During the horrific flooding on July 4 in Kerr County, Texas, the catastrophe unfolded before us with its now-familiar script: Alerts were issued, warnings failed to reach the most vulnerable and leaders deflected blame. 

But once again we are getting the story wrong. Here are three misperceptions that we think it’s important to correct.

First, it’s not about the forecast. The National Weather Service did its job. It issued a flood watch, flash flood warning and flash flood emergency as conditions worsened. But any warning that arrives with floodwaters in the middle of the night is too little and too late. The failure wasn’t the forecast — it was the failure to act before the rivers rose. A forecast is just information; what meteorologists think will happen. A warning is a call to action. If no one acts, it’s not a system. A system is local officials activating in advance for what they know could happen.

Second, it’s not about the money. In a disaster, the challenge isn’t writing checks — it’s coordinating action. Emergency managers must bring together dozens of agencies across a fractured landscape, often with little more than goodwill and a cell phone. In the wealthiest nation on Earth, money isn’t the problem. Leadership is. Many years ago, on a cold sidewalk in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, a veteran volunteer overheard one of us discussing how to pay for a large catering order to feed the dozens of families in the Red Cross shelter who had been cast out of their homes. With a smoldering apartment building as a backdrop, he ended with a flourish, “This isn’t a money issue. It’s about the people, stupid.”

And finally, it’s not about FEMA. In the aftermath, state and federal officials point to the locals. The only thing we know for sure is that the warnings didn’t help the people who needed them most. This is a familiar story. From Paradise, California in 2018, to Lahaina, Hawaii in 2023, to Los Angeles County in January and St. Louis in May, an unending series of failures show us an American public warning system that is as broken as broken gets.

If we insist that disasters are local, then states must ensure every community has the warning tools — and the boots on the ground — to act. We use a patchwork of systems to issue public alerts including the FEMA-managed Integrated Public Alert and Warning System that issues Wireless Emergency Alerts sent to mobile devices, Emergency Alert System messages on TV and radio, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Weather Radio broadcasts and local opt-in alert systems. FEMA is a distant bureaucracy but, at a minimum, it must ensure that its systems work and that they are used properly everywhere.

The aftermath of every catastrophe includes a brief window of opportunity for us to find and fix the sources of our collective failures. That opportunity is now. Time and time again, our expectations about what the government can do and when it can do it are crushed

We can’t keep treating disasters as one-offs. This is the new normal, and our systems aren’t built for it. 

If FEMA can’t fix it, then states must. And if states expect local officials to carry the burden, then they must give them the tools to lead, the mandate to act and the support to succeed.

Steven Kuhr is a former deputy commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management and New York State director of Emergency Management. He is currently chief executive officer at the Kuhr Group LLC. Kelly McKinney is the vice president of Emergency Management and Enterprise Resilience at NYU Langone Health in New York City. He is a former deputy commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management and former member of FEMA’s National Advisory Council.