The water came fast. By dawn on July Fourth, catastrophic floods had ripped through Kerr County, leaving much of the region underwater and 135 people, including young girls and camp counselors from Houston, dead. Now, one month later, families are still holding funerals, mourning loved ones, and searching for answers.

Newly released text messages and internal communications reveal troubling failures in Kerr County’s disaster response: nonexistent emergency siren systems, local officials who silenced alerts, and a community left unprepared. While Houston has stepped up to help its neighbors—sending aid, charity, and comfort—questions about Texas’s readiness for the next disaster remain unanswered. Whether state and federal officials act on the failures could determine if this disaster becomes a turning point or just another disaster in a state that has seen too many.

Recent investigations into Kerr County’s response have uncovered dangerous gaps in leadership and infrastructure. Documents and text messages obtained by the Houston Chronicle have revealed that modernized flood warning systems were not installed, and at least one local official, Kerrville city manager Dalton Rice, had turned weather alerts off on his phone completely. In one exchange with Kerrville city council members, Rice wrote: "The county is reacting poorly to this but we are assisting especially since we have unconfirmed reports of kids missing from camp mystic and some resorts out west.”

Many of the victims were Houstonians, including young campers and counselors at Camp Mystic, a popular all-girls Christian camp where at least 27 children and staff died. In the weeks that followed, the city held memorials that honored the memories of the lost. At St. John the Divine Church in River Oaks, hundreds gathered for the funeral of John and Julia Burgess, of Liberty, Texas. Beside their caskets lay two smaller ones for their sons, Jack and James, whose bodies had not yet been recovered. At St. John’s School in River Oaks, mourners prayed for missing campers and honored the lives of 9-year-old Lainey Landry, 8-year-old Anna Margaret Bellows, and 19-year-old counselor Chloe Childress.

As the spotlight turns to local governance, some have questioned whether cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) under President Donald Trump worsened the disaster. But Houston meteorologist and Space City Weather representative Matt Lanza argues the real problem lies closer to home. Trump’s cuts reportedly mainly affect long-term weather research, not the short-term meteorology that issues flood warnings. “In a normal world, this would be a bipartisan issue that everyone could agree upon,” Lanza says. Instead, he points to infrastructural concerns like sustainable drainage systems and county budgets that could have exacerbated flood damage. He adds that the NWS followed Kerr County protocol and sent warnings at the right time, and unlike the Houston NWS office, departments in Austin and San Antonio are relatively well-staffed and stable. 

Lanza expects future investigations to examine the local responses—what Kerr County didn’t do, rather than the NWS itself. “It will come back to how many resources communities like this have access to and what they were willing to do to help mitigate, alert, and warn people about disasters,” he says.

Meanwhile, Houston and the rest of Texas have rallied. Charities and nonprofits turned out with donation drives and volunteer efforts. Beloved grocery store chain H-E-B announced aid drives in affected areas, including San Angelo and Marble Falls. The Houston Astros contributed $1 million for flood relief, while NBA teams like the Houston Rockets, Dallas Mavericks, and San Antonio Spurs donated $2 million.

Virginia-based Mercy Chefs, an organization that provides hot meals to people during crises, was one of the first groups on the ground, deploying mobile kitchens from Alabama and serving hot, chef-crafted meals to victims and first responders. Mercy chefs also announced that a “long-term recovery kitchen” would be opened in Kerr County, offering victims a place to rest and eat together. “ We run to where the need is,” says Mercy Chefs member Ashbi Wilson, who lived in Kerrville for years before moving to her home in Wimberley, Texas. “They sent our kitchens over from Alabama and ordered groceries from all over the place, and we all met here and just started cooking.”

Houston-based charity Southern Smoke Foundation also mobilized to aid flood victims, announcing a $150,000 fund to assist food and hospitality workers affected by the floods, plus mental health services. Applications for the program open on August 15. “We know that trauma is a very big part of this tragedy, and people are going to need a lot of mental health support,” says Lindsey Brown, Southern Smoke’s executive director. “We're here for the long term.” Since launching a donation drive in July, Southern Smoke has received $18,793 in individual donations, which has been matched with a $15,000 donation from Sysco; in total, the foundation has raised over $42,793.

Despite the outpouring, little has changed politically, and calls for improved government-backed policies have only gotten louder. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), already plagued by massive budget cuts and staff departures, faced increasing scrutiny, The Guardian reported. US Senators Ruben Gallego and Richard Blumenthal have called for an investigation into cost-cutting measures and requested that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, investigate how policies may have compounded the disaster, according to Politico. In Kerr County, some summer camps along the once-flooded Guadalupe River have reopened, while others remain closed.

One month later, Texas is still reeling from the human cost of its disaster preparedness failures. For grieving Texans, the question isn’t just why this happened, but whether anything will change before it happens again.