The Lead’s Editorial: A note to our readers about flood misinformation

A Kerrville resident has spent several months publishing a series of claims about the July 4, 2025 flood on social media and a personal website. We have read them carefully. We are responding now because those claims have grown more elaborate, have begun to spread beyond our community, and because one of them is demonstrably false in a way that could cause real harm to grieving families still searching for answers.

The central claim is this: that the city of Kerrville’s Aquifer Storage and Recovery system — two injection wells that store treated Guadalupe River water in the Lower Trinity Aquifer — caused or substantially contributed to the flood that killed 119 people on July 4, 2025.

It did not.

The science is not ambiguous, and the math is not close. We know this not because we commissioned expert analysis or spent weeks on investigation, but because the basic research required to refute these claims is available to anyone willing to do it. Public records, state agency reports, and published hydrology are not hidden. They are simply inconvenient for a theory that does not survive contact with them.

The ASR system’s total underground storage on July 3, 2025 — its highest recorded volume — was approximately 1.05 billion gallons. The author of these claims has calculated that more than 60 billion gallons of water came through the south fork of the Guadalupe River during the flood. She presents both numbers in the same article without appearing to notice that you cannot release 57 times more water than you have stored. That is not a scientific dispute. That is arithmetic.

The geological claim is equally unsupported. The Lower Trinity Aquifer, where the ASR wells inject water, sits 500 to 600 feet beneath the surface, separated from it by a hydraulically tight confining layer of calcareous mudstone and shale. Groundwater in that formation moves through sandstone at a rate of centimeters per day. The flood was a surface water event — documented by rain gauges, stream gauges, and National Weather Service data showing more than 12 inches of rainfall over the south fork watershed in less than 24 hours. The aquifer and the flood occupy different physical worlds, separated by hundreds of feet of solid rock.

What actually amplified this disaster was the same geology that defines the Texas Hill Country — the fractured karst limestone of the Edwards-Trinity Plateau. In a karst system, rainfall does not spread slowly across the landscape. It moves fast, channeling through fractures, sinkholes, and dissolution conduits directly into creek beds and rivers. When more than 12 inches falls in less than 24 hours over a karst watershed, the Guadalupe does not rise gradually. It rises the way it did on July 4 — 26 feet in 45 minutes. The karst is not evidence of an underground catastrophe. It explains the surface one.

The TCEQ document she has described as proof of “extreme ground pressure” is a routine drinking water compliance order related to a tap water chemistry standard — a disinfection byproduct exceedance detected in 2024, resolved in August of that year, carrying a $2,500 penalty. It has nothing to do with aquifer pressure, flood causation, or the July 4 disaster. The order itself contains language explicitly barring the use she is making of it.

The HGCD monitoring well chart she posted as evidence of a pressurization event actually shows the opposite. The Lower Trinity dropped 108 feet following the flood — consistent with surface floodwater draining downward into the aquifer, not with water blowing upward out of it.

We want to be direct about why we are publishing this.

Kerr County lost 119 people on July 4, 2025. Families are pursuing wrongful death litigation. A community is still grieving. In that environment, misinformation about what caused the flood is not harmless speculation — it misdirects public attention, muddies the legal record, and causes additional pain to people who have already suffered enough.

There are real accountability questions that remain unanswered about July 4. The Lead has reported on them extensively — the warning timeline, the IPAWS alert authority, the emergency response, the flood warning system. We will continue to. Those questions deserve rigorous scrutiny, and we intend to provide it.

What they do not deserve is to be buried under theories that collapse under basic arithmetic.