Editorial: A year later, the hardest comment to hear

By the time Juliet Weldon reached the lectern at Monday’s Kerr County Commissioners Court meeting, the question she carried was nearly a year old.

She asked it the way her neighbors have been asking it since the Guadalupe came up on July 4: What do we do now? Where do we go? Who do we call? Weldon lost her home in the flood. She lost her dog, Willow. And she came not to vent but to propose — a single trusted website, recovery information in English and Spanish, a hotline for residents without internet, alerts by phone, text, email and social media. It was specific, organized and reasonable, and she earned the room’s attention.

Some of what she asked for is exactly right, and the county should build it. A bilingual hotline for people with no broadband and no smartphone is not a luxury; it is the difference between reaching the most isolated survivors and losing them. Austin Dickson of the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country conceded the underlying point Monday — that getting information to survivors is “the first challenge after any disaster” — and acknowledged that some residents still lack case managers and have slipped through the cracks. Those are real gaps. They have names and addresses attached to them, and they can be fixed. The people in that situation deserve every door the county can build.

But we have to be honest about the rest of it, because it has been a year.

“We don’t know where to go” was the truth in July. It was the fog of a mass-casualty disaster, and no one should have been expected to navigate it cleanly. A year out, in this community, the same sentence runs into an uncomfortable wall. The doors exist. Rebuildkerr.org and kerrtogether.com have been standing nearly since the flood. Kerr County has three newspapers, an online source, The Kerr County Lead and two radio groups. San Antonio television and newspapers have returned to the story again and again. There is no shortage of social media accounts pointing the way. Most of it was up within days. Whatever else our recovery has lacked, information has not been it. The problem has never been that the answers don’t exist. For some residents, the problem is that they were never going to go looking.

We want to say that plainly and without shame, because shame isn’t the point and it wouldn’t be fair. Some people don’t follow the news. Some never did before the flood and won’t after. Some are too exhausted, too grief-stricken, too wary of institutions, or too buried in their own daily survival to track a website or a council agenda. That is a permanent feature of any community, not a personal failing. You can build the most elegant centralized, bilingual, multi-channel system in Texas, and a share of people will still never see it — because the gap was never the system. It was attention.

So when “nobody told us” gets said out loud, a year on, it lands as a heavy sigh for everyone who has spent that year telling. The nonprofits that stood up relief funds within the week. The case managers. The volunteers. The reporters who have not stopped. They told. They are still telling. The information has traveled about as far as outreach can carry it.

None of this lets government or the nonprofits off the hook for the people who genuinely cannot get through the door — the ones without internet, without English, without a case manager who ever called back. Build the hotline. Close the gaps, Dickson admitted, are there. We will keep pointing at every door we know of, and we will keep pressing the county to make them easier to find.

But a year in, the honest question is no longer “why didn’t anyone tell us.” The answers have been on the table since summer. The question now is who we can still reach — and the clear-eyed, unsentimental truth is that some of our neighbors were never going to reach back.