Trump calls Texas floods ‘unimaginable tragedy' as death toll hits 80
He declared a major disaster, saying he would 'probably' visit the state later this week. Rescuers are still trying to find at least ten missing girls and one counsellor from Camp Mystic, the Christian camp that was overwhelmed when the River Guadalupe burst its banks on Friday.
Larry Leitha, the Kerr County sheriff, told a news conference earlier on Sunday that the 68 dead in the worst-hit county included 28 children and 40 adults. Eighteen adults and four children who died had not yet been identified.
Questions were raised about whether vacancies at two local offices of the National Weather Service (NWS) made coordination with emergency responders more difficult.
Despite warnings from meteorologists of possible flooding from late Thursday into Friday, the scale of the downpour in the early hours confounded expectations. Over a few hours, the Guadalupe running alongside Camp Mystic rose from 7ft to 29ft. Some wondered why camps along the river had not been evacuated given the warnings.
On Sunday Trump said he had signed a major disaster declaration for Kerr County, which will allow it to access further emergency funds. He said he had been in touch with the Texas governor and that he 'wanted to leave a little time' before visiting the stricken region.
'I would have done it today, but we would just be in their way, probably Friday,' the president said.
John Cornyn, a Republican senator from Texas, told Fox News that he expected the death toll to rise.
Trump promised to provide the 'brave first responders' of Texas with all the resources they needed as rescue teams and sniffer dogs continued to search for signs of life after the devastating flash floods.
But even the president could not provide better news to families who were already grieving, or fresh hope to those whose loved ones remained among the missing, as the death toll rose and the chances of finding survivors receded during the day.
The Texas governor Greg Abbott said 41 people were known to be missing.
Warnings of further rainfall and thunderstorms to come were issued as rescuers raced to find those who remained unaccounted for, including ten young girls and a councillor who had been at the hundred-year-old Camp Mystic, the Christian summer camp that was swept away by the torrents.
Blankets, teddy bears and other belongings at the camp were caked in mud, and windows in the cabins were shattered.
By Saturday, Dalton Rice, the city manager in Kerrville, said officials were 'seeing bodies recovered all over, up and down'. He added: 'We broke it down into grids so we can recover those bodies.'
As the search continued, questions were raised about why the worst-affected areas were not evacuated sooner. Kerr County appeared to lack a local flood warning system. Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, suggested that this came down to expense. 'Taxpayers won't pay for it,' he said.
• Why did the floods catch Texas by surprise?
But there were also questions about whether staffing shortages at the NWS had affected the quality of a forecast — or the speed of the response.
Texas officials said the forecasters had not anticipated the extent of the downpour. The first evacuation warnings from the San Angelo and San Antonio weather offices arrived from midnight on Thursday and the flash floods followed very quickly. The Guadalupe River rose more than 20ft in under two hours during the torrential rain.
Tom Fahy, the legislative director of the NWS's union, said the state's office in San Antonio had a number of vacancies in key roles, including a warning co-ordination meteorologist.
Fahy added that the San Angelo office, which covered some of the worst-hit areas, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, and that the vacancy rate at both offices was roughly double what it was in January, when Trump took office. Since then, the Trump administration cut or retired almost 600 employees at the NWS as part of a drive to reduce 'waste' in federal departments.
The majority of victims recorded were along the Guadalupe River in the county. Hundreds of emergency service personnel and more than a dozen dogs continued to search for those missing.
Parents rushed to the reunification centre on Friday morning after reports of the flooding, as the camp was hampered in its ability to assist search operations without internet or power, while a road which had been destroyed close by was further complicating efforts.
Abbott said the authorities 'won't stop until we find every girl who was in those cabins', as he described the camp as having been 'horrendously ravaged' by the floods.
Trump thanked the emergency services searching for those who remained missing. 'Our incredible US Coast Guard, together with State First Responders, have saved more than 850 lives,' he posted.
Rice said the primary focus remained the 'search and rescue of every single person involved'. He added: 'We'll continue through the night to make sure that happens.'
Securing a major disaster declaration allows Texas access to federal assistance.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said in a statement that this help 'can include grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses and other programmes' for individuals, while funding was available for eligible government agencies and non-profit organisations helping with the response.
RJ Harber, father of Blair, 13, and Brooke, 11, confirmed the deaths of his two daughters this weekend. The sisters were staying with their grandparents Charlene and Mike Harber in a cabin by the Guadalupe River. Harber believes his parents, who are still missing, have also died. He and his wife had been staying in a separate cabin nearby, when the catastrophic floods struck. They were unharmed.
Lila Bonner, nine, was at Camp Mystic with her best friend, eight-year-old Eloise Peck, who is still missing. The pair had recently finished second grade at Bradfield elementary school.
Renee Smajstrla, eight, also at Camp Mystic, was confirmed dead by her uncle. He told The Washington Post that the family were thankful Renee 'was with her friends and having the time of her life'.
The family of Sarah Marsh, eight, who had been attending Camp Mystic, said they were 'blessed to have had this beautiful spunky ray of light in our lives'.
Janie Hunt's mother, Anne Hunt, confirmed that her nine-year-old daughter, who had been staying at Camp Mystic, died on Saturday.
Julian Ryan's fiancée said the 27-year-old died a 'hero' saving his family. Punching through a window pane to allow his fiancée, children and her mother to escape, the father of three lacerated his arm in the process and bled to death before rescuers arrived.
Jane Ragsdale was director and co-owner of the Heart O' the Hills all-girls' camp located slightly upriver from Camp Mystic. Ragsdale was described as its 'heart and soul'.
Richard Eastland, Camp Mystic's co-owner since 1974, died in a helicopter on the way to a Houston Hospital, according to the Kerr County judge Rob Kelly. Eastland was the third generation of his family to manage the summer camp and had 11 grandchildren, many of whom helped with running it.
Reece and Paula Zunker were found dead on Saturday morning. The Zunkers' two young children are unaccounted for.
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Weather tracker: supercharged storms hit Texas's ‘Flash Flood Alley'
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The Guardian
an hour ago
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The Guadalupe River had returned to calm by Saturday evening and was beginning to give up its grim secrets, as 70 people – many of them children – were recovered from what just a day earlier was a terrifying flash flood that had turned land into water, taken homes and retreated to leave miles of terrible devastation along its banks. At Camp Mystic, on a bend in the river flanked by cliffs that sped the torrent as if through a chicane, 700 young girls had five days earlier joined for a month-long summer camp of fun and spiritual growth, the evening brought a strange calm to Texas Hill country. There were the flashlights of emergency vehicles; search helicopters clattered overhead; and wrecked cars marked as searched and clear with paint. A drenched mattress could be seen in the high branches of trees. Homes were obliterated, now stuffed with debris, as rescue workers continued to pull the camp girls and adults from the muddy waters. 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An initial flood watch for the area was issued at 1.18pm on Thursday predicting rain amounts of between 5 and 7in (12.7 to 17.8 cm). The weather messaging included automated alerts delivered to mobile phones to people in threatened areas. Those warnings grew increasingly ominous in Friday's early hours, urging people to move to higher ground and evacuate flood-prone areas. And as questions are asked about whether meterologists missed the signs of the storm's force, and if alert systems were enough, many in the area grappled with flashbacks to another deadly flood nearly four decades earlier. Some recalled one such emergency a few miles downriver in Comfort in July 1987, when a caravan of buses attempted to escape from a church camp through a low water crossing after an overnight storm. When the buses stalled, the teenagers attempted to form a human chain – and a wall of water washed them away. Ten were killed. 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Additionally, the NWS office in Austin/San Antonio — which has primary responsibility for Kerr County — is missing a warning coordination officer, a leadership position whose primary function is to be a decision-making point of contact for local officials and the general public, especially during dangerous weather. Although these positions are vacant, both offices had additional staff working the night shifts on 4 July that performed similar duties. The total staff vacancies at these offices are typical for the pre-Trump era and fewer than the current average staff shortage across the NWS. The local offices have also not been experiencing any lapses in weather balloon data collection that have plagued some other offices. In fact, weather balloon data gathered on Thursday from nearby Del Rio showed record amounts of moisture present in the upper atmosphere above central Texas and added to the confidence that severe flash flooding was possible. The Austin/San Antonio office then began issuing a series of flood watches starting on Thursday afternoon that cautioned the region to prepare for 'excessive runoff' from '5 to 7 inches of rain'. The NWS's Weather Prediction Center, based in College Park, Maryland, also issued a series of mesoscale precipitation discussions on Thursday – highly detailed advance notices to other weather forecasters that a particularly rare event might be underway. In one of the discussions, forecasters noted that moisture content in central Texas was 'above the 99th climatological percentile' – far in excess of normal and a clue that historic flooding was possible. In a final escalation, the NWS office in Austin/San Antonio issued a flash flood emergency about an hour before the water started rapidly rising beyond flood stage at the closest US Geological Survey river monitoring gauge. A flash flood emergency is the highest level of flood warning available to the NWS, and sufficient to set off the Wireless Emergency Alert system, which would have triggered cellphone alarms in the region. The National Weather Service issued dozens of additional flash flood warnings throughout the day on Friday and Saturday after the second wave of extremely heavy rains compounded the flooding's scope across central Texas during the early morning hours. Even though watches and warnings were issued on time throughout the disaster – contrasting what local officials have said in press conferences – rainfall totals specified in the first flash flood watch were about half of what ultimately fell. Current weather forecasting technology is capable of knowing that near-record rainfall may occur somewhere in a given region about a day in advance, but knowing exactly how much and in which part of a specific river's drainage basin over hilly terrain makes flood forecasting much more difficult – analogous to prediction exactly which neighborhood a tornado might strike a day ahead of time. Donald Trump's staffing cuts have particularly hit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Environmental Modeling Center, which aims to improve the skill of these types of difficult forecasts. Though it's unclear to what extent staffing shortages across the NWS complicated the advance notice that local officials had of an impending flooding disaster, it's clear that this was a complex, compound tragedy of a type that climate warming is making more frequent. Rainfall intensity in central Texas has been trending upward for decades, and this week's rains were enhanced by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which made landfall in northern Mexico last week. Barry's circulation pulled record amounts of atmospheric moisture up to central Texas from the near-record warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The mix of Barry's circulation and climate warming helped create conditions of record-high atmospheric moisture content over central Texas – in line with the trend towards increasing atmospheric moisture content globally as the world warms and the air can hold more water vapor.
