Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) says “something went wrong” when the staff at the all-girls Christian summer camp in Kerr County weren’t warned of rising flood waters on the Guadalupe River, which killed at least 27 campers and counselors.
“The fact that you have girls asleep in their cabins when the flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warning to get kids out of harm’s way,” Cruz told Fox News in an interview.
Cruz is the latest member of Congress to criticize the lack of adequate preparation for the flash flood in Central Texas on Friday, which has killed at least 81 people.
The Trump White House has defended the federal response to the storm.
White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson said in a post on X, the social media platform, that meteorologists say the National Weather Service (NWS) “did it’s job in Texas.”
She noted that Chris Vagasky of the American Meteorological Society said NWS “was on the ball” and got the message out.
Vagasky said the forecast office in San Antonio did a “fantastic job.”
But Democrats, notably Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) are calling for a thorough investigation of whether vacancies at weather services field offices in San Antonio and San Angelo resulted in poor communication with local authorities in charge of issuing evacuation orders.
Schumer urged Roderick Anderson, the Commerce Department’s acting inspector general, in a letter Monday to immediately “open an investigation into the scope, breadth, and ramifications of whether staffing shortages at key local National Weather Service (NWS) stations contributed to the catastrophic loss of life and property during the deadly flooding.”
Schumer pointed to media reports that key forecasting and coordination positions at the San Antonio and San Angelo offices of the NWS were vacant at the time of the storm.
“These are the experts responsible for modeling storm impacts, monitoring rising water levels, issuing flood warnings, and coordinating directly with local emergency managers about when to warn the public and issue evacuation orders,” he wrote.
“To put it plainly: they help save lives,” he wrote.
