Texas county emergency official says he was absent when floods hit because of illness

A Texas county emergency official said that he was absent when the deadly floods hit July 4 because he was sick and sleeping.

Kerr County emergency management coordinator William Thomas acknowledged his situation when testifying Thursday during a hearing with state lawmakers – marking his first comments since the floods hit central Texas, according to the New York Times.

“I want to directly address questions about my whereabouts,” Thomas said. He explained that he had already planned to take off work on July 3 “to fulfill a commitment to my elderly father,” but, because of a “progressing illness,” he stayed home.

“I stayed in bed throughout July 3 and did not participate in the regularly scheduled 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Texas Emergency Management Coordination Center coordination calls,” Thomas said.

Thomas said his supervisors were aware that he had taken off on July 3. He testified that he slept through most of July 3, until he briefly awoke at about 2 p.m., when he said there was no indication of local rainfall,  then went back to sleep until his wife woke him up at 5:30 a.m. on July 4.

By the time Thomas woke up, the worst of the flooding had already hit the low-lying communities in the county.

He said that the county sending more alerts would have been redundant since the National Weather Service had already triggered several alerts as the water rose, and that those seemed sufficient. Thomas also that only six of the 19 camps in the county had submitted emergency management plans.

Thomas works under the county’s judge, Rob Kelly, who is the top-ranking official and directs emergency management.

Kelly testified that he had been at his second home in Lake Travis when the floods began but returned to Kerr County when the severity of the floods became apparent on July 4.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), who sat in on the committee hearing, criticized Kelly for his absence from the emergency operations center where other key officials, such as the Kerrville mayor and the county sheriff, had gathered.

“Judge Kelly, I never saw you on day one,” Patrick said. “I came here from Austin, in this room, I talked to the sheriff multiple times, I talked to the mayor multiple times, we had a meeting when we got here."

“You should have been here, you should have been here directing that response,” he added.

Texas state Rep. Ann Johnson (D) said during the hearing that “the three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable” at the emergency's peak, before dawn on July 4.

She said that the judge was away, the sheriff didn’t wake up until 4:20 a.m., and the emergency management coordinator was sick.

Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R) criticized top officials for being absent during the crisis, saying, “Somebody has to have the football.”

Meanwhile, Kendall County Judge Shane Stolarczyk testified on Thursday that Brady Constantine, his county’s emergency manager, was on the July 3 state coordination calls and came away with “an uneasy feeling that night about the weather conditions.”

Stolarczyk said that Constantine began making phone calls around 4 a.m. on July 4. But by then, the water was already at deadly levels, as witnesses testified at the hearing that a call for help from Camp Mystic, outside of Hunt, came in at 3:57 a.m.