As the Guadalupe River swelled from a wall of water
heading downstream, sirens blared over the tiny river community of Comfort -- a last-ditch warning to get out for those who had missed cellphone alerts and firefighters going street-to-street telling people to get out.
Daniel Morales, assistant chief of the Comfort Volunteer Fire Department, believes that long, flat tone the morning of July Fourth saved lives.
The sirens are a testament to the determination of a community that has experienced deadly floods in the past, warning residents of devastating floodwaters that hours earlier had
killed at least 118 people in communities along the same river, including
27 campers and counselors in neighboring Kerr County.
That county did not have a warning system like the one in Comfort.
Morales has been with the department for decades. He was there when flooding in 1978 killed 33 people, 15 of them in Comfort, including his grandfather. So when an opportunity arose last year to expand the community's emergency warning system, he and other residents buckled down to find the funding.
Morales said they cobbled together money from a grant, from the county commission, the department’s own budget and from the local electric utility, which also donated a siren pole. They also got help installing the flood sensor gauge in the creek.
The price tag with all the donated materials and the costs the department fronted was somewhere around $50,000 to $60,000 or “maybe a little more,” Morales said.
After the updated Comfort sirens were installed, the volunteer fire department spent months getting the community used to the siren tests that sound daily at noon, putting out messaging that if they hear a siren any other time of day, they should check local TV stations, the department’s Facebook page and elsewhere for emergency notifications.
The sirens make a specific sound for tornadoes and a long, flat tone for floods.
So on July Fourth, if people in Comfort hadn’t seen the weather alerts sent to phones or announced on radios, if they hadn't heard shouting firefighters going from street to street to evacuate, they heard the long tone and knew they had to leave their homes. A Facebook post on the department’s page noted a mandatory evacuation of all residents along the Guadalupe River.
But Comfort was also miles away from the flash flooding that overtook the camps and didn't experience the cresting of the river flooding until after the terrifying rush of water in the pitch black early morning hours hit cabins. Many Comfort residents were already awake and aware of the rising water by the time the sirens sounded. The Guadalupe's crest was among the highest ever recorded at Comfort, rising from hip-height to
three stories tall in over just two hours.
Morales doesn't know if sirens would have changed things in Kerr County. But he knows they gave Comfort residents
an extra level of warning. In recent days, Morales said he has been contacted by some of the funders to talk about adding a third siren in town.
“Anything we can do to add to the safety, we’re going to sit down and try to make it work,” he said. “The way things are happening, it might be time to enhance the system even further.”