In a powerful evening testimony last week before a joint hearing of the Texas Senate and House committees on disaster preparedness and flooding, Rice University’s Philip Bedient called for urgent investment in real-time flood warning systems, citing lessons learned from both Houston and the devastating Hill Country floods earlier this month.
Speaking at the Hill Country Youth Event Center in Kerrville, Texas — just miles from some of the most tragic losses during the July floods — Bedient made a compelling case for statewide adoption of advanced flood forecasting tools.
“In the aftermath of this devastating storm in 2025, it’s clear that the need for reliable, real-time flood warning systems has never been more urgent,” said Bedient, a nationally recognized expert in hydrology and director of Rice’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center. “… Floods happen fast, and as extreme weather events are becoming more common due to all sorts of changes, we’re seeing these happen more frequently.”
At the invitation of Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, and Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, Bedient and his colleagues offered an overview of the SSPEED Center, shared technological tools developed at the university to improve flood modeling and early warning and provided recommendations to bolster Texas’ flood response infrastructure.
Central to his testimony was the SSPEED Center’s Flood Information and Response System (FIRST), a radar-integrated, real-time forecasting platform developed over decades in collaboration with fellow researchers, including Nick Fang at the University of Texas at Arlington. Initially created to protect Houston’s Texas Medical Center following Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, the system has expanded to cover four major watersheds in the Houston area and could be scaled to serve vulnerable communities across Texas.
“The system’s capabilities are applicable to both urban centers and rural regions nationwide where flash floods occur,” Bedient said. “It serves as a critical decision support tool for emergency management. It provides data every 10 to 15 minutes … and instantly displays flood risk in a very easy-to-use visual map.”
As Bedient explained, FIRST integrates real-time radar with precision floodplain mapping to deliver forecasts that account for how rain moves through watersheds.
“We’re not just looking at rainfall,” he said. “We’re looking at how the rain moves through the watershed … and how it puts people at risk.”
He added that the system helps emergency officials make high-stakes decisions like closing roads or ordering evacuations.
“During major storm events, every minute counts,” he said.
The urgency of such tools was underscored by the July 2025 Hill Country flood, which Bedient described as one of the worst the region has ever experienced. He emphasized the need for widespread implementation of advanced, real-time flood warning systems across Texas.
“The tools exist,” he said. “We just need to put them into place.”