CENTER OF THE STORM
As river rose near Hays 911 center, dispatchers had to evacuate building Flood raises questions about where to build jail, emergency offices
At 9:41 p.m. on May 23, a man in western Hays County called 911 to repor t that water from the Blanco River was rushing over the Fischer Store Road bridge.
“It looks like the ocean,” he sai d.
Within minutes, the 911 center heard reports of a woman stuck in her car with three kids on a flooded street, of a deaf couple possibly trapped in the second floor of their home and of four people who ditched their cars, went to high ground and were still surrounded by water.
Listening to thousands of desperate calls over the next few hours, Hays County’s 911 operators could trace the enormous wall of water as it rolled down the Blanco River from the county line through Wimberley and into San Marcos.
Soon, they knew, it would be in their backyard: The county’s jail and 911 center sit on the banks of the Blanco in northeastern San Marcos.
Around 3 a.m. on May 24, Erica Carpenter, the director of communications, made the call to evacuate the six 911 operators on duty, who then had to drive through the flood to the San Marcos Police Depar tment.
Once there, the dispatchers had to share a limited num-
ber of computers with San Marcos’ operators. The county’s dispatch system is different from the city’s, so the 911 operators had to take handwritten notes that were then ferried over to dispatchers.
The water ended up damaging a training facility on the county’s Uhland Road complex but stopped short of the jail and the 911 center.
Nonetheless, the episode will factor into decisions the county had been weighing before the flood about where to build its public safety facilities, including a possible new jail and a new combined 911 facility for all emergency agencies in the county.
For Carpenter, the flood should serve as a warning.
“I shouldn’t have to worry about the safety of my own dispatchers when we’re trying to provide that for others,” she said.
Hays County Commissioner Will Conley, however, said the fact that the record-breaking flood didn’t reach the jail or 911 center proves that the Uhland Road site is safe.
“We just got the best measuring stick we could have in evaluating that,” said Conley, who cochairs a committee studying the new 911 center.
‘We’re leaving’
As the water began rising, Carpenter and a dispatcher went outside to move their cars out of the parking lot so they wouldn’t be disabled. On the way back in, she heard trees snapping along the river.
“I walk in, and the dispatchers looked at me, and one of them said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And at that moment I said, ‘We’re leaving,’” she said.
Then she flipped the “make-busy switch,” which transferred the county’s 911 calls to the San Marcos Police Department, and her staff moved out.
Space and resources were limited at the Police Department, and the combined 911 volume threatened to overload the phone system until the county’s calls were diverted to a nonemergency line.
“That phone literally never stopped ringing. It was a continuous ring for hours, and that was just eerie,” Carpenter said. “Hearing a phone ring and have it not be an- swered, that’s creepy to dispatchers.”
All the while, she said, the dispatchers remained calm and effective.
“Nobody was breaking down. Nobody was upset. We were on it,” she said. “We were in the zone, we had a contingency in place, and we had a great team.”
Around the same time, Chief Deputy Jamie Page, in charge while Sheriff Gary Cutler was in Italy on vacation, orchestrated a partial evacuation of the jail. Fifty inmates were transferred to the Hays County Government Center in San Marcos. Others were loaded onto three buses, but ended up staying put.
To entice the inmates’ cooperation, Page promised them pizza that wasn’t from the jail cafeteria.
Although rescuers were unable to reach a group of three Corpus Christi families whose Wimberley vacation house was swept away in the flood, they successfully prevented similar tragedies throughout the night.
Recordings of 911 calls released this week by Hays County reveal dozens of emergency situa- tions that operators kept tabs on and coordinated rescues for, including 30 stranded campers with a Texas State University program, a group of 18 in a house on Blanco Drive in Wimberley and a disabled woman trapped on her second floor off of River Road.
The 911 staffers often had to prioritize those who were stranded on their roofs over those who only had a few feet of water in their house.
When out-of-towners called to inquire about relatives or friends in Wimberley, they collected information but ended the conversations to answer more urgent calls. When those in harm’s way became angry when help didn’t arrive immediately, the operators were professional and reassuring.
In the end, they had received an unprecedented 3,500 calls related to the flood, Carpenter said.
Despite their efforts, the overwhelming call volume and the challenges of evacuating hindered the response, she said.
“You can’t help but feel there may be a reduction in service, and that’s uneasy for me,” she said.
Bond election needed
Cutler said the flood will be a “topic of discussion” as law enforcement agencies continue to plan a new 911 facility.
Despite the evacuation, he said, building on the Uhland Road property should remain an option.
“That does not worry me because that is a 100-year flood, and it did not reach our jail,” he said. “With architects and what-not, they’ll be able to design it with some elevation.”
After water nearly reached the jail during the Halloween 2013 floods, the county built up the banks of the river on the property, a project Cutler said might have prevented worse flooding at the facility over Memorial Day weekend.
The estimated price tag for the most recent plan for a new 911 center and jail on Uhland Road was about $180 million, Cutler said, although that plan had been “scrapped” before the flood.
Although crime rates are falling across the country and many communities are declining to build new jails, Cutler said Hays County needs one because of its explosive population growth.
Voters would need to approve the project in a bond election.
The soonest a proposal could be on the ballot is November, but the commissioners aren’t expected to move forward by then.
Although water never reached the 911 center, the flood disconnected a key line for the county’s emergency radio system, Carpenter said, another factor in her decision to evacuate.
“If I didn’t evacuate when I did, we may not have flooded, but we may have been more crippled without a radio system,” she said.
“We had a very terrible flood situation. What could be the worst thing to happen? You have to leave your 911 center — and that happened. So I hope that is taken into account,” Carpenter said.