After the July 4 floods killed at least 90 across Central Texas, state and county officials told reporters that the storm had come without warning.
But a wide array of meteorologists — and the Trump administration itself — has argued that those officials, as well as local residents, received a long train of advisories that a dangerous flood was gathering.
By sunset the night before the floods, federal forecasters were warning that rainfall would "quickly overwhelm" the baked-dry soil. By 1:14 a.m. local time, the NWS released the first direct flash flood warnings for Kerr County, which officials told The Texas Tribune should have triggered direct warnings to those in harm's way.
Instead, beginning on the day of the flood, state and local officials insisted they had no idea the flood was coming.
Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said leaders "had no reason to believe this was going to be anything like what has happened here, none whatsoever."
They were echoed the following day by Nim Kidd, the state's top emergency management official, who told reporters that forecasts "did not predict the amount of rain that we saw."
On Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that "something went wrong" when Camp Mystic and other sleepaway camps alongside the region's rivers didn't receive warnings of the oncoming waters.
"Next time there's a flood," Cruz told a Kerr County press conference on Monday, "I hope we have in place processes to remove the most vulnerable from harm's way. But that's going to be process that will take careful examination of what happened."
Read more from The Hill's Saul Elbein at TheHill.com.
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