() An army of cadaver dogs is driving the next phase of recovery efforts in central Texas as more details emerge about actions from local officials.
More than 130 people are dead, and at least 100 remain missing after early morning flash floods deluged the region over the Fourth of July weekend.
“Dogs are a key tool for emergency managers to help find these people,” said Bill Holmberg, with Unified Search and Rescue.
Jeanette Sinclair, a senior K-9 handler with Buckeye Search and Rescue Dogs, and her canine partner Jolene are one of many pairs scouring central Texas.
“She’ll work through the brush, and then all of a sudden she’ll pick up her step a little bit. Or she will throw her head like that,” Sinclair said. “Or she will work some area and come back and give me eye contact.”
Handlers told their dogs can smell up to six feet underground and underwater, a vital skill for recovery efforts in the challenging terrain of Texas’ Hill Country region.
“We all have families. So, we all kind of look at it like ‘What if that was my family member?’ We would hope that other people would do the same thing for us,” Holmberg said. “We just want to be there to get these folks back to their families.”
Kerr County officials sent emergency alert 2 days after flood: FEMA
Officials in hard-hit Kerr County did not issue a locally targeted emergency alert until two days after deadly flooding began, according to data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency reviewed by affiliate KXAN.
Instead, emergency flash flood warnings sent on July 4 and 5 came from the National Weather Service. Those were distributed through CodeRED, a mass notification system that requires members of the public to register to receive alerts.
After an initial alert at 1:14 a.m., an additional 21 flash flood alerts were issued by the NWS on July 4 in Kerr County, according to archived alert data.
FEMA records indicate the county itself never issued an alert on July 4 about flash flooding through the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, which alerts all phones in a certain area, no matter their emergency alert preferences.
County officials have not responded to KXAN’s requests for comments.
affiliate KXAN contributed to this report.
