Sen. Missy Irvin wants Arkansas to prepare for flash-flood disaster, citing Texas tragedy

Sen. Missy Irvin of Mountain View said during a Game and Fish/State Police Subcommittee meeting on July 8, 2025, that she wanted to have more conversations about emergency preparedness in Arkansas after devastating flash floods in Texas killed over 100 people last week. (Ainsley Platt/Arkansas Advocate)

By Ainsley Platt, Arkansas Advocate

An Arkansas lawmaker said Tuesday that she wants a legislative subcommittee to focus on emergency preparedness for flooding in light of the disastrous flooding in Texas that had killed at least 109 people as of Tuesday afternoon.

Such a discussion is “really critical at this time,” Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, said during a meeting of the Arkansas Legislative Council’s Game and Fish/State Police subcommittee.

Flash floods along the Guadalupe River in Texas occurred last weekend in an area popular with campers. Camp Mystic, which serves young girls, saw more than two dozen of its campers and counselors killed in the disaster, along with its longtime director and co-owner, CBS reported.

The river rose rapidly early Friday morning after a storm system parked itself over the region, dumping heavy rain. The river rose over 25 feet in two hours, according to a stream gauge close to Camp Mystic.

Irvin, co-chair of the Arkansas subcommittee, said she knew the Texas floods were on the minds of many legislators, especially given the Camp Albert Pike flood that killed 20 people in Arkansas 15 years ago.

“In future meetings I really want to focus on emergency communication, the lack of cell phone coverage in many areas of the state of Arkansas, and really work with our federal delegation, with our FCC [Federal Communications Commission] commissioner — bringing those people in and seeing what we can do to really push the ball forward to make sure that we have good warnings in place,” Irvin said.

County government is also an important piece of the warning and response puzzle that must be accounted for, Irvin said.

Mike Hagar, secretary of the Department of Public Safety, which oversees both the Arkansas State Police and the Division of Emergency Management, said his department was looking into what it could do “more proactively” on emergency preparedness in conjunction with the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism.

“Unfortunately, the world that we live in and the arena that we all work under — we typically are more reactive, after-the-fact. We’re reactive; once the disaster happens, that’s when we assign resources to come in and try to mitigate that disaster as much as possible,” Hagar said. “Obviously, we need to do better. They say if it’s predictable, it’s preventable.”

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