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Main Highlights
- Heavy rains hit a part of Texas last Friday, causing fatal flooding.
- The number of fatalities has exceeded 100, including minors.
- Concerns have been voiced regarding the county’s emergency response and readiness.
The casualty count from a flash flood that devastated a Texas area has climbed to 109, with numerous children among the victims, as rescue crews sift through mud-covered wreckage searching for many missing individuals.
As reported by Texas governor Gregg Abbott on Wednesday AEST, officials were looking for over 180 individuals still unaccounted for, four days following one of the most lethal US flood incidents in recent history.
Most deaths and ongoing searches were focused in Kerr County and its county seat, Kerrville, a town of 25,000 that was turned into a catastrophe zone when deluges hit the area early on Friday, inundating the Guadalupe River basin.
Recoveries in Kerr County included 94 flood victims, roughly a third of whom were children, Abbott stated at a news briefing after surveying the site by air.
Kerr County’s fatalities involved 27 campers and counselors from Camp Mystic, a historic all-girls Christian summer camp near the town of Hunt on the Guadalupe’s banks. The camp leader was also among the deceased.
Five girls and a camp counselor continue to be missing, Abbott mentioned, alongside another child not linked to the camp.
Twenty-seven individuals from Camp Mystic, a traditional all-girls Christian retreat, were among those lost. Source: AAP / AP / Eli Hartman
Fifteen other flood-related fatalities had been confirmed across a swathe of Texas Hill Country known as “flash flood alley”, the governor said, bringing the overall tally of lives lost to 109.
Reports from local sheriffs’ and media have put the number of flood deaths outside Kerr County at 22.
But authorities have said they were bracing for the death toll to climb as flood waters recede and the search for more victims gains momentum.
Law enforcement agencies have compiled a list of 161 people “known to be missing” in Kerr County alone, Abbott said. The roster was checked against those who might be out of touch with loved ones or neighbours because they were away on holiday or out of town, according to the governor.
He said another 12 people were missing elsewhere across the flood zone as a whole, a sprawling area northwest of San Antonio.
Hindered by intermittent thunderstorms and showers, rescue teams from federal agencies, neighbouring states and Mexico have joined local efforts to search for missing victims, though hopes of finding more survivors faded as time passed. The last 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.”
In less than an hour before dawn last Friday, over a foot of rain inundated the area, sending a torrent rushing down the Guadalupe that claimed numerous lives and left heaps of debris, uprooted trees, and overturned cars.
Questions about flood warnings
Local, state and federal emergency officials have faced days of questions about whether they could have alerted people in flood-prone areas sooner.
State emergency management officials had warned on Thursday, on the eve of the disaster, that parts of central Texas faced the possibility of flash floods based on National Weather Service forecasts.
But twice as much rain as predicted ended up falling over two branches of the Guadalupe just upstream of the fork where they converge, sending all of that water racing into the single river channel where it slices through Kerrville, city manager Dalton Rice said.
Rice has said the outcome was unforeseen and unfolded in a matter of two hours, leaving too little time to conduct a precautionary mass evacuation without the risk of placing more people in harm’s way.
Scientists have said extreme flood events are growing more common as climate change creates warmer, wetter weather patterns in Texas and other parts of the country.
US President Donald Trump 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.
