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At least 27 people have died and more than 20 children are missing after a catastrophic flash flood in Texas. 

In the early hours of Friday, the Guadalupe River, which flows through the Hill Country in central south Texas, surged by 26 feet (8 meters) within a mere 45 minutes, as reported by officials. This sudden rise caused the river to overflow, resulting in damage to roads and properties.

Rescue teams continued their efforts on Saturday to locate over 20 children who went missing from a summer camp they attended. The flooding incident coincides with Independence Day celebrations across the United States.

“Our rescue teams have been working tirelessly through the night and will persist until all our residents are accounted for,” the City of Kerrville Police Department shared on Facebook on Saturday.

The search and rescue operations have involved helicopters, drones, boats and hundreds of personnel, officials said, but have been hampered by limited access to some areas, especially where roads have been washed away. 

President Donald Trump said the flooding and deaths were “terrible” and “shocking” as he pledged federal support.

Officials in Kerr County, north-west of San Antonio, said that the extreme rainfall had not been forecast, adding that there was no warning system in place. “We had no reason to believe this was going to be anything like what’s happened here,” said Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the top local elected official. 

But the National Weather Service said it had issued a flood watch for the area on Thursday, with the first flash flood warning for Kerr County in the early hours of Friday morning. On Saturday it warned that there remained a risk of more flash flooding in the area. 

Hannah Cloke, a professor of hydrology at the University of Reading in the UK, said the downpour “seems to have been well forecasted by multiple forecasters around the world, several hours in advance”. 

“It is not good enough for authorities to say they were not aware that floods were coming. Warnings were available but the message just didn’t get through,” she said.

The Trump administration has axed hundreds of jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Weather Service with critics arguing that the moves would impair the country’s ability to produce life-saving forecasts.

Scientists have warned that climate change is increasing the risk of devastating storms and intense rainfall because warmer air holds more moisture. A flash flood — a rapid inundation of low-lying areas — killed more than 200 people in Valencia in Spain last year.

Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical & climate hazards at University College London, said the “tragic events in Texas are exactly what we would expect in our hotter, climate-changed world”.

“There has been an explosion in extreme weather in recent years, including more devastating flash floods caused by slow-moving, wetter, storms, that dump exceptional amounts of rain over small areas across a short time,” he said.