I'm surprised the camps and local officials didn't implement stricter measures after that--no sleeping cabins allowed near the river, require participation in the best early warning technology available, etc.

This is tragic, and unnecessarily so.

Maybe kremlin is bonusing slob for dead Americans.

By then the water was already rising and the news said it rose up to 25' in 25 minutes.

Ty for sharing.

That way more people would be in the know.

Flash floods happened before climate change kicked into gear but as the EPA wrote (before the Dark Ages)

Texas’s climate is changing. Most of the state has warmed between one-half and one degree (F) in the past century. In the eastern two-thirds of the state, average annual rainfall is increasing, yet the soil
is becoming drier. Rainstorms are becoming more intense, and floods are becoming more severe. Along much of the coast, the sea is rising almost two inches per decade. In the coming decades, storms are likely to become more severe, deserts may expand, and summers are likely to become increasingly hot and dry, creating problems for agriculture and possibly human health.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-09/documents/climate-change-tx.pdf

Thousands of square miles of very flat land with heavy clay soil that absorbs water very slowly, meaning most water runs off. There are a few canyons which people hike. In school they told us that if you see storm clouds on the horizon it may be fifty miles away but get out of the canyon immediately. The runoff from all of that flat land can fill the hundred foot deep canyon before you can climb to the top. If you wait until the dry creek has a few inches of water in it you have already waited too long.

Lake Travis for decades. This type of flooding is common in the area.

As a scout leader, I was great with winter camp where I ended getting the iceberg award 5 or 6 times, but summer camp was hard on me. I had a SUV and I had to tow the scout trailer for most trips to summer or winter camp a couple of times. Luckily, we had some leaders who could back up the trailer after I got it to camp. The hill country will flood with even a small amount of rain. I remember hiking up the hill to go for meals.

One of my middle child's classmates used to go to Camp Mystic every summer. I am glad that this classmate's children are too young to go to camp this year. My middle child and her classmate are very upset about the news about Camp Mystic

a clip of an article about the flood. Judge Kelly said about the river that it's the most dangerous river in the country for flash flooding. The discussion was about if that's a known fact that it floods often and is a popular summer destination why is there no early warning system for floods along it. That's separate from the NWS flood warnings, one that warns about the river levels in real time and sets off sirens. I know I've camped in lots of places that have signs up saying, "If alarm sounds move to higher ground immediately."

This is a very rural area.

I am in Austin, and we do not have tornado sirens, for example. Nor do we have flood sirens along our major waterways that have flash floods like this. You watch the news when the weather is getting bad, and you have the warning that goes off on your phone, which will hopefully alert you even in the middle of the night. My phone has been going off all day with flood warnings. I am still wondering why that phone alert didn't seem to get to the camp directors, and local law enforcement, who surely would have had cell phones. Some of our local meteorologists are saying on social media that NWS posted flood warnings for the area at 1 AM. Perhaps the cell phone reception is so bad in the area (again because it is so rural) that they just didn't get the alerts over their phones? If so, that is truly tragic.

But back to sirens.

When we had a series of tornados come through Austin several years back, the question of why we don't have tornado sirens came up, and it was explained that not only would it be extremely expensive to implement a siren system across the entire city, but it would have to be constantly maintained, tested every few weeks (annoying!) and upgraded and that was difficult (and expensive) to do as well. In short, it was safer to rely on the cell phone warning system that is currently in place. But that may not be the case everywhere. We'll have to see what comes of this as they investigate and try to prevent future tragedies like this.