A deluge of rain triggered deadly flash floods in Texas Hill Country over the weekend, causing widespread damage and killing more than 80 people. As the death toll climbs, some experts say “flood warning fatigue” may have discouraged residents from heeding the National Weather Service’s (NWS) warnings.
Texas Hill Country is part of “flash flood alley,” a crescent-shaped region that curves from the Dallas area down to San Antonio and then westward. It’s one of the most dangerous places in the U.S. for flash flooding. In this region, the NWS issues flood watches so often that residents may be more likely to ignore them, Troy Kimmel, an Austin-based meteorologist and emergency manager, told NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth. While Kimmel believes the NWS issued timely alerts for this weekend’s floods with the best information available, he argues that too many warnings can make people complacent.
“The public just gets buried in these warnings,” Kimmel said. “I’m on the record for saying the National Weather Service overall in the United States issues too many warnings. I fully believe that.”
On the afternoon of Wednesday, July 2, the NWS office in Austin/San Antonio posted on X, stating that scattered moderate to heavy showers were developing and expanding to the Hill Country. Meteorologists know that this region’s rolling terrain can quickly cause shallow rivers to swell, and as the forecast grew increasingly concerning, the NWS continued to post about the flood threat.
By Thursday afternoon, portions of the western Hill Country, southern Edwards Plateau, and Rio Grande were under a flood watch. That advisory upgraded to a flood warning for some parts of the affected area just after midnight on Friday, indicating that flooding was imminent or already underway. From then on, the situation escalated. According to ABC News, Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring told reporters the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet (7.9 meters) within just 45 minutes in the early hours of Friday.
Local weather and disaster officials are no strangers to this type of situation or how deadly it can become. In 1987, heavy rain in western Kerr County triggered a similar flash flood that killed 10 teenagers being evacuated from a camp. Less than a month ago, another flash flood killed 13 people in San Antonio.
Despite this, many people within the Guadalupe floodplain—particularly those in cabins, campsites, and mobile home parks along the riverbank—failed to receive or respond to flood warnings and evacuation alerts early Friday. “We know we get rains. We know the river rises. But nobody saw this coming,” said Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top elected official. A Washington Post review of wireless emergency alerts and data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Integrated Public Alert & Warning System showed that Kerr County did not issue its first Amber Alert-style push until Sunday. And although the NWS Austin/San Antonio office was issuing alerts before then, some of them didn’t come until flooding was already well underway on Friday, and many may not have reached people in places where cellular reception is spotty.
Texas officials have raised questions about whether the NWS could have done more to warn people in the flood path. Some critics suggested the Trump administration’s sweeping NWS cuts hindered the agency’s ability to forecast the impact. Other experts have defended its efforts, stating that the NWS issued timely and accurate warnings to the best of its ability considering the rapid escalation of the event. In an emailed statement, the NWS communications office told Gizmodo it is “heartbroken by the tragic loss of life in Kerr County” and detailed its flood warning alert efforts leading up to Friday, July 4, stating that it gave “preliminary lead times of more than three hours before warning criteria were met.”
The question of whether flood alerts actually reached all residents in the flood path is a critically important one. This disaster has renewed a years-long push for a comprehensive flood monitoring system in Kerr County, which could go a long way to address gaps in the county’s warning abilities. But getting these messages to the public as quickly as possible is only half the battle. “The real trick is, how do you get people to get the message quickly, a message they can understand easily, and have them take action that will save their lives?” Steven Lyons, retired meteorologist-in-charge of the NWS San Angelo office, told the Washington Post. “People think, ‘It can’t be that bad; I’ll just jump up on my roof,’” Lyons said. “Well, not if your house is floating away.”
Warning fatigue is a key driver of this type of thinking. Some experts, like Kimmel, argue that issuing too many false alarms can lead to the “cry wolf effect.” This is when people ignore emergency alerts because they assume the hazard won’t actually manifest. The phenomenon has taken hold across the country, especially in disaster-prone places like Flash Flood Alley, where climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of extreme weather. As global temperatures continue to rise, so will the number of alerts, which could worsen warning fatigue. At the same time, catastrophic events like this deadly flood will become more common.
This is a deadly combination. It’s possible that more weather catastrophes could make the public more attentive and responsive to emergency alerts, but desensitization likely already results in countless deaths nationwide. As the NWS contends with climate realities and struggles to maintain lifesaving operations under the second Trump administration, the agency must also find ways to get through to the public.
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