Emergency responders say better tools and preparation also played life-saving roles after intense storms dropped heavy amounts of rain.
KERR COUNTY — One year after catastrophic flooding killed more than 100 people along the Guadalupe River, another round of deadly July flooding swept across Central and South Texas, creating flash flood emergencies that forced evacuations and rescues along the Guadalupe and elsewhere.
But while the two July storms were sometimes similar in intensity and effect, they unfolded in unique ways — swift and concentrated last year vs. multiple rounds of heavy rain over days across a broad region this week.
And while weather officials said they took the same approach to issuing warnings, residents and responders on the ground said they had more tools available to them and the motivation of anxiety borne from last year’s horrific tragedy.
The result: A dramatically lower death toll amid widespread and catastrophic flooding.
“I mean, it’s so fresh in everybody’s memory, about the flood and about being so surprised that it got that big and that it made it far and all that kind of stuff,” said Center Point resident Kay Steadham, who felt people took emergency alerts more seriously this go around.
Last year’s flooding came from an exceptionally intense burst of late-night rain that pummeled a small area at the headwaters of the south fork of the Guadalupe River. Some 7 to 12 inches of rain fell mostly over three hours, propelling a huge and deadly wave of water downstream. The National Weather Service issued alerts through the storm, but the worst of the flooding happened overnight, in the dark while people slept. Some alerts may not have been received if cell service was lacking or phone alerts were disabled. Some people described getting alerts but not feeling worried because floods often happen in Flash Flood Alley.
The Guadalupe River rose 29 feet in three hours at the gauge where the two forks of the river meet in Hunt, according to U.S. Geological Survey data. Many along the waterway found themselves trying to escape a river that rose faster than they imagined it could. The flood was incredibly deadly, killing 27 girls and an adult at the Camp Mystic summer camp and more than 30 people at RV parks, along with families staying in vacation homes. The top emergency officials — the county judge and the county emergency management coordinator — were asleep when the disaster struck.
This year’s floods stretched across a much broader area and time span, dropping water over multiple days and multiple river basins, often while the sun was up, giving emergency officials a warning and residents time to prepare, experts said. State and local officials confirmed two deaths from this year’s flood; one person who was driving in Uvalde County and the other who was swept away in an RV in Kerr County.
It was a serious and significant disaster at a wide scale, but the loss of life and severity of destruction did not amount to last year’s swift and violent tragedy.
“The Guadalupe River last year, it all came down at once,” said Greg Waller, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service’s West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth. “This one almost looks like a football game. There’s the first quarter, then there’s the second quarter. … It’s spread out.”
Differences and similarities
Multiple rivers saw flooding this year because the rain was widespread.
The heaviest rainfall Tuesday developed farther west in rural Uvalde County before spreading across the Hill Country and into Central Texas. Repeated storms followed over several days and across multiple watersheds, including Cibolo Creek and the Nueces, Guadalupe and Pedernales Rivers.
In the Kerr County area, the heaviest rain fell Wednesday and Thursday around Kerrville in areas further downriver than the year prior.
Several rivers crested at significant flood levels Thursday, including the Nueces River below Uvalde at 28 feet (up from a foot and a half in the weeks prior) and the Pedernales River at 34 feet near Fredericksburg (up from earlier levels around 5 feet).
The Guadalupe River, around 3 feet in recent weeks in Comfort, rose to 37 feet there this year — slightly higher than the 2025 floods. This wasn’t the first time major flooding struck that area in consecutive years. In 1935, the river rose to 36 feet, then 34 feet the following year.
Upstream on the Guadalupe where the worst damage occurred last year, the river did not peak nearly as high.
This year’s storms produced lower hourly peak rainfall rates, said Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, with hourly rainfall generally topping out around 4 inches from Tuesday to Friday over a wide area of the Hill Country. The heaviest rain fell in Kinney and Uvalde counties, and then Kerr and Gillespie counties.
The repeated rain added up. Rain gauges in Uvalde, Kerr, Real and Guadalupe counties measured more than 20 inches of rain since Monday, according to the National Weather Service. Such totals in those locations have only a 0.2% chance of occurring in a given year, according to federal scientists.
The 2025 and 2026 storms were highly extreme with a low probability of happening, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California. They shared other traits, including occurring when there were high levels of water vapor in the atmosphere and conditions primed for persistent, slow-moving storms — which Swain said was the model for most major flash floods in the region.
“It’s a familiar flavor, certainly, but the magnitude really is in some cases exceeding what we’ve seen historically, and it is really notable the same place has seen this in two consecutive years,” Swain said, “Part of that is just random chance. Just because it happened last year does not decrease the likelihood of it happening this year.”
Climate change is making heavy downpours more likely because warmer air is able to hold more moisture. Swain said scientists have found that intense subtropical and tropical downpours in thunderstorms like these may be the fastest increasing type of extreme rainfall.
The progression of storms over days created what experts described as valuable lead time for emergency managers downstream. Periods of lighter weather between rounds of rain allowed forecasters to monitor rivers as they rose before the next wave arrived.
Nick Fang, director of the University of Texas at Arlington’s water research center and an expert in flood prediction and early warning systems, said the 2026 storm’s evolution allowed forecasters and emergency responders to recognize the threat before it reached some of the hardest-hit communities.
“Early flood warning doesn’t start with the sirens, but starts with the science,” Fang said.
Forecasters briefed local officials on calls starting Sunday to spread the word about incoming storms, said Jason Runyen, warning coordinator meteorologist with the National Weather Service office for the Austin and San Antonio region. During the storm, he said, they were issuing warnings with the same approach as last year, escalating flash flood warnings to emergencies in some places, including along the Guadalupe and Pedernales rivers and in Uvalde.
“From a warning philosophy standpoint, there’s been no change in how we warn things,” Runyen said
And on the ground, people said they were prepared to take action.
Better tools bring a better response
Last year’s flood served as a warning that prompted an aggressive response this year, Gov. Greg Abbott said in a news conference Thursday.
The Texas Legislature responded last year with two major reforms: sweeping safety requirements for summer youth camps and warning siren mandates for certain places with a history of flash flooding.
The Upper Guadalupe River Authority has thus far installed six sirens in Kerr County, where the worst of the damage happened last year. Two on the South Fork and one in Hunt on the Guadalupe River were activated, while the remaining were not because they served areas with minor flooding, Tara Bushnoe, general manager of the river authority, said in an email. The authority plans to install additional sirens elsewhere.
Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring said the city was pushing out warnings along with the county and weather forecasters. They were also tracking conditions on the river authority’s dashboard, which became active in June and uses rainfall, river levels, stream flow and weather data to support emergency managers and prepare people to act.
The information let crews coordinate evacuations, close bridges and put up barricades.
“That saved lives yesterday, without a doubt,” Herring said Friday.
Continued Herring: “The difference [from 2025] is we did not have a warning system in place that could tell us the magnitude of the problem heading our way.”
County and city officials were posting updates throughout the night on their Facebook pages.
In Center Point, an unincorporated community in Kerr County along the Guadalupe River, volunteer firefighter Razor Dobbs said first responders felt prepared this time around. At the fire department, volunteers who staff the station 24/7 were trained and certified, he said.
The department had new rescue boats and vehicles, specialized gear and two trucks. The special operation team was ready to help with evacuations when an alert arrived.
“We’ve had it on our radar because the ground’s been getting saturated,” Dobbs said. “The more the ground gets saturated … it doesn’t take as much rain to flood.”
Rising water tore through the area early Thursday morning. The first alert one volunteer received went out roughly at 2:40 a.m.
The Center Point firefighters responded to dozens of distress calls, rescuing people from homes, cars, trees, tops of RVs and attics, Dobbs said. Two volunteers, Darcy Hasty and Coral Barrett, said they were knocking on doors to tell residents to evacuate to higher ground.
Dobbs said his team pulled people from floating cars and threw ropes to help a man trapped inside an 18-wheeler.
Last year’s tragedy helped change how people responded this week, said Robert Mace, a water expert and executive director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University.
“Everybody’s already a bit on edge about these storms and what they can do in terms of devastating property and taking people’s lives,” he said.
Rachel Hanes, a policy director at the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, said there’s a “much higher level of flood awareness this year,” adding this year’s event did not happen on a major holiday weekend, so there were likely fewer visitors unfamiliar with the local flood risks.
The broader lesson, experts say, is that no two floods are identical.
“The main lesson is this sort of thing can happen again, and we won’t know when,” Nielsen-Gammon said.
Source: , and , The Texas Tribune
Photo Credit: First responders on a bridge covered by water after the flood in Kerrville on July 16, 2026. Brenda Bazán for The Texas Tribune
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