(TNS) — Kaysi Ricker’s phone buzzed with a flash flood warning.

She scrambled down to the creek behind her house to clean up the toys her niece and nephew had left in the usually ankle-deep water.

On the way, she heard it — a deafening sound like the rumbling of a freight train.

Then, just as she grabbed one more toy from the creek bank, she saw it — a wall of water tearing down Peters Run, dragging trees and massive piles of debris with it.

It wasn’t even raining at her home in Ohio County, W.Va., on that Saturday night in June, but the water just kept rising. Within 10 minutes, a car floated past her house.

It slammed into the bridge that connects her family’s property to the main road.

“I don’t think anyone, until you live through it, understands the magnitude of fear you feel in your body,” Ricker said.

Witnessing the terrifying power of raging floodwaters and the devastation they wrought upon her community underscored for Ricker why she received the wireless emergency weather alert in the first place. The public-facing culmination of National Weather Service forecasts is a key tool in emergency preparedness that can save lives.

She and her family were safe. But just down the road from Ricker’s house, nine people were killed by the flash flooding June 14 in the Triadelphia area.

Seven of the victims were from Triadelphia, a town of fewer than 1,000 people located east of the Ohio River. The other two were from Moundsville.

Ricker’s bus driver and neighbor growing up, Sandra Parsons, was the last victim identified after her body was found in the Ohio River more than a week after the flooding.

Nearly 40 homes in Ohio County were destroyed, and more than 200 suffered “major” damage, county emergency management director Lou Vargo said.

“This is stuff that you watch on TV … in other communities, not here,” Ricker said.

She has always paid attention to flash flood warnings — her family uses the banks of Peters Run as something of a storage area. But she had never seen the water rise so high, so fast.

“No one thought when they got a flash flood warning, it pertained to them,” Ricker said.

“Take it seriously no matter where you are, because the water can reach you, no matter if you have never been flooded before. You could be.”

Sounding the alarm

That night, about an hour northeast of Triadelphia, meteorologists at the NWS office in Moon were scrambling to pin down where the threats of flash flooding were highest in the tri-state area.

They’d issued a flash flood watch hours before for counties northeast of Pittsburgh, including Indiana and Clarion. Over the course of the day, they’d shifted the watch southwest. But by the time they expanded the watch to include Ohio County, the storm was nearly there.

They issued a flash flood warning just after 8 p.m., within minutes of expanding the watch — but not one that triggered a wireless emergency alert.

“The predictability of where the threat was shaping up was kind of at a minimum,” said Matthew Kramar, the science and operations officer for the NWS in Moon. “Sometimes you can predict that well ahead of time. This was not one of those cases.”

Two storms were merging over the area and dumping several inches of rain in a matter of minutes — ultimately more than 3 inches in about an hour, including almost three-quarters of an inch in five minutes at the storm’s peak.

The potential severity of the flooding started to come into focus for NWS meteorologists as they analyzed rain gauge estimates, and the radar continued to show torrential downpours. They sent out another warning — this time at the “considerable” level — less than 20 minutes after the first.

By triggering a “considerable” flash flood warning, emergency alerts would have been set off on all phones in the affected area — the type of alert that automatically causes your phone to vibrate with a jolting emergency tone — as long as people have not turned off those alerts and have a cell signal.

The alert sent to Ohio County warned of “life-threatening” flooding.

Likely within 10 minutes, floodwaters slammed the area around Triadelphia, Kramar said.

Ricker received the alert in time to rescue another toy from the banks of the creek, but she didn’t think there would have been time to truly evade the racing flood.

“Had you packed up the car, you would have been washed away. Had you tried to get on a roadway somewhere, you would have been another victim,” she said.

“There was no time to prepare for this.”

The NWS didn’t send the highest tier of flash flood warning — a “catastrophic” level or flash flood emergency — as the rain fell that night. They sent it hours later, around midnight, after they’d received reports from overwhelmed local emergency managers on the ground.

Kramar said he didn’t believe the outcome would have been different if the NWS had escalated the warning earlier because wireless alerts had already gone out for the “considerable” warning.

In 2020, the NWS changed its guidance to send wireless emergency alerts only in the case of “considerable” or “catastrophic” flash flood warnings in order to significantly reduce the number of messages people receive.

The NWS is cautious, he said, about triggering the highest warning level for fear of desensitizing people.

“If every flash flood becomes a flash flood emergency, it’s basically just muting the effect of what [that] truly means,” Kramar said.

When to send a warning

With their aggressive alarm sounds and often frightening messages, emergency alerts can cause anxiety and irritation — leading some to ignore the messages or even alter their phone settings to make sure they don’t receive them.

But experts say that heeding these alerts is a critical part of staying safe in emergencies.

“We would hope that people take it seriously because our mission is to protect lives and property,” said Alicia Miller, the senior service hydrologist for the NWS in Moon.

Days before issuing watches or warnings, forecasters are looking for the ingredients that could produce flash flooding: How much water is in the atmosphere that a storm could transform into precipitation? How fast is a storm moving? How much rain has fallen in the area over the past few days — or even months? What type of terrain is it going to fall on?

Urban areas, filled with impermeable concrete, flood more quickly than rural areas, where the soil can soak up some moisture. Steep hillsides can funnel water into narrow valleys and creeks, streams and rivers — hallmarks of the terrain in the Pittsburgh area — and cause rapid flooding. Places that have received significant recent rainfall will likely struggle to handle more.

Those ingredients are sometimes clear several days ahead of time, ideally allowing the NWS to issue a flood watch — meaning conditions are favorable for flooding to occur — hours in advance.

But sometimes, as in the case of the West Virginia floods, where two storms suddenly merged, those conditions come together all at once — offering little lead time.

Even with a watch in place, it may not be clear where the rain will actually come down until minutes — or even seconds — ahead of time. Rain falling in one creek basin might harmlessly travel down the stream and into one of the major rivers. But the same amount of rainfall just one basin over could lead to flooding.

The NWS uses several tools to determine whether to issue a flash flood warning, including their “flash flood guidance,” which provides estimates for how much rain over a certain amount of time could spur flooding.

When they become increasingly confident that flooding is occurring or about to occur, they fire off the warning.

The importance of receiving weather alerts and taking action was made all too clear by the tragic floods in Texas earlier this month that killed more than 130 people.

Independent meteorologists said the warnings sent by the NWS were largely timely and accurate, NBC News reported. But in the rural areas around the Guadalupe River where many of the victims died, cell service was limited. Messages that got through arrived in the middle of the night.

“One of the ultimate lessons from the Texas flooding is we need to have redundancy built into our communication systems,” said Micki Olson, a researcher with the University at Albany who has worked with FEMA to develop more effective emergency alerts. “We can’t rely on just one dissemination tool to get people warning messages.”

Kerr County, where the vast majority of the deaths occurred in Texas, had discussed installing a flood warning system like a tornado siren because of the prevalence of flash flooding in the region. The county decided against it because of the cost.

How a weather alert is sent

The NWS system is a model for effective emergency communications, Olson said. Good messages tell people “what’s going on, where it is, what time they should act and what they should do,” she said.

NWS messages contain all of these elements automatically. Meteorologists just have to fill out the details, and the process is fairly simple.

Once NWS meteorologists decide to send a warning, a computer system allows them to draw a polygon around the warning area. Then, they fill out a form consisting of dropdown menus, multiple-choice lists and text boxes that lets them create a detailed message in seconds.

They choose the level of the warning — base, considerable or catastrophic, with the latter two triggering wireless emergency alerts.

Meteorologists can indicate why the warning was triggered, whether because of radar estimates or reports on the ground. They can input how much rain has fallen so far and how much more is expected. They can describe the potential hazards — and what actions people should take.

Once they hit send, the message goes out to phones, weather radios, TV and radio stations, and emergency management officials.

Local officials can also send alerts using the same FEMA Integrated Public Alert and Warning System that the NWS utilizes.

Allegheny County Emergency Services Chief Matt Brown said he remembers activating the IPAWS alerts only twice in about eight years, outside of the NWS messages.

“I’m of the belief that if I made regular use of that system, people would just shut off their alerts,” he said.

Warnings at a record pace

A record number of flash flood warnings have been issued in the U.S. this year, according to NBC News. The 3,040 warnings across the country from Jan. 1 to July 15 were the most since the modern alert system was introduced in 1986.

The 34 warnings in Allegheny County this year through July 23 were also the most on record for that time period, according to NWS data.

Experts have warned that shifting climate patterns are leading to increasingly extreme rainfall, and thus flash floods.

“As temperatures warm, that means that we’re going to have more days with more moisture in the atmosphere,” said Jared Rackley, a meteorologist with the NWS in Moon. “Higher moisture availability just means that our probabilities for having flash floods at any given location increase.”

In late June, Campbells Run Road in Robinson suffered flash flooding that inundated local businesses and trapped multiple cars on the road. The NWS issued a “considerable” flash flood warning, which would have triggered a wireless emergency alert.

People who work in the area told the Post-Gazette they received warnings. But a common refrain was, “What am I going to do?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. I don’t think many people do,” said Sam Eaton, general manager of Knickerbocker Russell, a construction equipment agency in the 4700 block of Campbells Run Road.

As Ricker noted, people who have not experienced flooding before might not think it’s possible in their area. And because flash flooding can be so hyper-localized, people who receive messages might not see any effects.

When Campbells Run flooded, 2.62 inches fell on the area in less than an hour. Just a few miles away down the road, Pittsburgh International Airport received just 0.13 inches all day.

Weather alerts often list the counties, cities and towns affected, but, Olson said, providing more specificity about where flooding is likely to occur could increase trust in the messaging.

To get warnings out immediately, Vargo, the Ohio County emergency management director, said he’d like to have flood sirens that automatically sound when creek gauge readings reach a certain threshold, to remove the time it takes a person to send an alert.

Ultimately, messaging is perhaps the most important aspect of the NWS’s work.

Officials urge people to have multiple methods of receiving messages beyond just their phones. Messages are also broadcast on TV and radio stations via the federal Emergency Alert System and via weather radios.

“We can put out the best forecast,” Kramar said. “But if somebody doesn’t receive it, understand it, and understand what decisions they have to make based on it, it has no value.”