the county’s existing long-term recovery groups, formed after the 2025 flood, put Kerr County in a stronger position to respond this time.
“We already have the recovery infrastructures in place. They’re already formed, they’re already staffed, they’re already prepared,” he said.
Kelly noted that Kerr County and the city of Kerrville operate under separate lines of authority during a disaster, with the county drawing state emergency resources directly.
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