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Los Angeles Times
10-07-2025
- Climate
- Los Angeles Times
Hundreds gather at high school stadium to honor the many lost to deadly Texas floods
KERRVILLE, Texas — Hundreds prayed, wept and held one another at a Texas prayer service for the 120 people who died in catastrophic flash floods and the many more reported missing. While search crews and volunteers pushed ahead with recovering those unaccounted for, communities in the devastated Hill Country region are just beginning to grieve those lost over the July Fourth holiday. Mourners gathered Wednesday night at Tivy High School's stadium, where they had celebrated victories and suffered losses on the field, said Ricky Pruitt, of the Kerrville Church of Christ. 'Tonight is very different than all of those nights,' he said. Among those who died was the school's soccer coach. Many wore blue shirts with the school's slogan, 'Tivy Fight Never Die,' and green ribbons for Camp Mystic, the century-old all-girls Christian summer camp where at least 27 campers and counselors died. Officials said five campers and one counselor have still not been found. More than 170 people are believed to be missing across central Texas, most in Kerr County, where nearly 100 victims have been recovered. Authorities say they have carefully gone over the list of those unaccounted for but those numbers are often tough to pin down in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Parents of children who were at the many summer camps in Hill Country have credited the teenage counselors with ushering campers to safety and helping keeping them calm during the chaos. The catastrophe is the deadliest inland flooding in the U.S. since 1976, when Colorado's Big Thompson Canyon flooded, killing 144 people, said Bob Henson, a meteorologist with Yale Climate Connections. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called on state lawmakers to approve funding for new warning systems and emergency communications in flood prone areas when the Legislature meets later this month. Abbott also asked for financial relief for the response and recovery efforts. 'We must ensure better preparation for such events in the future,' he said in a statement Wednesday. Public officials in the area have come under repeated criticism amid questions about the timeline of what happened and why widespread warnings were not sounded and more preparations were not made. Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha has said those questions will be answered after the victims are recovered. Local leaders have talked for years about the need for a flood warning system, but concerns about costs and noise led to missed opportunities to put up sirens. President Donald Trump has pledged to provide whatever relief Texas needs to recover and is planning to visit the state Friday. Polls taken before the floods show Americans largely believe the federal government should play a major role in preparing for and responding to natural disasters. Catastrophic flooding is a growing worry. On Tuesday, a deluge in New Mexico triggered flash floods that killed three people. After the ceremony in Kerrville on Wednesday, children and families mingled on the field, and some students formed prayer circles. Counselors and therapists were also on hand. Andrew Brown, who wanted to pay tribute to the school's soccer coach, said he believes a warning system with sirens would be helpful. 'I'm sure there are things that could have been different, and I'm sure there will be going forward,' he said. David Garza drove more than an hour to support loved ones affected by the floods. 'I'm from here, and I was here in the '78 flood and the '87 flood,' Garza said. 'I just wanted to be a part of this.' Lathan, Murphy, and Golden write for the Associated Press. AP writers John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio; Jim Vertuno in Austin, and John Hanna in Topeka, Kan., contributed to this report.
Boston Globe
09-07-2025
- Climate
- Boston Globe
Harrowing stories of rescue emerge from Texas floods as crews search for more than 160 reported missing
More than 160 people are still believed to be missing, and at least 118 have died in the floods that laid waste to the Hill Country region of Texas. The large number of missing suggests that the full extent of the catastrophe is still unclear five days after the disaster. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The floods are now the deadliest from inland flooding in the United States since 1976, when Colorado's Big Thompson Canyon flooded, killing 144 people, said Bob Henson, a meteorologist with Yale Climate Connections. Advertisement Crews used backhoes and their bare hands Wednesday to dig through piles of debris that stretched for miles along the Guadalupe River in the search for the missing. 'We will not stop until every missing person is accounted for,' Governor Greg Abbott said Tuesday. 'Know this also: There very likely could be more added to that list.' Public officials in the area have come under repeated criticism amid questions about the timeline of what happened and why widespread warnings were not sounded and more preparations were not made. Advertisement 'Those questions are going to be answered,' Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said. 'I believe those questions need to be answered, to the families of the loved ones, to the public.' But he said the priority for now is recovering victims. 'We're not running. We're not going to hide from anything,' the sheriff said. Local leaders have talked for years about the need for a flood warning system, but concerns about costs and noise led to missed opportunities to put up sirens. Raymond Howard, a city council member in Ingram, said it was 'unfathomable' that county officials did not act. 'This is lives. This is families,' he said. 'This is heartbreaking.' A day earlier, the governor announced that about 160 people have been reported missing in Kerr County, where searchers already have found more than 90 bodies. Officials have been seeking more information about those who were in the Hill Country, a popular tourist destination, during the holiday weekend but did not register at a camp or a hotel and may have been in the area without many people knowing, Abbott said. The riverbanks and hills of Kerr County are filled with vacation cabins, youth camps, and campgrounds, including Camp Mystic, the century-old all-girls Christian summer camp where at least 27 campers and counselors died. Officials said five campers and one counselor have still not been found. Just two days before the flooding, Texas inspectors signed off on the camp's emergency planning. But five years of inspection reports released to the Associated Press did not provide any details about how campers would be evacuated. Advertisement With almost no hope of finding anyone alive, search crews and volunteers say they are focused on bringing the families of the missing some closure. Crews fanned out in airboats, helicopters, and on horseback. They used excavators and their hands, going through layer by layer, with search dogs sniffing for any sign of buried bodies. They looked in trees and in the mounds below their feet. They searched inside crumpled pickup trucks and cars, painting them with a large X, much like those marked on homes after a hurricane. More than 2,000 volunteers have offered to lend a hand in Kerr County alone, the sheriff said. How long the search will continue was impossible to predict given the number of people unaccounted for and the miles to cover. Shannon Ament wore knee-high rubber boots and black gloves as she rummaged through debris in front of her rental property in Kerr County. A high school soccer coach is one of the many people she knows who are still missing. 'We need support. I'm not going to say thoughts and prayers because I'm sick of that,' she said. 'We don't need to be blamed for who voted for who. This was a freak of nature — a freak event.' President Trump has pledged to provide whatever relief Texas needs to recover. He plans to visit the state Friday.
Yahoo
09-07-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Weather warnings gave officials a 3 hour, 21 minute window to save lives in Kerr County. What happened then remains unclear.
Three hours and 21 minutes. That's how much time passed from when the National Weather Service sent out its first flash flood warning for part of Kerr County to when the first flooding reports came in from low-lying water crossings. The weather service says that first warning triggered one of many automatic alerts to cell phones and weather radios, telling people in the area of the danger. But if any local officials got those warnings, and if so, whether they activated in any meaningful way in that 3 hours and 21 minutes remains a black box. County officials have not responded to requests for interviews and have not said at public press conferences what efforts they took when the flooding threat turned from possible to imminent in the middle of the night. At those press conferences, Kerrville's city manager has repeatedly said they are focused on search and rescue, rather than answer questions about their response. "We knew there was a flash flood warning,' Gov. Greg Abbott said at a press conference on Tuesday. 'No one would know that would be a 30-foot-high tsunami-ball of water." NWS officials said they communicated directly with local officials during the night of the floods, but did not specify when. In some cases, they said, calls went to voicemail. Kerrville's mayor said he was unaware of the flooding until around 5:30 a.m., more than four hours after that first warning, when the city manager called and woke him up. Warnings didn't go up on county Facebook pages until around the same time — when the Guadalupe River had already risen rapidly and pushed out of its banks around Hunt and was making its way toward the county seat of Kerrville. Weather experts say that — from the outside at least — weather service forecasters appear to have done most everything right as the river rose with astonishing speed, blew past its previous record level and blasted through summer camps, RV parks, homes and campgrounds. It's the kind of situation that meteorologists warn trainees about, the sort of nightmare scenario some refer to as a silent killer. A holiday weekend that brings out-of-town visitors to the area known as 'Flash Flood Alley.' The worst of the danger arrived in the dark, while people slept. The river claimed more than 90 lives in Kerr County, where many people were still missing more than four days later. The weather service on Thursday afternoon put out a flood watch, which is a specific threat designation that means the conditions are present for a flood to happen. 'That far ahead of an event like this, that's the most you can do,' said Bob Henson, a meteorologist and journalist with Yale Climate Connections. And the agency issued increasingly urgent warnings through the night, which should have given most people enough time to escape death if they received and understood them, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. Questions remain about whether people along the river had cell service to get the push alerts, had alerts enabled on their phones, or were even awake to heed them. Had they been warned of the coming flood, many people could have walked in the rainy darkness to higher ground. 'This really does appear to be a case where had there been even a modest acknowledgement of the level of danger that was predicted by the weather service, I don't think much of the scope of loss of life would have happened,' Swain said in a public video call Monday. Emergency officials across Central Texas had reasons to pay attention to the skies well before the deadly flooding occurred and the July 4 holiday weekend got into full swing. Federal forecasters issued a flood watch for a swath of the state at 1:18 p.m. Thursday, including for Kerr County, where at least 30 children would die. Nineteen other people have been confirmed dead in other counties from the widespread floods as of late Tuesday. A flood watch is intended to indicate to local emergency officials and others that they should be on the lookout, weather experts said. Forecasts on Thursday didn't say exactly where the worst rain might fall and how much — because that's very difficult to predict so far ahead, meteorologists said. Where exactly the rain falls can make a big difference in river forecasting. 'I look at flash flood events like this very similarly to tornadoes,' said Alan Gerard, a retired NOAA meteorologist and current CEO of Balanced Weather. 'We can tell you the conditions are favorable … but we can't tell you exactly how strong the tornado is going to be and whether or not it's going to hit your house.' Kerr County is part of the Texas Hill Country, where the limestone hills lack deep layers of soil to absorb water. Rivers can rise shockingly fast. Deadly flood events have happened there repeatedly in the past. The Texas Division of Emergency Management had activated rescue teams and bumped up its readiness level Thursday to bring more help on board. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the regional director for TDEM personally called local officials to discuss the brewing storm. A state rescue task force, military vehicles and aircraft were stationed in the region, mostly in San Antonio, TDEM Chief Nim Kidd said during a press conference Friday night. But whether Kerr County officials got a call or took any particular action after the July 3 flood watch went out is unclear. At a news conference on Friday as the death toll rose, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said, 'We didn't know this flood was coming.' Neither Kelly, the county sheriff nor the emergency management coordinator responded to requests for interviews. Part of the problem could be alert fatigue, especially in an area known for frequent flooding. People often receive multiple flood watches that don't result in actual flooding, said Avantika Gori, an assistant professor of civil & environmental engineering at Rice University and flood risk expert. This can lead to complacency, with people thinking, 'It's just another one of those things,' she said. They may also not understand the difference between a watch and warning, Gori said. Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring, 63, who grew up in the city, recalled seeing reports Thursday night of a chance of rain around the time of the July 4 kids' bike parade the next day. A friend warned him heavy rain was possible across a large area, but he didn't feel worried. 'I went outside and looked at the clouds and thought someone is going to get rain, but it's not going to be us,' he said. He said thunder woke him around midnight, and he was glad to see some rain falling. The Hill Country was in a significant drought. More specific warnings, which indicate flooding is occurring or imminent, came later in the night as the forecast developed and data poured in. Extra people were on duty at the weather service office in New Braunfels, said Erica Cei, a weather service spokesperson. At 1:14 a.m., the National Weather Service pushed out its first flash flood warning for central Kerr County, saying that data indicated life-threatening flash flooding was occurring or would begin soon. That message automatically triggered alerts to radios and cell phones, Cei said. At that point, the river had barely started to rise. The river was still within its banks in most places, and the incongruity between the warning and what people saw on the ground could potentially have caused people not to take action, Erik Nielsen, an instructional assistant professor at Texas A&M University, said in an email. It's just one of many challenges of issuing effective warnings that are hard to overcome, he said. People like Valerie Peters, who was staying at a Kerrville RV campsite called Jellystone Park, woke to the rainfall at some point and said she didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. She said she looked at the emergency notifications, shut the sound off and she went back to bed. She had been looking forward to a weekend of painting, karaoke and cornhole tournaments with her family. Luckily, her campsite avoided serious damage. 'We could have died,' Peters said. 'We had no idea how serious this rain was.' For officials in the early morning hours, there was still time to act as the rain pounded. At 4:03 a.m., two hours and 49 minutes after their initial flood warning, federal forecasters warned that the rain had created a flash flood emergency for south-central Kerr County. Weather forecasters only use that term in what the agency says are 'exceedingly rare' cases to indicate that lives are very much at risk. 'This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!' the warning said. The Guadalupe River was rising precipitously. In the nearly three hours since the first warning went out, it had risen 14.3 feet, according to the river level gauge near Hunt, upriver from Kerrville. It would rise another 15.5 feet, according to the data, before the gauge broke. At 4:35 a.m., three hours and 21 minutes after the first warning, the weather service office started to get reports from the Kerr County sheriff's office of low-level flooding, Cei said. The river was still rising. Forecasters pushed out a second flash flood emergency alert at 5:34 a.m., now for east central Kerr County, saying that 'a large and deadly flood wave' was headed down the Guadalupe River. Again, they urged people to get to higher ground immediately. They described the threat of damage as catastrophic. That was about the time the Kerr County Sheriff's Office took to Facebook to warn 'DANGEROUS FLOODING NOW.' On its Facebook page, Kerr County also posted a warning around then that the river was flooding. Kerrville's city manager — who told reporters that he'd been jogging near the river at 3:30 a.m. and saw no signs of flooding — woke the mayor with a phone call around 5:30 a.m. and told him the downtown park where a lot of the July 4th events were planned was under water. Herring said he threw on some clothes and went downtown. He got an alert on his phone from the CodeRED system the county uses at 6 a.m., he said, indicating a flash flood alert or 'something to that effect.' Residents can enroll in the system to get alerts. He said it was the only weather alert he got that morning. Communicating these developing threats as forecasts become more clear is what meteorologists call a 'last mile' problem — and it's long plagued the field. Even as weather service forecasters are issuing warnings, they might have no idea who's listening or monitoring the situation from the other side. 'The big question marks are, who was the National Weather Service able to reach in person and who was able to monitor the automated warnings that went out through cell phones, through email blasts and so forth at 1, 2, 3, 4 a.m.,' said Henson, the meteorologist with Yale Climate Connections. 'And that just comes down to county, local, and even to individual entities like campgrounds.' At National Weather Service weather forecast offices, it falls to the warning coordination meteorologist — in this case Paul Yura, who retired from a decades-long career in April, a few years earlier than he planned — to build relationships with local community members to prepare for events such as this. The White House on Monday defended the forecasting agency in the face of questions about whether nationwide staffing cuts had impacted their work. Two of Mayor Herring's close friends — Jane Ragsdale, director of the Heart O' The Hills camp and Dick Eastland, one of the owners of Camp Mystic — died in the flooding and their deaths have hit him hard. He felt sure both would have checked the weather. 'I wish to God there had been some way to warn them,' he said. Disclosure: Facebook, Rice University and Texas A&M University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Nahar Net
09-07-2025
- Climate
- Nahar Net
More than 160 people still missing after deadly Texas floods
by Naharnet Newsdesk 09 July 2025, 14:32 More than 160 people are still believed to be missing in Texas days after flash floods killed over 100 people during the July Fourth weekend, the state's governor said Tuesday. The huge jump in the number unaccounted for — roughly three times higher than previously said — came after authorities set up a hotline for families to call. Those reported missing are in Kerr County, where most of the victims have been recovered so far, Gov. Greg Abbott said. Many were likely visiting or staying in the state's Hill Country during the holiday but did not register at a camp or hotel, he said during a news conference. The county's lowlands along the Guadalupe River are filled with youth camps and campgrounds, including Camp Mystic, the century-old all-girls Christian summer camp where at least 27 campers and counselors died. Officials said Tuesday that five campers and one counselor have still not been found. Search-and-rescue teams are using heavy equipment to untangle and peel away layers of trees, unearth large rocks in riverbanks and move massive piles of debris that stretch for miles in the search for the missing people. Crews in airboats, helicopters and on horseback along with hundreds of volunteers are part of one of the largest search operations in Texas history. The flash flood is the deadliest from inland flooding in the U.S. since Colorado's Big Thompson Canyon flood on July 31, 1976, killed 144 people, said Bob Henson, a meteorologist with Yale Climate Connections. That flood surged through a narrow canyon packed with people on a holiday weekend, Colorado's centennial celebration. Public officials in charge of locating the victims are facing intensifying questions about who was in charge of monitoring the weather and warning that floodwaters were barreling toward camps and homes. The Republican governor, who took a helicopter tour of the disaster zone, dismissed a question about who was to blame for the deaths, saying, "That's the word choice of losers." "Every football team makes mistakes," he said. "The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who's to blame. The championship teams are the ones who say, 'Don't worry about it, man, we got this. We're going to make sure that we go score again and we're going to win this game.' The way winners talk is not to point fingers." Abbott promised that the search for victims will not stop until everyone is found. He also said President Donald Trump has pledged to provide whatever relief Texas needs to recover. Trump plans to visit the state Friday. Scenes of devastation at Camp Mystic Outside the cabins at Camp Mystic where the girls had slept, mud-splattered blankets and pillows were scattered on a grassy hill that slopes toward the river. Also in the debris were pink, purple and blue luggage decorated with stickers. Among those who died at the camp were a second grader who loved pink sparkles and bows, a 19-year-old counselor who enjoyed mentoring young girls and the camp's 75-year-old director. The flash floods erupted before daybreak Friday after massive rains sent water speeding down hills into the Guadalupe River, causing it to rise 26 feet (8 meters) in less than an hour. The wall of water overwhelmed people in cabins, tents and trailers along the river's edge. Some survivors were found clinging to trees. Some campers had to swim out of cabin windows to safety while others held onto a rope as they made their way to higher ground. Time-lapse videos showed how floodwaters covered roads in a matter of minutes. Although it's difficult to attribute a single weather event to climate change, experts say a warming atmosphere and oceans make catastrophic storms more likely. Where were the warnings? Questions mounted about what, if any, actions local officials took to warn campers and residents who were spending the July Fourth weekend in the scenic area long known to locals as "flash flood alley." Leaders in Kerr county, where searchers have found about 90 bodies, said their first priority is recovering victims, not reviewing what happened in the hours before the flash floods. "Right now, this team up here is focused on bringing people home," Lt. Col. Ben Baker of the Texas Game Wardens, said during a sometimes tense news conference. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county's chief elected official, said in the hours after the devastation that the county does not have a warning system. Generations of families in the Hill Country have known the dangers. A 1987 flood forced the evacuation of a youth camp in the town of Comfort and swamped buses and vans. Ten teenagers were killed. Local leaders have talked for years about the need for a warning system. Kerr County sought a nearly $1 million grant eight years ago for such a system, but the request was turned down by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Local residents balked at footing the bill themselves, Kelly said. Recovery and cleanup goes on Four days have passed since anyone was found alive in the aftermath of the floods in Kerr County, officials said Tuesday. The bodies of 30 children were among those that have been recovered in the county, which is home to Camp Mystic and several other summer camps, the sheriff said. The devastation spread across several hundred miles in central Texas all the way to just outside the capital of Austin. Aidan Duncan escaped just in time after hearing the muffled blare of a megaphone urging residents to evacuate Riverside RV Park in the Hill Country town of Ingram. All his belongings — a mattress, sports cards, his pet parakeet's bird cage — now sit caked in mud in front of his home. "What's going on right now, it hurts," the 17-year-old said. "I literally cried so hard." Along the banks of the Guadalupe, 91-year-old Charles Hanson, a resident at a senior living center, was sweeping up wood and piling pieces of concrete and stone, remnants from a playground structure. He wanted to help clean up on behalf of his neighbors who can't get out. "We'll make do with the best we got," he said.
New Indian Express
09-07-2025
- Climate
- New Indian Express
More than 160 people are still missing after deadly Texas floods, governor says
HUNT, Texas: More than 160 people are still believed to be missing in Texas days after flash floods killed over 100 people during the July Fourth weekend, the state's governor said Tuesday. The huge jump in the number unaccounted for — roughly three times higher than previously said — came after authorities set up a hotline for families to call. Those reported missing are in Kerr County, where most of the victims have been recovered so far, Gov. Greg Abbott said. Many were likely visiting or staying in the state's Hill Country during the holiday but did not register at a camp or hotel, he said during a news conference. The county's lowlands along the Guadalupe River are filled with youth camps and campgrounds, including Camp Mystic, the century-old all-girls Christian summer camp where at least 27 campers and counselors died. Officials said Tuesday that five campers and one counselor have still not been found. Search-and-rescue teams are using heavy equipment to untangle and peel away layers of trees, unearth large rocks in riverbanks and move massive piles of debris that stretch for miles in the search for the missing people. Crews in airboats, helicopters and on horseback along with hundreds of volunteers are part of one of the largest search operations in Texas history. The flash flood is the deadliest from inland flooding in the U.S. since Colorado's Big Thompson Canyon flood on July 31, 1976, killed 144 people, said Bob Henson, a meteorologist with Yale Climate Connections. That flood surged through a narrow canyon packed with people on a holiday weekend, Colorado's centennial celebration.
