KERRVILLE, Texas (AP) — Authorities overseeing the search for flood victims in Texas said Monday that they will wait to address questions about weather warnings and why some summer camps did not evacuate ahead of the catastrophic flooding that killed nearly 90 people over the July Fourth weekend.
The officials spoke only hours after the operators of Camp Mystic, a century-old all-girls Christian summer camp in the Texas Hill Country, announced that they lost 27 campers and counselors to the floodwaters. Meanwhile, search-and-rescue teams carried on with the search for the dead, using heavy equipment to untangle trees and wading into swollen rivers. Volunteers covered in mud sorted through chunks of debris, piece by piece, in an increasingly bleak task.
With additional rain on the way, more flooding still threatened in saturated parts of central Texas. Authorities said the death toll was sure to rise.
The announcement by Camp Mystic confirmed the worst fears after a wall of water slammed into cabins built along the edge of the Guadalupe River. The local sheriff later said that 10 girls and a counselor from the camp remained missing.
The raging flash floods — among the nation’s worst in decades — slammed into riverside camps and homes before daybreak Friday, pulling sleeping people out of their cabins, tents and trailers and dragging them for miles past floating tree trunks and automobiles. Some survivors were found clinging to trees.
Piles of twisted trees sprinkled with mattresses, refrigerators and coolers now litter the riverbanks. Caught in the debris were reminders of what drew so many to the campgrounds and cabins in the Hill Country — a volleyball, canoes and a family portrait.
In hard-hit Kerr County, home to Camp Mystic and several other summer camps, searchers have found the bodies of 75 people, including 27 children, Sheriff Larry Leitha said.
Fourteen other deaths were reported in Travis, Burnet, Kendall, Tom Green and Williamson counties, according to local officials.
Among those confirmed dead were 8-year-old sisters from Dallas who were at Camp Mystic and a former soccer coach and his wife who were staying at a riverfront home. Their daughters were still missing.
Calls for finding why warnings weren't heard
Authorities vowed that one of the next steps would be investigating whether enough warnings were issued and why some camps did not evacuate or move to higher ground in a place long vulnerable to flooding that some local residents refer to as “flash flood alley.”
That will include a review of how weather warnings were sent out and received. One of the challenges is that many camps and cabins are in places with poor cellphone service, said Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice.
“We definitely want to dive in and look at all those things,” he said. “We’re looking forward to doing that once we can get the search and rescue complete.”
Some camps, though, were aware of the dangers and monitoring the weather. At least one moved several hundred campers to higher ground before the floods.
Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, said recent government spending cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Weather Service did not delay any warnings.
“There’s a time to have political fights, there’s a time to disagree. This is not that time,” Cruz said. “There will be a time to find out what could been done differently. My hope is in time we learn some lessons to implement the next time there is a flood.”
The weather service first advised of potential flooding on Thursday and then sent out a series of flash flood warnings in the early hours of Friday before issuing flash flood emergencies — a rare step that alerts the public to imminent danger.
Authorities and elected officials have said they did not expect such an intense downpour, the equivalent of months of rain. Some residents said they never received any warnings.
President Donald Trump, who signed a major disaster declaration for Kerr County and plans to visit the area, said Sunday that he does not plan to rehire any of the federal meteorologists who were fired this year.
“This was a thing that happened in seconds. Nobody expected it,” the president said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said local and federal weather services provided sufficient warnings.
“That was an act of God. It’s not the administration’s fault that the flood hit when it did, but there were early and consistent warnings,” Leavitt said.
More than three dozen people were unaccounted for across the state and more could be missing, Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday.
Search-and-rescue crews at one staging area said Monday that more than 1,000 volunteers had been directed to Kerr County.
Little time to escape floods
Reagan Brown said his parents, in their 80s, managed to escape uphill as water inundated their home in the town of Hunt. When the couple learned that their 92-year-old neighbor was trapped in her attic, they went back and rescued her.
“Then they were able to reach their tool shed up higher ground, and neighbors throughout the early morning began to show up at their tool shed, and they all rode it out together,” Brown said.
Elizabeth Lester, a mother of children who were at Camp Mystic and nearby Camp La Junta during the flood, said her young son had to swim out his cabin window to escape. Her daughter fled up the hillside as floodwaters whipped against her legs.
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Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio. Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Michael Biesecker and Brian Slodysko in Washington; Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Arkansas; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; Christopher Weber in Los Angeles; Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City and Sophia Tareen in Chicago.
Jim Vertuno, Nadia Lathan And John Seewer, The Associated Press
