Crews picked through mountains of debris and waded into swollen rivers Monday in the search for victims of catastrophic flooding that killed nearly 90 people over the July Fourth weekend in Texas, including more than two dozen campers and counselors from an all-girls Christian camp.
With additional rain on the way, more flooding still threatened in saturated parts of central Texas. Authorities said the death toll was sure to rise as crews looked for many people who were missing.
Operators of Camp Mystic, a century-old summer camp in the Texas Hill Country, said they lost 27 campers and counselors, confirming their worst fears after a wall of water slammed into cabins built along the edge of the Guadalupe River.
“We have been in communication with local and state authorities who are tirelessly deploying extensive resources to search for our missing girls,” the camp said in a statement. Authorities later said that 10 girls and a counselor from the camp remain missing.
The raging flash floods — among the nation’s worst in decades — slammed into riverside camps and homes before daybreak Friday, pulling sleeping people out of their cabins, tents and trailers and dragging them for miles past floating tree trunks and automobiles. Some survivors were found clinging to trees.
Piles of twisted trees sprinkled with mattresses, refrigerators, coolers and canoes now litter the riverbanks. Search-and-rescue teams used heavy equipment near Kerrville to remove large branches while volunteers covered in mud sorted through chunks of debris, piece by piece.
In the Hill Country area, home to Camp Mystic and several other summer camps, searchers have found the bodies of 75 people, including 27 children, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said.
Fourteen other deaths were reported in Travis, Burnet, Kendall, Tom Green and Williamson counties, according to local officials.
Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday that 41 people were unaccounted for across the state and more could be missing.
Authorities vowed that one of the next steps will be investigating whether enough warnings were issued and why some camps did not evacuate or move to higher ground in areas long vulnerable to flooding.
Searching the disaster zone
Search-and-rescue crews at one staging area said Monday that more than 1,000 volunteers had been directed to an area of hard-hit Kerr County.
Families were allowed to look around Camp Mystic beginning Sunday morning. A man whose daughter was rescued from a cabin on the highest point in the camp walked a riverbank, looking in clumps of trees and under big rocks.
One family left with a blue footlocker. A teenage girl had tears running down her face as they slowly drove away and she gazed through the open window at the wreckage.
Little time to escape floods
Reagan Brown said his parents, in their 80s, managed to escape uphill as water inundated their home in the town of Hunt. When the couple learned that their 92-year-old neighbor was trapped in her attic, they went back and rescued her.
“Then they were able to reach their tool shed up higher ground, and neighbors throughout the early morning began to show up at their tool shed, and they all rode it out together,” Brown said.
Among those confirmed dead were an 8-year-old girl from Mountain Brook, Alabama, who was at the camp, and the director of another camp up the road.
Two school-age sisters from Dallas were missing Sunday after their cabin was swept away. Their parents were staying in a different cabin and were safe, but the girls’ grandparents were unaccounted for.
Warnings came before the disaster
On Thursday the National Weather Service advised of potential flooding and then sent out a series of flash flood warnings in the early hours of Friday before issuing flash flood emergencies — a rare step that alerts the public to imminent danger.
Authorities and elected officials have said they did not expect such an intense downpour, the equivalent of months of rain.
Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said one of the challenges is that many camps are in places with poor cellphone service.
President Donald Trump signed a major disaster declaration Sunday for Kerr County and said he would likely visit Friday. He said it wasn’t the time to talk about whether he was still planning to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency and added that he doesn’t plan to rehire any of the federal meteorologists who were fired this year as part of widespread government spending cuts.
“This was a thing that happened in seconds. Nobody expected it,” the president said.
Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, said recent cuts to FEMA and the National Weather Service did not delay any warnings.
“There’s a time to have political fights, there’s a time to disagree. This is not that time,” Cruz said. “There will be a time to find out what could been done differently. My hope is in time we learn some lessons to implement the next time there is a flood.”
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Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio. Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Christopher Weber in Los Angeles; Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee; Cedar Attanasio in New York; Sophia Tareen in Chicago; and Michelle Price in Morristown, N.J.
