Residents in central Texas were observing a day of prayer on Sunday for at least 78 people killed and dozens missing in Friday’s devastating flash flooding, as a search and rescue operation for survivors began to morph into a grim exercise of recovering bodies.
Relatives continued an anxious wait for news of 10 girls and one camp counselor still unaccounted for from a riverside summer camp that was overwhelmed by flash flooding from the Guadalupe River, which rose 26ft (8 meters) in 45 minutes on Friday morning after torrential pre-dawn rain north of San Antonio.
Kerr county’s sheriff, Larry Leitha, said at a briefing on Sunday afternoon that 68 people have been confirmed dead there, including 28 children, with the search continuing for the missing girls and their counselor from Camp Mystic, along the river.
Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, said in an earlier briefing that another 10 fatalities have been confirmed in neighboring counties. Abbott said that officials were still searching for 41 known missing persons across the state.
“We are seeing bodies recovered all over up and down,” Kerrville’s city manager, Dalton Rice, told reporters at an earlier briefing on Sunday.
Authorities said about 850 people had been rescued, with more than 400 people involved in the search and rescue operation.
By Sunday morning, water levels had fallen to just a foot or two higher than before the flood. On Sunday afternoon, people in Kerrville received an emergency alert on their phone, reading: “High confidence of river flooding at North Folks of river. Move to higher ground.”
Further rain on Saturday and into Sunday morning hampered search efforts of crews using boats, helicopters and drones. Abbott promised responders would remain at the scene until every individual was recovered. He said he instructed responders to assume all missing persons were still alive.
The US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, was in Texas as Donald Trump announced on social media that he had signed a federal emergency declaration that would free additional resources to support local efforts. Trump also posted a letter saying federal efforts would be coordinated by Benjamin Abbott of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). In May, that agency’s acting administrator was fired after he told Congress he did not believe it was “in the best interest of the American people to eliminate” Fema, which Trump and Noem have said they plan to do.
Asked on Sunday if he is still planning to phase out Fema, Trump told a reporter: “Well, Fema is something we can talk about later, but right now they’re busy working.”
Noem defended the federal response to the disaster at a press conference Saturday afternoon, promising that “relief will be coming”. Yet questions continued to swirl over the Trump administration’s actions that some believe could have contributed to the severity of the event.
In particular, harsh budget cutbacks affecting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) have left numerous key weather forecasting offices short of staff, including the Austin-San Antonio office of the National Weather Service (NWS).
Officials defended the service on Sunday, insisting warnings of flash flooding were issued in advance. But some residents said they hadn’t received them – which Texas’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick acknowledged Sunday on Fox News. And an initial NWS forecast had called for only 3-6in of rain – not the intense downpour that triggered the deadly flooding.
The Washington Post reported that 1.8tn gallons of rain fell over the Texas Hill Country – which includes Kerrville – and Edwards Plateau on Friday morning.
Matthew Stone, 44, of Kerrville, said police came knocking on doors – but that he had received no warning on his phone.
“We got no emergency alert. There was nothing” until suddenly there was “a pitch-black wall of death”, Stone said.
Questions are being asked with increasing intensity about the timing and manner of warnings about the flood danger issued by Kerr county, with updates posted on Facebook in the middle of the night unlikely to have been seen by those in danger. A local official told the New York Times that emergency alert systems are expensive and the county’s taxpayers had not previously wanted to pay for one.
Other nearby towns do have outdoor early warning sirens that are activated for life-threatening emergencies such as flooding. On Friday morning, emergency sirens reportedly blared in Comfort, less than 20 miles from Kerrville, warning residents to evacuate as the Guadalupe River rose. Abbott told reporters on Sunday that the lack of sirens near riverside camps is “something that will be looked at”.
In the tense final moments of a news conference on Sunday morning, Rice, the Kerrville city manager, refused to answer a reporter’s question about why information about the threat of flooding was not passed to camps along the river. “That is a great question,” he said, “but again, we want to make sure that we continue to focus, we still have 11 missing children that we want to get reunited with their families.”
Rice and other local officials then ended the news conference and walked away as reporters pressed them for answers. “Sir, was any emergency alert given out on the fourth, that morning of? Did anyone get any alerts?” one reporter asked. “Sir, there are families that deserve better than that,” another said as Rice opened a door and walked out.
The Republican Texas congressman Chip Roy, whose district includes Kerr county, said at the Sunday press conference that actions taken before and during the flooding would be scrutinized.
“There’s going to be a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of second-guessing,” he said. “There’s a lot of people saying ‘why’ and ‘how,’ and I understand that.”
Abbott said late Saturday that he had visited Camp Mystic, a popular Christian summer retreat for girls on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Hunt.
The camp, which had more than 750 girls in attendance at the time of the flood, was overrun by a torrent of water, sweeping away 27 that were initially missing. The number of missing from there by Sunday had dropped to 12, as the death toll climbed, according to officials.
Sarah Marsh, an eight-year-old girl from Mountain Brook, Alabama, who was at the camp, was found dead Saturday, as was Dick Eastland, the camp’s longtime director who was reportedly found along with three girls he tried to rescue. Eastland’s son told the Washington Post his father had tried to rescue the girls in Bubble Inn cabin, situated about 150 yards from the river’s edge.
“It, and the river running beside it, were horrendously ravaged in ways unlike I’ve seen in any natural disaster,” Abbott said in a post to X after touring the ruins of the Camp Mystic with rescue crews.
“The height the rushing water reached to the top of cabins was shocking. We won’t stop until we find every girl who was in those cabins.”
The camp, long a home for the daughters of the Texas political elite, imposed a ban on both cellphones and social media for campers, closing them off from distraction but also from two modes of receiving emergency warnings.
Former president George W Bush and his wife, Laura, said in a statement that they “are heartbroken by the loss of life and the agony so many are feeling”. Laura Bush once worked as a counselor at the camp during her college years.
Also confirmed dead was Jane Ragsdale, the director of the nearby Heart O’ the Hills camp, who was described by friends as a “pillar of the community”.
Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas decision of emergency management, said Friday that early NWS forecasts “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw”. His comments prompted a defense of the service Sunday by the private weather service AccuWeather, which said in a statement that Friday’s pre-dawn warnings “should have provided officials with ample time to evacuate camps such as Camp Mystic and get people to safety”.
Meanwhile, Tom Fahy, legislative director for the NWS employees organization, told CNN that he believed the service’s Texas offices had “adequate staffing and resources”. Yet he said the Austin-San Antonio office was missing a warning coordination meteorologist, a crucial link between the NWS and emergency managers.
A Noaa official told the network that the vacancy, along with several other key roles, were the result of the White House offering early retirement incentives after Trump’s second presidency began in January.
Identities of more of those killed were becoming known on Sunday, as survivors shared extraordinary stories of how they were spared.
Two children from Dallas, Blair Harber, 13, and her 11-year-old sister Brooke, were among those confirmed dead, by officials at the Catholic high school they attended. They were staying at a riverside cabin with their grandparents, who are missing.
Their father, RJ Harber, who was staying with his wife in an adjacent cabin, told CNN that Blair “was a gifted student and had a generous kind heart” and that Brooke “was like a light in any room, people gravitated to her and she made them laugh and enjoy the moment”.
High school soccer coach Reece Zunker and his wife, Tina, were among the Kerr county victims, the Kerryville Daily Times reported – and their two children are missing.
The newspaper also identified teacher Jeff Wilson among the victims, with his wife, Amber, and son Shiloh unaccounted for.
Officials in Burnet county told KHOU TV that a local fire department chief was among three fatalities there.
Associated Press contributed reporting
