The Flood Warning Reached One Woman Six Times. Another Woke to Water on the Floor.

Around two in the morning on Wednesday, July 15, a friend called Jaclyn Gonzales to warn her that a tornado might be heading toward her home in the Uvalde area. She got up. The floor was already wet. What fully woke her, as she later told the Associated Press, was the water on her feet.

The call was about the wrong hazard. Whatever the tornado was doing, the water was already inside the house, and nothing official had told her it was coming — no siren, no message pushed to her phone, no call from the county.

Gonzales lived in the Uvalde area, outside the county at the center of a flash flood that had killed at least 135 people across Central Texas one year earlier, and where officials had spent that year building a warning system meant to keep it from happening again. An AP review of federal wireless-alert data found no alerts issued by Uvalde County agencies during the event, though AP noted other channels may have been used. What government warning products, if any, covered her precise location that night isn't in the published record.

Thirty hours later and about sixty miles northeast, Suzanne Gschwind sat in Kerrville watching her phone light up as the same storm system moved through Kerr County. Texts, calls, alerts from her doorbell camera. Warnings came roughly every two hours through the night. She described it as nothing like the year before, and said she would rather have too many than too few. For someone who had lived through 2025, the excess was the point.

Eighteen hours after that, at 3:30 on Friday morning, Kat Sprawls found out water was approaching her home in Batesville because a friend called her five or six times. Sprawls's phone was set to do not disturb — a setting built specifically to silence the kind of repeated, urgent contact her friend was attempting. The repetition beat the setting.

One storm system did all of this. It began dropping rain over rural Uvalde County on Tuesday, moved through several watersheds before reaching Kerr County on Wednesday and Thursday, then pushed water downstream into Zavala County by Friday. The rain was not the variable. What each of these women experienced depended on what had been built where she happened to live.

What Got Built, and Where

On July 4, 2025, flash flooding along the upper Guadalupe River killed at least 135 people across Central Texas, 117 of them in Kerr County, with two people still listed as missing at the time of a subsequent federal review. The National Weather Service had issued a flash-flood warning covering the town of Hunt at 1:14 a.m. But Kerr County had no outdoor sirens along the affected stretch of river, an older river-warning network had fallen into disrepair, and the Weather Service could not reach the county's emergency-management coordinator until 6:19 a.m., more than an hour after the river crested.

The rebuilding went where the dying had happened. The Upper Guadalupe River Authority, the regional water agency that manages the river corridor, installed six public sirens. The county expanded CodeRED, a notification service that only reaches people who have signed up for it. Wireless emergency alerts — the messages that go to every cell phone inside a targeted area, whether or not the owner enrolled in anything — became part of the county's repertoire. A network of river gauges called RiverHub started feeding officials real-time water levels.

Uvalde County, where Gonzales lived, had none of it. Zavala County, where Sprawls lived in the unincorporated community of Batesville, relied on Facebook posts and knocking on doors. Sprawls told AP there was "no warning system at all." That describes what reached her, which is the thing she is in a position to know. It isn't a complete inventory of every federal or county product issued in the region.

What the County Sent That Night

Kerr County's new equipment did produce something measurable on the night of July 15–16. County officials said CodeRED notifications began at 1:36 a.m. and that 59 went out over the course of the incident. That figure counts notifications sent. It does not count unique recipients, successful deliveries, or people who read a message and understood what it was asking them to do. AP's review of the federal data found four Kerr County alerts and one from the city of Kerrville early Thursday, one of them telling Quinlan Creek residents to get to higher ground.

At 3 a.m. the Weather Service issued a flash-flood emergency for central Kerr County, its most severe flood product. The text describes conditions already underway: three to six inches of rain, flooding, evacuations, rescues, water entering structures. In some places that message was confirming what people could already see.

UGRA activated three of its six sirens — two on the South Fork, one in Hunt. The other three cover watersheds that saw only minor flooding. Governor Greg Abbott said one siren failed to sound on the first attempt and worked when officials retriggered it two to five minutes later. No public document identifies which siren, explains what went wrong, or records an inspection afterward.

Six privately owned River Sentry towers at campgrounds near Ingram went off automatically around 3:32 a.m. when their sensors registered rising water. Those are commercial devices, separate from the six UGRA sirens, though some early coverage ran the two together.

Gschwind was somewhere inside all of that. She got texts and calls from local authorities and weather services and her doorbell camera. Which of the county's specific alerts reached her, whether she was signed up for CodeRED, whether she heard a siren — none of that is in the record. Her exact address in Kerrville isn't public, and the sirens sit along the river corridor in the western part of the county, so living in Kerrville does not by itself put a person within earshot of one.

What the coverage does capture is her read on the night: nothing like 2025, and she was glad of the surplus. What it doesn't capture is what she did next. No published account says whether she evacuated, moved upstairs, drove out to look at the river, or went back to bed. Even so, hers is the closest thing the public record offers to a description of designed redundancy from the receiving end — several channels arriving in sequence, each one confirming the last.

The Plan Nobody Has Seen

Two weeks before the flood, on July 2, Kerr County Emergency Management Coordinator Shorey Harmon told reporters he was confident he could activate every completed siren and would base that call on Weather Service reports and river readings. In the same meeting he described the specific activation protocols and the county's updated emergency action plan as a "work in progress." The county did not produce the plan when the Texas Newsroom asked for it.

After the flood, UGRA said an operations manual and flood emergency procedures had been developed before the event and that Kerr County activated the three sirens under an established protocol. County Commissioner Tom Jones said the system "worked the way it was designed to work."

Both things can be true. Two weeks is enough time to finish a protocol. But the manual has not been released, nor its completion date, nor its activation thresholds, nor the command log showing when each siren was triggered and by whom. "Worked as designed" is a statement about a system meeting its own specifications. It answers a narrower question than the one a person standing in her kitchen at 3 a.m. is asking.

Fewer Deaths, and the Argument Over Why

The July 2026 flooding in Kerr County killed far fewer people than the 2025 disaster. Officials pointed to the new system. Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring said RiverHub and the alerts had saved lives "without a doubt." State Sen. Paul Bettencourt called the pairing of outdoor sirens and cellphone alerts an "enormous improvement."

Other people looking at the same event listed reasons to be careful with that conclusion. The 2026 rain arrived in rounds over several days, which gave forecasters and emergency managers time to watch conditions and move resources into place — nothing like the single overnight deluge of 2025. The worst Kerr County flooding hit farther downstream. The upper Guadalupe near Hunt did not rise as high. It happened midweek, with fewer out-of-town visitors around. And county officials had stood up an incident command post Tuesday evening, before the heaviest rain fell.

Jason Runyen, a warning coordination meteorologist with the Weather Service, said the agency's warning philosophy hadn't changed from the year before. Flood-warning researcher Nick Fang made the case that early warning starts with forecasting and observation, not with sirens. Others pointed to public awareness: people who survived the previous July, or buried someone from it, did not need a loudspeaker to take heavy rain seriously.

The disagreement is about proportion. How much of the smaller death toll belongs to the new hardware, and how much to a slower storm, staged responders, a weekday, a different stretch of river, and a population carrying a year-old memory? None of the sources reviewed here — the county, the city, UGRA, the Weather Service, or independent researchers — has published anything connecting a particular warning channel to a particular number of evacuations. Kerr County logged 234 flood-related calls on July 16. That number captures how much need there was, but not whether people were calling because a siren woke them or because the water had already come in.

A Friend Who Kept Calling

Each piece of a warning system gets counted on its own: gauges installed, sirens erected, notifications sent, alerts issued. But no one tracks whether the pieces ever converged on one person in one bedroom at three in the morning, and whether that person understood what she was being told and had anywhere safe to go. Joining the pieces is work, and it isn't assigned to anyone.

In Gschwind's case, the system did the joining. Alerts came from several directions at once, and the redundancy itself carried the message — this is not a normal night. Her account still has holes the reporting doesn't fill. But she felt warned.

In Batesville, no county alert system, siren network, or opt-in notification service has been documented, and no local wireless emergency alert appears in the federal data. The thing that reached Sprawls was a friend with a phone who called five or six times, which was exactly the number of calls required to get past a setting designed to stop them. Whatever Sprawls did in the minutes after she woke, and how close the water was by then, no one wrote down.

Gonzales got neither. Her friend's call came at roughly the same hour, and it was about a tornado. The wet floor told her what was actually happening.

What Remains Open

Before the July flood, county and state officials were already arguing about what to build next. Commissioner Rich Paces pushed for road gates and flashing warnings at low-water crossings. Former commissioner Tom Moser said putting up sirens first and assembling the rest of the system around them was not the right order. Mark Rose, who used to run the Lower Colorado River Authority, argued that state law needs to say clearly who is responsible for river warning and then fund the whole thing. Officials put the price of additional sirens, road warnings, rain gauges, and river gauges at $14 million or more — for Kerr County alone.

That argument takes one county as its unit. The July 2026 floods did not. The same weather that tested Kerr County's rebuilt system also put water into homes in Uvalde and Zavala counties, where nothing comparable had been funded. Zavala County reported more than 100 rescues. The line between the county with sirens and the counties without runs along the same border as the line between where the 2025 deaths were concentrated and where they weren't.

As of today, no public after-action assessment has been posted by the City of Kerrville, Kerr County, UGRA, or any state agency. The siren activation log is unpublished. So is the operations manual UGRA says existed before the flood, and the county emergency action plan that was a work in progress on July 2. For now, the question of what the system accomplished on July 16 is answered by officials expressing confidence and researchers urging caution, with nothing at the household level to settle it.

Gschwind, in Kerrville, got more warning than she could count and was grateful for it. Sprawls, in Batesville, was reached only because a friend wouldn't stop calling. Gonzales, near Uvalde, learned about the flood from the water already on her floor. None of that reflects how prepared or attentive these three women were. It turns on which county's losses in 2025 were large enough to fund a rebuilding — and whether the counties that didn't lose 117 people are ever going to get one is a question no one in Austin or Kerrville has answered publicly.