Texas flood rescue teams continue to search for scores of missing people as death toll climbs
The search for more than 170 people still missing after flash floods devastated Central Texas stretched into a seventh day on Thursday, as the death toll continued to rise.
At least 121 people have been confirmed dead, according to local law enforcement and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Ongoing search operations were underway to find anyone lost in the debris after the catastrophic weekend storm, which caused the Guadalupe River to swell rapidly to near-unprecedented levels.
There are 161 people known to be missing in Kerr County alone, officials said. The county, located in the flood-prone Texas Hill Country west of Austin, the state capital, bore the brunt of the disaster. At least 10 more people are missing in other parts of the state.
President Trump signed a federal disaster declaration at Abbott's request, allowing the to deploy its own teams to support local rescue and recovery efforts as those operations press on. More storms after the initial flooding made efforts especially challenging, officials said.
Camp Mystic tragedy
A large majority of the flooding deaths occurred in Kerr County, where officials have confirmed at least 96 people died.
At Camp Mystic, a girls' summer camp with cabins along the river in a rural part of Kerr County near Hunt, at least 27 campers and counselors died in what the camp described as "catastrophic flooding." Some survivors said they woke up to water rushing through the windows.
Leitha said Wednesday that crews continued to search for five missing campers and one counselor from Camp Mystic.
One child not associated with the camp is also missing, Abbott said Tuesday.
Hundreds of rescuers, including teams from local, state and federal agencies, as well as volunteers, are involved in the search, Texas Game Warden Ben Baker said Tuesday during a news conference.
"It's very tragic whenever you see human life. But to see a child in that loss of life, is extremely tragic," Baker told a reporter who had asked about the impacts on rescuers' mental health.
Abbott said Tuesday he received a text message from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that said the Department of Health and Human Services is set to declare a public health emergency for the Texas Hill Country flash floods.
"This will make it easier for health care and mental health providers from out of state to help both by traveling to the area and by telemedicine," Abbott said the message read.
26 feet of water rose from Guadalupe River
Friday was the last time a missing person was found alive in Kerr County, according to authorities. But search crews continued to survey miles of the Guadalupe River in the hope of locating others who may have been lost in the floods that inundated Kerr County, Baker told reporters.
The river runs for approximately 230 miles through a region that sits between Austin and San Antonio, starting in Kerr County and ending along the Gulf Coast. It's nicknamed "flash flood alley" because the terrain makes it vulnerable to inundation.
Officials in five other Texas counties have also confirmed deaths in the flooding: Travis County, which includes Austin, as well as Burnet, Kendall, Williamson and Tom Green County.
During the early hours of Friday morning, the Guadalupe River in Hunt, in Kerr County, rose to about 26 feet — roughly the height of a two-story building — over the course of just 45 minutes, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said during a news conference.
Camp Mystic was "horrendously ravaged," Abbott later wrote in a social media post after visiting the site. About 650 people were staying there, including around 550 children, according to inspection records released by the Texas Department of State Health Services, which were dated July 2 — just two days before the flood.
According to the records, Camp Mystic had "a written plan of procedures to be implemented in case of a disaster," which was "posted in the camp's administrative on-site office." But exactly what the plan contained isn't clear. Unlike at least one other camp along the Guadalupe River whose employees spoke to The Associated Press, Camp Mystic did not evacuate to higher ground ahead of the floods.
Kerr County officials said Wednesday that evacuating from Hill Country is not always the best course of action during a storm, echoing an earlier statement released by a joint information center established in the wake of the floods, which said that disaster responses in the Hill Country terrain are complex.
Rural areas, like Hunt, are full of single-lane bridges known as "low water crossings" that easily flood and create scattered "islands" of land that are impassable, said Johnathan Lam of the police department in Kerrville, a city in Kerr County. Those same locations have inconsistent cell service and are hard to reach for first responders.
"In Hunt, Highway 39 crisscrosses the Guadalupe again and again and again," Lam said. "And all of those low water crossings, when they flood, they create islands where you can't get in and you can't get out, trapping people in their homes, trapping people in their vehicles. And that's what happened on the morning of July 4."
A makeshift crew consisting of two Kerville officers, an emergency room doctor and some volunteer firefighters did what they could to fulfill the duties of a robust response team for 13 hours on Friday, until emergency workers in high-profile vehicles were able to reach them at around 5 p.m., Lam said Wednesday.
Scrutiny over weather forecasts
Whether communities in the path of the flooding received adequate warnings has been heavily scrutinized and is the subject of ongoing debate. Kerr County officials declined to respond to reporters' inquiries on the matter during their Tuesday news conference.
Some have questioned if the Trump administration's cuts earlier this year to the National Weather Service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, potentially prevented local forecast offices from sufficiently preparing the public for the extent of the flooding.
Mr. Trump and his team have repeatedly rejected any suggestions that federal firings impacted forecasting or emergency preparedness ahead of the floods.
A CBS News analysis found that 22 warnings from the National Weather Service were issued for Kerr County around the storms and flash flooding, which used escalating language as time went on. But some local residents said they did not receive emergency alerts on their phones nor did they understand how serious the situation had truly become until it actually happened.
The San Antonio and San Angelo weather service offices issued warnings for the areas affected by flooding. Officials with the union representing National Weather Service workers told CBS News there are 23 meteorologists staffed between those offices, which together have 10 vacant positions.
In San Antonio, the office is missing a warning coordination meteorologist, a vital role that essentially liaises between forecasters and emergency management agencies in the region to plan how information about an extreme weather event will be disseminated to the public, and which steps to take to protect them.
Nim Kidd, the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said his office received a forecast Wednesday that predicted several inches of rain, but "the amount of rain that fell at this specific location was never in any of those forecasts."
Dalton Rice, the city manager for Kerrville, in Kerr County, said during the same briefing that the storm "dumped more rain than what was forecasted."
Judge Rob Kelly, of Kerr County, said his area does "not have a warning system" in place for inclement weather, which may have been why people were not as prepared as they could have been. County officials had previously discussed a public alarm system but did not proceed with it because of the cost. Former Kerr County commissioner Tom Moser told CBS News the county had applied for a grant in the past to build the system but the application was not approved.
"If they can't afford to do it, then let us do it," Lt. Gov. Patrick said Monday, noting that the state could offer resources for Kerr County to implement a system. "We have a special session starting two weeks from today, and I think we can take that up and do some other things of funding these sirens. ... If there had been a siren, maybe that would have sparked people to say 'Oh, we have a massive disaster like five minutes away.'"
When asked about the emergency warnings on Tuesday, Abbott said everything would be discussed at the state Legislature session.
"We're going to address every aspect of this storm to make sure we're going to have in place the systems that are needed to prevent deadly flooding events like this in the future," he told reporters.
