During the Central Texas flooding in the early hours of the July 4 weekend that has claimed over a hundred lives, the small town of Comfort was using sirens manufactured in Colorado to warn people to higher ground.

The two sirens had been installed less than a year before the disaster, said Sentry Siren distributor and installer Cruz Newberry.

“They definitely credit the siren system with being able to save some people,” he said.

“We have sounded the flood sirens and urge all residents in low-lying areas of town to evacuate immediately,” read a 10 a.m. post from the town volunteer fire department. The Comfort fire chief later told CBS News that the sirens helped the town of about 2,300 residents when activated for the historic flooding.

Newberry said that Comfort was one of the only towns in the area with a contract with the Colorado company, which manufactures and assembles near Penrose with about 14 employees. He said sirens from Sentry, based for several decades in Cañon City and Penrose in Fremont County, can be found on every continent and almost every U.S. state.

“It’s a pretty niche market,” said Newberry, who has also sold models for use in places as far-flung as Iraqi oil fields and rigs offshore Papua, New Guinea.

The lack of sirens or an early-warning system in nearby Kerr County has prompted questions for public officials of the hard-hit area, where the majority of fatalities occurred.

‘A fallback warning system’

Elected officials in Kerr County discussed the possibility of installing sirens and a new flood gauge system as early as 2016, according to commissioners’ court meeting records. Proposals met financial roadblocks over the years, including a failed $1 million grant request.

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Officials were aware of possible difficulties in alerting people in the path of a flash flood, especially in summer when the area is occupied by tourists and campers, who may not have been signed up for the county’s emergency communications program.

“Just about half the county is doubled in size from those people,” said former Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer in a meeting transcript from 2016.

The National Weather Service warning triggered wireless alert messages about flooding on the morning of July 4, but survivors have said some in the path did not have their mobile devices or did not see the warnings for other reasons. Those included children and counselors at Camp Mystic, a girls camp in Kerr Couny where more than two dozen people died.

Newberry said that the system he installed in Comfort cost about $30,000 for a new siren and about $70,000 for a computer system to connect the sirens to weather alerts, both for tornadoes and floods. He also refurbished and relocated a siren that the town already had down to the floodplain.

Newberry, who sells for Sentry Siren through his own small business, Table Rock Alerting Systems, said that sirens were not a catchall solution to emergencies.

“The siren should be kind of a fallback warning system,” he said.

He said the Comfort system was set up to send an automatic siren blast in the case of a tornado warning, but whether to alert for floods was up to local officials.

“The instance I think of false alarms with that is pretty high,” he said.

Sirens also are designed for outdoor use and may not be heard by people indoors, according to Newberry.

He also said that emergency instructions for those hearing sirens must often come from a different source, like mobile alerts.

Texas Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick has said that flood-prone areas in Texas should have more sirens and called on the state for necessary funding.

Colorado’s historic floods

Colorado is experienced with its own flash flood tragedies and the debate on how best to notify people in the path.

The Texas flood has likely topped the previous most deadly inland flash flood in the U.S., which happened along the Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado on July 31, 1976.

The flood killed 144 people.

More recently, multiple communities in and around Boulder County were hit by a week of flooding in September 2013, in which nine people died.

Texas floods spur memories of major floods in Colorado’s past

Mike Chard, director of the Office of Disaster Management for the City and County of Boulder, said that the communities at risk of flooding have a notification system to reach as many people as possible during an incident. Some include sirens, while others do not.

Chard said that 2 inches of rain per hour can be enough to trigger a flash flood warning in the county, while some parts impacted by the erosion and instability left by wildfire burns may face flash flood conditions with three-quarters of an inch of rain in an hour.

He said advanced warning is key. To that end, he said emergency officials operate as “para-meteorologists” — a play on “paramedics” — to predict precipitation before official warnings.

“We had to be ahead of these storms forming,” he said.

The area has an emergency notifications program, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency can send buzzing alerts. Both rely on access to mobile devices and cell coverage.

Chard said that sirens have “limited capacity” due to multiple factors, including difficulty for people inside to hear and desensitization to alarms over time.

“It’s not just one thing, like sirens are going to make it better,” he said.

Newberry said that Sentry Siren and other similar companies were seeing a “renaissance” of interest in past years as communities sought redundancy in their emergency alert systems.

Sirens dropped in popularity from their height in the Cold War era with the advent of the wireless network.

While some parts of the country have few sirens, he said they are common in Colorado, especially on the Eastern Plains. Sentry Siren has its roots in 1905 and the former Sterling Siren and Fire Alarm company.

Former owner Bill Yarberry bought Sterling in 1976, moving operations to the Penrose area, where the company still operates its own foundry to create uniquely durable mechanical siren parts.

“We take a lot of pride in what we do,” said Managing Director Ben Byerly.

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