Search teams yesterday plodded through mud-laden riverbanks and flew aircraft over the flood-stricken landscape of central Texas for a fourth day, looking for dozens of people still missing from a disaster that has claimed at least 78 lives.
The bulk of the death toll from Friday’s flash floods was concentrated in the riverfront Hill Country Texas town of Kerrville, accounting for 68 of the dead, including 28 children, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said.
The Guadalupe River, transformed by predawn torrential downpours into a raging, killer torrent in less than hour, runs directly through Kerrville.
Photo: Reuters
The loss of life there included an unspecified number of fatalities at the Camp Mystic summer camp, a nearly century-old Christian girls retreat on the banks of the Guadalupe where authorities reported two dozen children unaccounted for in the immediate aftermath of the flooding on Friday.
Leitha on Sunday said that search teams were still looking for 10 girls and one camp counselor, but he did not specify the fate of others initially counted as missing.
As of late Sunday afternoon, state officials said 10 other flood-related fatalities were confirmed across four neighboring counties, and that 41 other people were still listed as unaccounted for in the disaster beyond Kerr County.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Freeman Martin predicted that the death toll would rise further as floodwaters receded and the search gained momentum.
Authorities also warned that continued rainfall — even if lighter than Friday’s deluge — could unleash additional flash floods because the landscape was so saturated.
State emergency management officials had warned on Thursday last week, ahead of the July Fourth holiday, that parts of central Texas faced the possibility of heavy showers and flash floods based on National Weather Service Forecasts, but twice as much rain as was predicted ended up falling over two branches of the Guadalupe just upstream of the fork where they converge, sending all of that water racing into the single river channel where it slices through Kerrville, City Manager Dalton Rice said.
Rice and other public officials, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, vowed that the circumstances of the flooding, and the adequacy for weather forecasts and warning systems, would be scrutinized once the immediate situation was brought under control.
In the meantime, search-and-rescue operations were continuing around the clock, with hundreds of emergency personnel on the ground contending with a myriad of challenges.
“It’s hot, there’s mud, they’re moving debris, there’s snakes,” Martin said at a news conference on Sunday.
Thomas Suelzar, adjutant general of the Texas Military Department, said airborne search assets included eight helicopters and a remotely piloted MQ-9 Reaper aircraft equipped with advanced sensors for surveillance and reconnaissance missions.
In addition to the 68 lives lost in Kerr County, three died in Burnet County, one in Tom Green County, five in Travis County and one in Williamson County, Texas Division of Emergency Management chief Nim Kidd said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency was activated on Sunday and was deploying resources to Texas after US President Donald Trump issued a major disaster declaration, the US Department of Homeland Security said.
US Coast Guard helicopters and planes were aiding search-and-rescue efforts.
Trump, who said on Sunday that he would visit the disaster scene, probably on Friday, has previously outlined plans to scale back the federal government’s role in responding to natural disasters, leaving states to shoulder more of the burden themselves.
Some experts questioned whether cuts to the federal workforce by the Trump administration, including to the agency that oversees the National Weather Service, led to a failure by officials to accurately predict the severity of the floods and issue appropriate warnings ahead of the storm.
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