Life in the country is different. You can't take what you know about the city and translate it, it doesn't work like that. It is in the country, a big area with very few people. My ranch is in Bandera & Uvalde Counties. Bandera is the County Seat and had 829 people in 2020 (~ 35 miles away), and Uvalde is the County Seat, w/ 15,217 people in 2020 (~ 50 miles away). That is an 80+ mile stretch of roadways with no town over 1,000 people in it. It is in a box canyon, one way in and out, across two low water crossings and the creek crossing and there are no roads over the hills.
The long list of people to call in an emergency? Volunteer Fire Dept, Constable, Sheriff, DPS, Game Warden, Life Flight Helicopter to SA.
A "flotilla of locals with pickup trucks -- god knows they have plenty of those -- and of course some busses."
I'm lucky I have 4 neighbors I can call in an Emergency, after that I'm calling the guys who drilled the water well, or put up the fence, or the A/C guy. During a flood emergency, if I have issues, so do they. If I can't get out, they can't either. And no one is driving in.
You have to be prepared in advance, and self contained, for some minimal period of time.
It sucks. Especially when kids are put at risk. Prayers for all that are impacted.
The storms that came through Austin last month blew threw town at 50 miles an hour. This one parked in 1 place for a day. Harvey stayed in SE Texas for a week. They all came with flood warnings.
I know I get pissed when I see and hear those alerts on the TV. I know I am high and dry, so quit interrupting my game, dammit! The circumstances of each storm are different, and damn near impossible to predict.
To compound things, this was a Federal holiday on a Friday of a 3 day weekend, which means minimal staffing at all levels of government. Guys were drilling my water well during the Uvalde Elementary shooting. I told them to leave if they needed to. They shrugged, "... too far away, and nothing they could do."
Damn near every town in the Hill Country has had a major flood in the past 50 years, because they are all along rivers. It is hard to say one place is worst than the next, probably one place that has been hit twice since then.
The bolded part of your post is absolute. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, there is no escape. When I go to other ranches, I look up into the trees, to see how high the water has been in the past.
I've learned over the years, if I want my avatar to look like my ranch, we need a tropical storm to do it. I hate that for me to have what I want, others have to suffer.
I grew up with it and have always known it can be dangerous when it rains. There is an old car along Onion Creek, by an old (probably gone) low water crossing in Del Valle, that is wrapped around a tree and folded in half like a playing card on a bicycle wheel. I probably saw it in the lates 60's, and I think about that every time it starts raining.
We went to Buffalo Trails Scout Ranch in the Davis Mountains in ~ 2006. We did the back country hiking and camping program when the remnants of a tropical storm made it over us and parked for a while. The camp had a little creek running through it. When we came to camp mid week to resupply, the creek had cut the camp in half, and they couldn't let us go back out. Never thought that would have happened in the Mountains in West Texas,
We've had a similar floods at my ranch, smaller watershed and creek, went from dry to ~ 60-80,000 gal/sec (2 swimming pools) in about 2 hours. There was minor flooding downstream, no fatalities, so it probably never happened, officially.
Thunder Creek is the appropriate name for my ranch, and the valley.
This. You can't make anything fool proof, because fools are so ingenious. Human behavior.
I tell every visitor, "Every thing at the ranch, plant or animal, is tougher than you are. It has survived by biting, or stinging, or scratching, or poking, or itching, or doing whatever it has to so you will go away. If I say don't run, that means don't run. If I say stay away, that means stay away. And the life flight helicopter comes from San Antonio; the GPS coordinates are on the wall."
I marvel at how much better the kids behave when they leave, compared to when they got there.
Y'all be safe.