‘Multiple dead' in Texas as flash flooding threatens communities
Judge Rob Kelly, the chief elected official in the county, confirmed fatalities from the flooding and dozens of water rescues so far.
He said he was advised not to cite specific numbers and said authorities are still working to identify those whose lives were lost.
'Most of them, we don't know who they are,' Mr Kelly said during a news conference.
'One of them was completely naked, he didn't have any ID on him at all. We're trying to get the identity of these folks, but we don't have it yet.'
Officials conducted dozens of rescues, and the emergency response continued as an unknown number or people remained unaccounted for, Mr Kelly said.
A flood watch issued on Thursday afternoon estimated isolated amounts up to seven inches (17 centimetres) of rising water.
That shifted to a flood warning for at least 30,000 people overnight.
When asked about the suddenness of the flash flooding overnight, Mr Kelly said 'we do not have a warning system' and that 'we didn't know this flood was coming', even as local reporters pointed to the warnings and pushed him for answers about why more precautions were not taken.
'Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming,' he said. 'We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.'
Texas governor Greg Abbott said the state was providing resources to Hill Country communities dealing with the flooding, including in Kerrville, Ingram and Hunt.
'I urge Texans to heed guidance from state and local officials and monitor local forecasts to avoid driving into flooded areas,' Mr Abbott said in a statement.
The Guadalupe's river gauge at the unincorporated community of Hunt, where the river forks, recorded a 22 foot rise (6.7 metres) in just about two hours, according to Bob Fogarty, meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Austin/San Antonio office.
Mr Fogarty said the gauge failed after recording a level of 29 and a half feet (nine metres).
'We think the river's higher than that,' Mr Fogarty said. 'The gauge is completely underwater.
'This is the kind of thing that will catch you unaware. The water's moving so fast, you're not going to recognise how bad it is until it's on top of you.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Maps reveal the impact of deadly Texas floods
The National Weather Service has warned that the situation could get even worse, with thunderstorms and heavy rains of up to three inches potentially causing more flooding in the area. A flood watch has been issued for Central Texas that lasts until 8pm ET with dozens of counties in the path of the storm. Some areas could see rain that exceeds five inches which will 'quickly lead to flooding', the NWS said in an advisory. Meanwhile, officials have revealed just how bad the initial flooding was, with maps showing how far inland water from the Guadalupe River traveled. Collectively, flooding across multiple rivers created a flood footprint spanning over 150 miles of riverine corridors, with the Guadalupe's rapid rise - described as the worst since the 1987 flood - causing the most extensive damage. The Guadalupe River, San Gabriel River, San Saba River, Pedernales River, and Llano River all surged far beyond their banks, transforming the region's limestone terrain into a vast flood zone. Fueled by a mesoscale convective complex (a massive cluster of thunderstorms that dumps heavy rain over a wide area) and the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, five to 18 inches of rain fell in mere hours. This caused rivers to rise dramatically, with the Guadalupe River reaching a devastating 39 feet in under three hours. This river's floodwaters affected approximately 50 miles of its course, from its headwaters near Hunt through Kerrville, Ingram, and Comfort, extending downstream toward Center Point and beyond, where it merges with the San Antonio River. The San Gabriel River in Williamson County, particularly around Georgetown, flooded for about 20 miles of its length, submerging low-lying areas like Two Rivers and Waters Edge apartments, with floodwaters spreading into northern Travis County. The San Saba River, Pedernales River, and Llano River, feeding into the Colorado River were each affected for roughly 30 to 40 miles. Overall, the flood zone stretched far inland, covering an estimated 2,000 square miles across south-central Texas, with Kerr County bearing the brunt. The Guadalupe River's floodwaters spread up to five to seven miles inland from its banks in some areas, particularly around Kerrville, where entire neighborhoods, fields, and infrastructure were submerged. In Hunt, Camp Mystic, a Christian girls' summer camp, was a focal point of the devastation, with floodwaters sweeping away buildings and leaving 11 campers and a counselor missing. The inundation reached 10 miles north and south of the river's course in Kerr County, engulfing rural areas and camps like Waldemar. In Georgetown, the San Gabriel River's floodwaters extended two to three miles inland, submerging green spaces and apartment complexes. The San Saba, Pedernales, and Llano rivers created additional flood zones, each spreading three to five miles inland, affecting agricultural lands and small communities. Families with ties to Camp Mystic planned to unite at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in the wake of deadly flooding. Organizers of Monday night's event planned to pray, sing songs, and read verses that are traditionally recited at the camp. 'While the outpouring of love from everyone has been so appreciated and comforting, we want to make this a special time for Mystic girls and families to be able to be together,' the group said in a post. Experts warn there are several other states, including Florida, New York, and New Jersey, which are prone to deadly flash floods due to a combination of geography, weather patterns, soil type, and urban development. Climate scientists say warming temperatures are driving more intense and frequent rainfall events. Warmer air holds more moisture, which leads to heavier downpours and, in turn, greater risk of flash flooding, especially in regions like the southern US where the terrain and infrastructure are ill-equipped to handle rapid water surges. This could bring deadly flash floods to other US states, including Florida, which is barely above sea level in many areas, so rain has nowhere to drain. Much of Louisiana is swampy or below sea level, especially around New Orleans, making it a target. New Jersey is one of the most densely populated cities in the US, meaning there is less natural land to absorb rainwater.
NBC News
6 hours ago
- NBC News
Scrutiny over Texas flood alerts and conservative anger after Epstein memo release: Morning Rundown
A look at one Texas city's weather warning system, as questions swirl about the timing of flash flood warnings. Donald Trump will push back a critical tariff deadline. And conservative figures express anger over the FBI and DOJ's Epstein memo. Here's what to know today. In deadly Texas floods, one town had what some didn't: A wailing warning siren The death toll as a result of devastating floods in Central Texas rose to at least 104 people across six counties, officials said yesterday. The majority, 84, were killed in Kerr County, including 27 campers and counselors at the 99-year-old Camp Mystic. Seven people were killed in Travis County; four in Burnet County; six in Kendall County; and one in Tom Green County. Search and recovery efforts are still underway, though the likelihood of finding survivors is growing slimmer. This is Morning Rundown, a weekday newsletter to start your day. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. As the aftermath of the floods comes into clearer view, questions and criticisms have emerged about the timing of the weather alerts sent to people in the area. Some Texas officials have blamed the National Weather Service, arguing it didn't do a good enough job of forecasting rainfall and issuing timely flooding alerts. In Kerr County, a flood watch was issued Thursday afternoon, and an urgent flash flood warning was issued at 1:14 a.m. Friday morning. Downriver in the town of Comfort, a flash flood alert for Kendall County came at 7:24 a.m. Friday — and a wailing siren urging residents to flee provided a last-minute alarm for anyone who hadn't responded to previous warnings. There were zero fatalities in Comfort, according to Danny Morales, assistant fire chief of the city's volunteer fire department. It's impossible to know whether a siren system in Kerr County would have saved lives. The systems are meant to alert people who are outdoors, not in bed indoors, as many victims were. And many people in Kendall County were already awake and aware of the dangerous flooding when they were alerted of the threat to their area. But Tom Moser — a former Kerr County commissioner who began looking into a warning system for his area 10 years ago, after deadly floods in nearby Hays County — believes a system would have been valuable. Records show there were disagreements among officials about the need for a siren system, and the county didn't have the funding it needed. 'I don't know if it could have been 100% preventable,' Moser said of the current disaster's death toll. 'But it could have been improved.' More coverage of the Texas floods: Photos and maps show the severity of the flooding along the Guadalupe River. NBC News' Morgan Chesky, who grew up in Kerrville, wrote about what it's like returning home to cover the tragedy. His parents evacuated in the early hours of Friday morning, and their home is still standing, Chesky wrote, 'but we have friends who this has personally affected.' Read the full essay here. Community members, like 22-year-old Samuel Cummings, and volunteers from profit organizations have joined authorities in the search for survivors. Cummings, who grew up in Kerrville and swam the Guadalupe River as a kid, said the tragic sight of remnants from Camp Mystic — girls' Crocs, tennis shoes, volleyballs and water bottles — left him 'choked up.' Trump to push back tariff deadline but unloads new threats A pause on reciprocal tariffs that had been set to end this week will be extended to the end of the month, the White House said, after President Donald Trump pushed the deadline to Aug. 1. The announcement from press secretary Karoline Leavitt that Trump would sign an executive order came hours after the president published two letters addressed to Japan and South Korea, threatening them with 25% duties and higher ones for items deemed to have been transshipped through their countries. Later in the day, Trump posted letters threatening duties as much as 40% on goods from Laos and Myanmar, 30% on goods from South Africa and 25% on goods from Malaysia and Kazakhstan. However, Trump's ability to impose the tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act is under court review. The pushed-back deadline and threats represent a return to the back-and-forth, on-again, off-again state of affairs that has prevailed before and after Trump's April 2 speech announcing extreme import duties on dozens of countries. While some markets saw dips in light of Trump's threats, some Wall Street analysts are optimistic that this new round of uncertainty may not weigh as heavily on stocks this time around — though it could prove to be a setback for the Federal Reserve. Read the full story here. More politics news: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump at the White House. Both leaders complimented each other on their alliance in the conflict in Iran and struck an optimistic tone on a ceasefire deal in Gaza. Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman, who along with his wife was injured in a shooting spree that took the life of a fellow lawmaker, was released from intensive care. Both Republicans and Democrats bet Trump's megabill can help them win big in the 2026 midterms. Here's how. Conservative anger over Trump admin's latest Epstein memo A new two-page memo published by the FBI and Justice Department concluded after an 'exhaustive review' that there is no evidence of an 'incriminating 'client list'' or evidence that would lead to additional prosecutions in the case of convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein. The memo also concluded that Epstein died by suicide in his New York City jail cell in 2019 and that no evidence was found to suggest he had participated in blackmail. The findings closely mirror what news outlets have reported for years, but the findings have done little to quell conservative internet and media personalities who have reacted to the memo with skepticism and anger. Elon Musk, who has recently feuded with Donald Trump, reposted a post that suggested a larger government cover-up. Several conservative personalities echoed that idea, including Mike Benz, who worked in the State Department during Trump's first term, and said he believes there is a vast 'deep state' conspiracy. Another commentator said the memo is part of a 'shameful chapter' in U.S. history. Read the full story here. Read All About It A man was killed after an exchange of gunfire with Border Patrol agents in South Texas that also left an agency employee and two officers injured. The Army veteran accused of killing his three daughters in Washington state and disappearing into the wilderness may have been spotted in Idaho. The leader of an 'orgasmic meditation' business condemned what she believes is a double standard in how her case ended versus Sean Combs' case. Jasper Philipsen, a Tour de France sprint favorite, crashed out of the race just two days after taking first place on opening day. 'Love Island USA' contestant Cierra Orta left the villa after viewers uncovered old social media posts that contained a racial slur. Staff Pick: The rising cost of home construction When the Trump administration announced sweeping tariffs at the beginning of April, we wanted to better understand how these policies could affect readers' daily lives. After hearing concerns from home builders about the effects on their businesses, we decided to explore how the cost of building a new house could change due to tariffs. To get the numbers we needed for a representative sample, we designed a model house, determined every material required to build it and then used trade data to identify which countries the U.S. most relied on for each item. Our interactive visualization takes readers through the step-by-step construction of a house, showing how tariffs could add thousands to home prices at a time when the U.S. is already grappling with a severe housing shortage. Industry experts we spoke with explained that tariffs don't just add direct costs. They create downstream effects that force builders to pause projects and scramble for alternatives. As additional tariffs loom on the horizon, builders face mounting pressures to make decisions about materials and pricing. According to Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders, it's only a matter of time before consumers feel the effects. — Alex Ford, interactive visual designer NBC Select: Online Shopping, Simplified This week is stacked with deals. To start, Amazon Prime Day is officially here, and NBC Select has a roundup of the 33+ best deals. We also have a list of everything to shop for or skip during the four-day sale. And while we're at it, we dug into the history of Prime Day, and our editors rounded up their 100 favorite Amazon finds.
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
Did National Weather Service cuts lead to the Texas flood disaster? We don't know
Why exactly so many people drowned in the terrible Independence Day floods that swept through Texas's Hill Country will probably have multiple explanations that take a while to obtain. But it's 2025, and people want answers immediately, and lots of people seized on stories blaming the National Weather Service (NWS). There were two opposing reasons to blame this vital government service. For local and state authorities, blaming a branch of the federal government was a way of avoiding culpability themselves. And for a whole lot of people who deplore the Trump/Doge cuts to federal services, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, the idea that the NWS failed served to underscore how destructive those cuts are. Many of them found confirmation in a New York Times story that ran with the sub-headline: Some experts say staff shortages might have complicated forecasters' ability to coordinate responses with local emergency management officials. Might have is not did. Complicated is not failed. It's a speculative piece easily mistaken for a report, and its opening sentence is: 'Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.' A casual reader could come away thinking that staffing shortages had had consequences. But if you give the airily innuendo-packed sentence more attention, you might want to ask who exactly the anonymous experts were and whether there's an answer to their questions. Did it actually make it harder, and did they actually manage to do this thing even though it was harder, or not? Did they coordinate with local emergency managers? The piece continues: 'The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said,' and 'suggested' sounds like we're getting an interpretation of what these anonymous sources think might have happened or been likely to happen, rather than what actually did. Suggestions are not facts. Likelihoods are not actualities. Eventually we get to a named source: 'A spokeswoman for the National Weather Service, Erica Grow Cei, did not answer questions from The New York Times about the Texas vacancies, including how long those positions had been open and whether those vacancies had contributed to the damage caused by the flooding.' In other words, there's no answer to the suggestions and questions and intimations. Nevertheless, a lot of readers gathered the impression that this was not speculation aired by unnamed experts but confirmation that the NWS had failed. One prominent public figure with three quarters of a million BlueSky followers shared the New York Times piece with this note: 'The United States government is no longer able to protect us from real hazards, such as flash floods, because it's shifting funds to fake hazards, such as a non-existent immigrant crime wave.' If you read down a couple of dozen paragraphs in this New York Times piece, you get to the former NWS director of Congressional Affairs saying 'that the local Weather Service offices appeared to have sent out the correct warnings. He said the challenge was getting people to receive those warnings, and then take action.' Nevertheless, the idea the NWS failed became so widespread that Wired magazine published a report specifically to counter it: 'Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.' They link to the pundit with almost a million followers, who had posted on Twitter: 'Now TX officials are blaming a faulty forecast by NWS for the deadly impact of a storm.' Those officials are, but why would we believe them? Wired continues: 'But meteorologists who spoke to Wired say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm.' With that, we're onto another piece of the picture: the difference between accurately predicting a risk and knowing exactly how severe it will be. Climate change, which some reports mentioned and others did not, is both a contributing factor for specific weather disasters and a reason why the future will not necessarily look like the past. For both fires and floods, the old rules about how fast they'll move and how big they'll get have expired. Hotter air holds more moisture, and that can and does lead to more torrential downpours and worse flooding. On the other hand, as local newspaper the Kerrville Daily Times reported, Kerr county has a history of extremely heavy rainfall leading to rapid river rise and devastating floods. The Washington Post had a better assessment of what went right and what went wrong: 'But even as weather forecasts began to hint at the potential for heavy rain on Thursday, the response exposed a disconnect: few, including local authorities, prepared for anything but their normal Fourth of July. When the precipitation intensified in the early morning hours Friday, many people failed to receive or respond to flood warnings at riverside campsites and cabins that were known to be in the floodplain.' The county, in this report, did not send its first cell-phone alert until Sunday, while 'most cellphone alerts were coming from the National Weather Service's Austin/San Antonio station. But some alerts about life-threatening flooding didn't come until the predawn hours, and to areas where cellular reception may have been spotty.' It seems like the National Weather Service did its duty despite the cuts, but more are coming. Fossil Free Memo reports: 'Just days before the flood, Texas Senator Ted Cruz helped pass the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a sweeping fossil fuel giveaway that also slashed $200 million from Noaa's weather forecasting and public alert programs. The money was meant to improve early warnings for exactly the kind of fast-moving, deadly flooding that just hit his own state. The cuts weren't in the House version. Cruz added them in the Senate, behind closed doors, as chair of the committee that oversees Noaa.' The impact of cuts to vital services is going to degrade everyday life and add to the dangers we face, and as far as politicians like Ted Cruz are concerned, that's the plan. It will be important to connect cause and effect, when there is a connection. The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one's politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits. But knowing we don't know, knowing the answers are not yet in, or there are multiple causes, being careful even with the sources that tell us what we want to hear: all this equipment to survive the information onslaughts of this moment. We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – both the practical information about climate catastrophes and weather disasters and the journalism that reports on it. Both the weather and the news require vigilance. Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist
