A flood warning system that was deemed too costly by the Texas county where last week’s rains 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ed at least 27 kiddie campers might have given the victims more of a fighting chance, experts told The Post.

Officials in Kerr County — home to “Flash  Flood Alley’’ where at least 75 of the state’s more than 100 flood victims died — contemplated installing a flood warning system in 2017.

But the county, which has an annual budget of around $67 million, lost out on a bid to secure a $1 million grant to fund the project,  according to  county commission meeting minutes, reports said.

An aerial view of flooding in Kerrville, Texas on July 5, 2025.Po3 Cheyenne Basurto/UPI/Shutterstock

The county board considered kicking in the money  itself but then ultimately scrapped the plan, a then-commissioner, Tom Moser, told the  Wall Street Journal.

“It was probably just, I hate to say the word priorities. Trying not to raise taxes,’’ Moser said.Kerr County officials instead relied on a word-of-mouth system to pass messages about raging floodwaters downriver from the camps upstream.

The proposed warning system — similar to one in a neighboring town that ran $2 million — would have included river gauges, sirens and other modern communication tools along the Guadalupe River’s “Flash Flood Alley.’’

The river rose more than 29 feet during a freak summer storm July 4 — and experts said a flood-warning system such as the one proposed for Kerr County might not have been perfect, but it could have at least potentially helped curb the ensuing devastation.

“No one is ever going to complain about having more data when it comes to hazardous weather,” said Nick Bassill, director of the New York State Weather Risk Communication Center.

“Then there’s the question of, once you know that the flooding is imminent, how do you communicate that to the people who maybe aren’t able to be communicated too, like if they’re at a camp somewhere or something like that,” he added.

Furniture and debris in a room destroyed by flooding at Camp Mystic.REUTERS/Marco Bello

Camp Mystic, a Christian girls’ summer camp a few hundred feet from the riverbanks in Hunt in Kerr, lost 27 campers ages 8 and 9 in the flooding, with 10 still missing, officials said Monday.

Bassill said he would have been in support of an advanced warning system such as the one Kerr County officials eschewed in 2017 — adding that the setups don’t necessarily have to be high-tech or expensive to save lives.

“A really basic one that is probably close to a must-have in these sort of situations would be a NOAA weather radio, so if you’re in an area without Internet or cell phone service and there’s a flash flood warning in the middle of the night, you’ve got your radio on, you’ll be woken up by a sort of jarring alert from it. So that would be … a really obvious kind of low-cost solution,” he said.

NOAA radios like Bassill described can be found on Amazon starting at around $20.

Dr. Erik Nielsen, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University and an expert in extreme rainfall and warning communication had a slightly different take, noting that even if an advanced early warning system was in place, extenuating circumstances could have limited their efficacy.

“Sirens are designed to be outdoor alerts. They’re not designed to be indoors and they probably will not wake you up,” he said.

Suitcases and other belongings at Camp Mystic after the flooding.REUTERS/Marco Bello

“People would have to know what those sirens meant. So there would have to be some sort of educational thing beforehand, maybe at the campground or something like that to make sure people understood that if these sirens are going off, what does it mean and what does that look like?”

Nielsen said the best approach is one that encompasses several different warning methods.“You need layered ways to receive warnings … Things like a NOAA weather radio, your cell phone alerts, things maybe in place locally like sirens. All those things work together to communicate information,” he said.

Nielsen noted that the Guadalupe had some gauges in place, but “likely not enough,” he said.Having a better gauge system in place would have “possibly” saved lives, he said, “but then it also still goes back to all of the challenges of communicating to people when they’re asleep at 2 to 3 in the morning. Your best alert system is great, but if you don’t get the people to hear it and understand it, it’s not going to do anything,” he noted.

A search and rescue team on the water on the Guadalupe River near Camp Mystic.AFP via Getty Images

“So that’s where the design aspect and the education aspect of such a system matters, especially to those who are not from the area.”