When the Texas special legislative session gets underway on July 21, Governor Greg Abbott confirmed that disaster response will be included on the agenda. Gov. Abbott made that statement during a news conference while updating the media on the latest search and rescue information following the catastrophic and deadly flooding in South-Central Texas. Much of the devastation is in Kerr County, along the Guadalupe River, as the death toll has now surpassed 100 victims.
As Texas Public Radio reports, disaster communication expert Kari Stephens, PhD, says emergency response teams must often go from one home to the next to alert residents to a disaster or danger. “They know the major employers, the major groups that are housing kids, and they contact those people directly to say, ‘Hey, this is important. You've got to stay alert on this.’ But that's a super manual process. It's not necessarily something technology is going to solve all the problems.”
Professor Stephens teaches crisis communications at the University of Texas at Austin. With more than 20 years of research experience, she explained how it is often difficult for some to imagine that a dry creek bed one day could be a raging river the next. She recommends aggressive public awareness campaigns to help educate residents and visitors about the dangers in the Texas Hill Country, sometimes referred to as flash flood alley. “In Texas, the saying is typically that we are in a perpetual state of drought, occasionally interrupted by flood,” adding, “So, the fact that we have this need for water yet when we get a lot of water in a short period of time, it’s absolutely devastating. That’s a hard type of risk for people to grasp.”
