Commissioners in Kerr County, Texas, are set to meet Monday in their first official court hearing since more than 100 people in the county, including children and counselors at a summer camp, were killed in catastrophic flooding last week.
The first item on the agenda at the bimonthly meeting: the July 4 flooding. The commissioners will “consider, discuss, and take appropriate action following update on status of recovery efforts,” according to a meeting agenda. Other agenda items will focus on authorizing overtime pay for employees who responded to the flooding and establishing a central location to assist affected citizens.
The meeting is expected to be livestreamed on Monday morning.
The Kerr County commissioners’ court consists of County Judge Rob Kelly and four commissioners and is the main governing body for the county, responsible for budgetary, tax and revenue decisions for the population of about 50,000 people.
The meeting on Monday comes about a week after torrential downpours in the overnight hours of July 4 transformed the Guadalupe River into a roaring flood, sweeping away homes, vehicles, roads and trees. At least 106 people in Kerr County alone died, including 36 children, and more than 150 others in the county are still missing.
The disaster has led to serious questions about how local officials prepared for the possibility of flooding in the months and years beforehand, how they acted as the Guadalupe River swelled from 3 feet to 30 feet in just 45 minutes on July 4, and how officials have responded in its destructive aftermath.
In addition, thunderstorms and heavy rain Sunday sparked new concerns of flash flooding. Ground search operations were suspended in Kerrville due to ongoing flood danger, authorities said Sunday morning. Operations later resumed, officials told CNN.
A week into recovery, questions on FEMA’s response
As search and rescue operations continue, officials inside the Federal Emergency Management Agency have expressed frustration and confusion about its own slow response to the floods.
Multiple urban search and rescue teams from across the country that responded to the floods told CNN they were not deployed by FEMA until at least the evening of July 7 – days after any victim had been found alive. In the past, the agency would have quickly staged these teams near disaster zones in anticipation of urgent requests for assistance, they said.
Multiple officials also said that a new rule requiring Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to sign off on relatively small expenditures from her agency, which oversees FEMA, created bureaucratic hurdles during a critical time. The rule slowed down the agency at a time when quick action was most needed, officials inside FEMA told CNN.
FEMA staff have also been answering phones at a disaster call center, where, according to one agency official, callers have faced longer wait times as the agency awaited Noem’s approval for a contract to bring in additional support staff.
The New York Times reported that FEMA did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line two days after the floods.
“When a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge, and wait times can subsequently increase,” a FEMA spokesperson said in response to the report. “Despite this expected influx, FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.”
Noem defended her agency’s response Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“Those claims are absolutely false – within just an hour or two after the flooding, we had resources from the Department of Homeland Security there helping those individuals in Texas,” Noem said. “So those claims are false, they’re from people who won’t put their name behind those claims, and those call centers were fully staffed and responsive, and this was the fastest, I believe, in years, maybe decades, that FEMA has been deployed to help individuals in this type of a situation.”
David Richardson, the acting administrator of FEMA, visited the disaster recovery center in Kerrville on Saturday in his first visit to central Texas since the floods. He did not respond to questions from CNN’s Julia Vargas Jones about the call center’s reported issues.
At Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian camp that sat along the Guadalupe River’s flood plain, 27 campers and counselors were killed, swept away in the raging waters.
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A review by The Associated Press found federal regulators repeatedly granted appeals to remove Camp Mystic’s buildings from their 100-year flood map, loosening oversight as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain.
Meanwhile, in downtown Kerrville, CNN’s Ivan Rodriguez visited a growing memorial Saturday along a fence featuring flowers, stuffed animals and photos of victims in a show of support and mourning. One message in crayon in a child’s handwriting read, “Beautiful angels, fly high. Until we meet again, may you rest in peace.”
CNN’s Brian Todd, Gabe Cohen, Michael Williams, Ray Sanchez, Rebekah Riess, Michelle Watson and Donald Judd contributed to this report.
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