Death toll from Texas flash floods tops 100, with scores still missing

Straits Times

5 hours ago

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KERRVILLE - The death toll from the July Fourth flash flood that ravaged a swath of central Texas Hill Country rose on Tuesday to at least 109, many of them children, as search teams pressed on through mounds of mud-encrusted debris for scores of people still missing.
The bulk of fatalities and the search for additional victims were concentrated in Kerr County and the county seat of Kerrville, a town of 25,000 residents transformed into a disaster zone when torrential rains struck the region early last Friday, unleashing deadly flooding along the Guadalupe River.
The bodies of 94 flood victims, more than a third of them children, have been recovered in Kerr County alone as of Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said at a late-afternoon news conference after touring the area by air.
He said 161 other people were known to be missing in the flood zone.
The Kerr County dead included 27 campers and counselors from Camp Mystic, a nearly century-old all-girls Christian summer retreat on the banks of the Guadalupe near the town of Hunt. The camp director also perished.
Five girls and a camp counselor were still unaccounted for on Tuesday, Abbott said, along with another child not associated with the camp.
As of midday, 15 other flood-related fatalities had been confirmed across a swath of Texas Hill Country known as "flash flood alley," the governor said, bringing the overall death toll from the disaster to 109. Reports from local sheriffs' and media have put the number of flood deaths outside Kerr County at 22.
Hindered by continuing intermittent thunderstorms and showers, rescue teams from federal agencies, neighboring states and Mexico have joined local efforts to search for missing victims, though hopes of finding more survivors faded as time passed.
The last flood victim found alive in Kerr County was on Friday.
"The work is extremely treacherous, time-consuming," Lieutenant Colonel Ben Baker of the Texas Game Wardens said at a press conference. "It's dirty work. The water is still there."
More than a foot of rain fell in the region in less than an hour before dawn last Friday, sending a wall of water cascading down the Guadalupe River basin that killed dozens of people and left behind mangled piles of debris, uprooted trees and vehicles.
Local, state and federal emergency officials have faced days of angry questions about whether they could have warned people in flood-prone areas sooner.
At an earlier news briefing on Tuesday, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha rebuffed questions about the county's emergency management operations and preparedness and declined to say who in the county was ultimately in charge of monitoring weather alerts and issuing a flood warning or evacuation orders.
He said his office first started receiving emergency 911 calls between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. on Friday, several hours after the local National Weather Service station issued a flash-flood alert. "We're in the process of trying to put (together) a timeline," Leitha said.
Beyond the fatalities in hardest-hit Kerr County, the death toll included seven in Travis County, seven in Kendall County, five in Burnett County, two in Williamson County and one in Tom Green County.
U.S. President Donald Trump, a Republican, plans to visit the devastated region this week, a spokesperson said. Democrats in Washington have called for an official investigation into whether the Trump administration's job cuts at the National Weather Service affected the agency's response to the floods. REUTERS