Top Pictures Credit: Diana Olvedo-Karau

Press release from Uvalde County Acting Judge Jerry Bates

08/05/26

August 3, 2026

INFORMATION FOR COUNTY RESIDENTS AFFECTED BY THE RECENT FLOODING
Uvalde County is continuing recovery efforts following the recent flooding and is asking residents to follow the guidelines below to help ensure debris is collected safely and efficiently.
Residents who experienced flood damage should separate debris into the following categories before placing them in the County right of way:

• METAL/HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES
• HOUSEHOLD AND CONSTRUCTION DEBRIS
• BRUSH

To assist with collection efforts, we ask that you call the Road Department at (830) 278-9213 and give your name, phone number and address to schedule a day and time for pick up.
Residents should place debris at the edge of the public right of way, away from mailboxes, utility poles, trees, and other obstacles. Do not place debris in the roadway, where it could block traffic.
Remember to separate debris into the categories listed above. Mixing debris will delay collection. County crews will begin debris collection when scheduled with the Road Department.
The County appreciates the patience and cooperation of all residents affected by the floods. Working together will help ensure debris is removed safely and efficiently.
For additional information or questions regarding debris removal, please contact the Uvalde County Road Department at (830) 278-9213.

By Michael Robinson | Uvalde Hesperian

08/03/26

  Uvalde County Commissioners voted to approve the county take action to pick up flood and storm debris from residents with property in Uvalde County.

  Uvalde County Commissioner John Yeackle said, “I spoke with Joe Cardenas at the City this morning. Several of the commissioners I think, have talked with the City over time at the landfill and been out a part of the City making an offer of access to some additional acreage that was currently unpermitted; there’s a temporary permit application underway to make available for our use for the debris to be taken from the County out to their Landfill followed up on that. They are anticipating getting the greenlight between today and Wednesday for that acreage has been cleared by the County on our behalf out there by county employees.”

  Yeackle also stated county residents should pile the debris on the easement outside the fenceline. Also, the debris must be sorted into the following 3 categories: appliances; bush; and construction materials. He suggested the county road department would be the contact for affected county residents for debris pick-up arrangements.

  According to Diana Olvedo-Karau, a citizen who attended the meeting, said, “The primary change from today’s is that the road and bridge department employees will be picking up the trash instead of their original idea which was to contract a third-party.”

  Uvalde County Emergency Response Coordinator Forrest Anderson reported to the court that Federal Office of Emergency Management (FEMA) dollars might be available to reimburse the county for flood debris removal and other fees but he stated FEMA requires specific reporting on where the debris was picked up and must be sorted accordingly.

  Yeackle went on to say that the county would be obligated to pay the City for use of the new landfill site but those fees would not be  due right away.

  A resident of the Deer Valley subdivision spoke to County Commissioners urging immediate action on its assistance with food debris removal.

 “The place we used to call home is now just a pile of rubbish so that is why I’m here today and hope we get the assistance we need and remove the debris,” she said.

  We cannot justify having to spend thousands of dollars just to remove it from our property when we have to rebuild from scratch. We have to replace appliances, furniture, loss, vehicle loss, clothing, and not to mention I have a baby due in two months so it’s hard enough having to start from scratch and without your help with the huge burden.

  She concluded saying, “It’s crucial that we have the debris removed so we can begin the rebuilding process.  So whatever it is that you’ll have to do I ask ya’ll to please do it.”

  Yeackle said the County’s debris pick-up start time is contingent upon the City’s temporary permit application’s approval

Jennifer Fry | Uvalde Hesperian

07/25/26

  Wilson County resident Jason Lowery was listening to the radio one afternoon last week when he heard warning of a “500-year flood” headed to the city of Uvalde, Texas.  He had been watching news coverage of the storm that had set up over the Texas Hill Country and was getting worried.  He knew his sister—me—lived in Uvalde, so he reached out to ask us to leave.

“I didn’t know the topography,” he told me later, “but I knew y’all were here.”

By the time he called on Thursday afternoon, most of the rain was behind us, but the floodwaters had yet to recede.  That morning, both the Leona River and Taylor Slough had swelled to their fullest, overreaching their banks by as many as two city blocks on either side.  The flooding was worse further downstream.

It was the most difficult day of the whole ordeal for most residents.  It had rained every day since Saturday.  My little rain gauge measured a combined total of 12” for the week, and we were on the lower end of rain totals.  All roads leading in or out of Uvalde were closed due to flooding.  Driving around town was also difficult.  The river and slough had bisected the town, leaving some residents unable to go to the store or visit relatives.  We were all under orders to “shelter in place.”

In his compassion, my brother urged me to get out quickly, but I couldn’t have left even if I had wanted to.

“Jason, we’re fine.  We’re on high ground,” I told him—and we were.  Our house sits in Old Town Uvalde, just behind the Briscoe-Garner Museum, four blocks west of the Leona River and two blocks north of Main Street, well out of reach of the floodwaters.

“As you drive around town, you start to see how protected this area is,” my husband had told me earlier in the week.

Indeed, our street, which is off West Leona St., rides high at 927 ft. above sea level, whereas East Leona St. at the river crossing is only 902 ft.  My husband was quick to point out, though, that elevation is only part of the story with flood plains: The further north one is, the higher in elevation one needs to be to escape a river overflowing its banks.

In a text message, I told my brother of the severity of the plight of our city that day.  “The footage you have seen does not lie,” I wrote.

“If I came down there tomorrow, do you think the city could use volunteers?” he replied.

At the time of his query, there was rain in the forecast for Thursday night—a pattern that had emerged in this extended weather event—which looked to worsen conditions for the area.  I was sure we were not through the worst of it.  I did not want him to start out on the two-hour drive, only to have to turn back two-thirds of the way into his trip because of road closures.  I did not even have a clear idea of where to direct his volunteer efforts.

“You are welcome to come.  I’m not trying to discourage, just being realistic.  Please be careful,” I wrote back.  “Volunteers will be needed when the water recedes and we start clearing debris, demo-ing houses, and picking up the pieces.”

More rain in Uvalde did not materialize that night, but plans solidified for my brother to come on Monday and Tuesday the following week, July 20-21.  He was willing to bring others with him if they wanted to join recovery efforts, but in the end it was just himself and his trailer.

In an interview, I asked him why he chose to come.  He had seen the devastation in Kerrville on July 4, 2025, he said.  “I wanted to help out here… because I didn’t help then.  I figured it would be easy to get in, help out, and get out.”

He was counting on whatever community contacts I might have to plug him in.  I managed to connect him with a family friend, Constable Max Dorflinger, who told my brother, “Just show up.  No one’s going to turn you away.”

Dorflinger directed him to three of the hardest-hit areas, Rio Seco and William off Studer Street, and Private Road 4330 off Old Pearsall Road, otherwise known as the Dodson subdivision.  My brother never made it to Rio Seco, as the Leona River was still rushing over the roadway as of Tuesday morning, but he was able to help out those who live on Barry and William Streets, just to the east of the river.

“I don’t know the names of the people I helped out today,” he said.  But it did not matter.  With his trailer, he was able to haul six loads of debris to the dumpsters across from Uvalde Meat Market set up by the National Guard.  “I feel like I helped out a lot more today than yesterday because I was able to help out more people.”

As the National Guard was closing up operations for the day at two o’clock on Tuesday, my brother pulled up to a house on Wood Street across from the golf course.  A second truck-and-trailer pulled up alongside him, strangers both of them, and together they hauled one final load to the dumpster.

In the middle of helping to haul trash, he noticed a ruined, mud-smeared photograph of a mother and father with their daughter in military uniform, possibly having graduated a military academy.  It wasn’t just stuff he was hauling away; it was memories.  “You realize people’s lives were affected in a negative way,” he said.  “You want people to survive, sure, but you can’t move a house.”

In the interview, my brother talked of larger organizations that might ask volunteers to run a background check or complete other paperwork before heading out to the field.  He stressed the urgency and the need of simply getting out there.

“You just need to come help these people,” he said.  “You need some hands to load garbage.  I have a trailer.  I can devote what I have.  Other people don’t have that.”

“I didn’t know I wanted to come until after the flood,” he continued.  “I figured it was going to be just as bad, if not worse, than Kerrville [last year].”

After talking with affected flood victims, he concluded, “Y’all didn’t think it was going to be as bad as it was.”

My brother includes me in that assessment, and he is right.  I did not know what to think.  I spent the week checking on friends and neighbors as I thought of them, and praying for those I had not yet heard from.  Thankful for the rain, I took notes on daily totals from my newly-installed rain gauge, reminding myself that 5” in one night is extraordinary and not to be thought of as the norm.

Looking outside my door last week, you would think there was no flood raging around me.  The air was fresh and clean-smelling, the grass a bright green.  I had a humming refrigerator stocked with fresh food.  My children even splashed in the rain.  It seemed there was no care in the world.

When my neighbor texted, “It’s bad, girl,” earlier in the week, I could hardly believe her.  I did not venture out with my children until Friday when the waters began to recede and I gave them strict warning not to get out of the car.  It was only through pictures my husband and others took that I realized the enormity of the tragedy.

“Nobody had flood insurance,” my brother told me after he came back from his rounds of debris-hauling.  “One guy off Wood St. just built the house—he couldn’t get it.  They wouldn’t sell it to him.”

My brother had come into town about 10:30 Monday morning, looking for a place to drop off a few donations he and some well-wishers had collected for the town.  He made his way to the Dodson subdivision, where most of the residents and the Red Cross were busy with cleaning out flood-soaked houses.  This was a hard-hit area, with some residents having had water inside their homes to the eight-foot ceilings.

Not even the Red Cross would take my brother’s donations at the time, but several homeowners took a few necessities.  That is how he met the Cochrans.

“Jason pulled up to our house in his truck and asked if we needed help and offered supplies and drinks that he brought,” said Kim Cochran after the fact.  “He immediately got to work.”

Chris and Kim Cochran, who hail from Fayetteville, AR and moved to Uvalde eleven years ago for work, currently live at the end of Private Road 4330 and had three to four feet of water in their home as a result of the flood.  They have a 1978 split-level home located a little less than a half-mile west of the  Leona River.  Taylor Slough joins the Leona about a half-mile north of them.

According to David Fry with Medina Real Estate Photography, who was out last Wednesday and Thursday capturing the devastation with his drone camera, water from the swollen Leona River came within 20 feet of the south bend of Johnson Loop, which is nearly one-third of a mile (1,600 ft.) west of the center of the river and about that much further west of Private Road 4330.  The footage shows the river over Old Pearsall Road up to 1,000 ft. west of the Dodson subdivision.  That would make the floodwaters at this juncture 780 feet shy of a mile wide.

The elevation of the Dodson Subdivision stands between 895 and 897 feet above sea level. The elevation of the Leona River at the Old Pearsall Road bridge, located less than 1,000 ft to the west, is 890 feet.  The Cochrans’ home was assessed to be “outside of the flood plain, so we expected everything to be okay,” said Kim.

Uvalde County had received a considerable amount of rain by mid-week last week.  According to David Reimer with Texas Storm Chasers, almost 17 inches had fallen just north of the city between Monday and Wednesday evening.  Julye Keeble with the Uvalde Leader-News recorded that “more than 14 inches” had fallen in that same time frame.  And more rain was on the way.

“Understand that the rivers out here are already forecast to be a major flood stage,” Reimer said as a warning to his viewers in the Uvalde area in his July 15 evening update.  “Any additional rain will just exacerbate that and just push things that much higher.”  His models predicted an additional 10 inches of rain in or near the Uvalde area in the overnight hours of Wednesday into Thursday.

“Given what we’ve seen the last couple of days, it’s entirely possible someone could get a foot, a foot and a half of rain tonight… If you live in an area that is near the river, creek, streams, pay attention and skedaddle if you need to skedaddle because this is going to get rowdy real quick overnight,” he warned.

According to my brother, the Cochrans did not think they were close enough to the river to be affected by its floodwaters.  “Prior to the flooding, we actually discussed it among our neighbors and a few others in the area on Wednesday afternoon,” Kim wrote in an email interview.  “The consensus was that it would probably flood the slough and we would be cut off from town, and the field to the side of our house would be boggy, but that we would be okay.”

Wednesday night saw the heaviest rainfall totals of the severe weather event.  The rain gauge at my house, which is 3.2 miles northwest of the Cochrans, recorded 5 inches that night.  Three point two miles due north of them is Garner Field Road, where Carol Kothmann reported “more than 11 inches overnight into July 16.”  It seemed David Reimer’s predictions had come true.

All that water flowed south.  By 5 A.M. Thursday morning, many along Private Road 4330 had evacuated their homes by boat, but no one had been able to get in touch with the Cochrans to see if they were all right.

“My family had slept through the storm and all the notifications on my phone, as well as the neighborhood text thread trying to get ahold of us as everyone on our street evacuated,” Kim wrote.  “My next door neighbor Crystal Alejandro-Jiminez called me at about 5 AM… and told me all the neighbors down the street were actively being evacuated by boat.

“We declined evacuation from [the Texas Game Warden’s] Game & Fish swift water rescue,” she continued.  “We discussed it and made a ‘plan b’ to evade water if it continued to come up. The east side of our property is higher, and the neighbor’s house to the southeast a little higher, so we still had a place to go if the water continued to rise even if we had to cut the fence to get out.”

Plan B proved unnecessary, but the floodwater ravaged their home.  “The entire first floor of our home and large four-car carport workshop was flooded with over 3 ft. of water,” Kim reported.  “The septic tank was totally flooded and a retaining wall was washed away.  We saw on a home security camera feed that our old Volvo was floating like one-to-two ft. off the ground and set back down about three ft. to the left of where it was, so that’s a total loss.”  Additionally, the carport acted as a catch-all for whatever the river had collected and floodwaters filled it with all manner of debris.

“We do plan to stay,” she added, “but plan make significant modifications to try to prevent this from happening again.”

Thankfully, by 9 A.M. that morning, the storm had fizzled out and no more rain came.  By 3:20 that afternoon, the floodwaters had started to recede.  By late Thursday night, the Cochrans were able to make it out of their subdivision.

It was life-saving that the Cochrans stayed behind in their home.  Their next-door neighbor contacted them about cats, a fifteen year-old senior and six foster kittens, trapped in the adjacent home.  Immediately Chris jumped into action, and waist-deep floodwaters, to rescue them.  He found them in a bathroom, soaking wet and exhausted from trying to keep their heads above water, and floated them out of danger in a plastic bin he had scavenged among the debris.

“To say I was relieved to see him coming back down the street intact is an understatement,” his wife wrote, “since, if the water was too strong for him, there was no way I could get to him quickly and I couldn’t leave my girls.”

“It probably meant the world to those people I helped yesterday,” my brother told me later.

Indeed, it did.  Both Chris and Kim assured me that my brother was “a massive help” in their recovery efforts.  “Jason was such a blessing in both physical help and boosting our spirits,” Kim said.  Not only did he help them with the “huge job” of debris-hauling, “He also helped immensely by simply visiting with us while we were working, especially my husband. Most of our friends and all our families live 700 miles away or more, so my husband shoulders a lot by himself. During the course of the day, Jason and Chris discovered they have so much in common interests…”

“We could be twins,” my brother told me when I dropped off his lunch.  “I know we’re twins,” he stressed—which is true—“but he and I could really be twins.  He even loves Star Trek!”

Because the floodwaters only reached the lower portion of the house, the Cochrans are able to stay in their home, which is not the case for some flood victims.  They were certainly among the more fortunate in this disaster.

“I’m usually the one helping others,” Chris Cochran told me.  “It’s hard to be the one to accept help.”

After assisting the Cochrans most of the day Monday, my brother was finally able to give his donations to the community by way of the staff at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, who eagerly received them.  Sacred Heart has set up recovery efforts at the CCD building on its Ft. Clark Road campus.  Please contact the church office at 830-278-3448 for more information.

As I think about the flood and its impact, what keeps coming back to mind is a verse from Ecclesiastes:  “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all (9:11).”

In the coming weeks, months, and years, no doubt there will be plenty of blame to smear in people’s faces in regard to this storm, but sometimes life just throws us a curve ball and the best we can do is swim for dear life while praying God sends us rescue.  Sometimes that rescue comes in the form of an out-of-towner—or a twin brother—just looking for a way to help out his fellow man.  It may takes weeks for Uvalde to get back on her feet, but with friendly volunteers like Jason Lowery, there will be no shortage of helping hands to go around.

By Michael Robinson | Uvalde Hesperian

06-10-26

About 300 plus attended the NW Screwworm Community Meeting sponsored by Spear AG during the morning session and over a hundred attended the evening session held at the Uvalde County Fairplex Events Center. Texas State Senator District 80 Don McLaughlin appeared with two other State officials at the evening meeting covering recent updates on Texas Counties where Screwworm cases have been confirmed as well as what animals are at risk.

The two-hour meetings discussed the animals at risk and steps ranchers, farmers, pet owners and locals should take to identify possible screwworm larvae infections on animals and how to report the problem. One official stressed the key way to address the problem is to keep “eyes-on” animals. They went on to stress the importance of looking for any odd behaviors and monitor any wounds that the NW Screwworm larvae could infect.

The Uvalde Hesperian will post additional information presented at the meeting in a future report.

By Michael Robinson | Uvalde Hesperian

05-20-26

With Memorial Day weekend just a few days away marking the start of the summer travel season, local gasoline prices have skyrocketed to over $4 per gallon at most stations around Uvalde.

According to Gasbuddy.com report on gasoline prices right now in Uvalde, the cheapest price per gallon of Regular Unleaded can be found at Stripes located on West Main Street at $3.82 per gallon with Murphy USA, Partners Food Mart and Tex Best posting the highest price per gallon at $4.19 per gallon for Regular Unleaded.

According to  AAA Fuel Prices today’s National Gas Price average is reported at  $4.53 per gallon for Regular Unleaded compared to the Uvalde County average price registering at $4.00 per gallon.

“The national average is up 45.2 cents from a month ago and is $1.33 per gallon higher than a year ago,” a report by Gasbuddy.com’s blog said.

Gasbuddy.com also reported the following, “Oil markets continued their upward march over the past week as geopolitical tensions and uncertainty surrounding U.S.-Iran negotiations kept traders focused on the growing risk of supply disruptions. While hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough had briefly pressured prices lower in prior weeks, optimism faded as talks appeared to stall again, reinforcing concerns that tensions could persist or escalate further. Continued unease surrounding shipping flows and export infrastructure has helped rebuild a sizable geopolitical risk premium into crude prices.”

By Michael Robinson | Uvalde Hesperian

05-04-06

The Knippa ISD School Bond Election clinches a one-vote victory on Monday after appearing to go down in flames Saturday night over a tie-vote vote tie which according to Texas Election Law equals a defeat.

Earlier this afternoon, Uvalde County Elections Administrator Christine White issued the following election results update following a ballot Board meeting,

In a statement sent to local media, White wrote, “The ballot board met this afternoon and processed the 3 provisional ballots received on election day (2 rejected, 1 accepted) and the 3 mail ballots (all accepted) that were postmarked on election day and received in today’s mail.  I have attached the updated election results.”