Death toll surpasses 100 in Texas floods, girls camp grieves loss

The death toll from catastrophic flooding in Texas over the July 4th weekend has surpassed 100 as the massive search continues for missing people.

The number of deaths reached 104 today. In hard-hit Kerr County, home to Camp Mystic and several other summer camps, searchers have found the bodies of 84 people, including 28 children, Kerr County officials said.

Authorities overseeing the search for flood victims in Texas said they will wait to address questions about weather warnings and why some summer camps did not evacuate ahead of the catastrophic flooding.

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 counsellors 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 raging flash floods — among the nation’s worst in decades — slammed into riverside camps and homes before daybreak Friday (local time), pulling sleeping people out of their cabins, tents and trailers and dragging them for miles past floating tree trunks and cars. Some survivors were found clinging to trees.

Piles of twisted trees sprinkled with mattresses, refrigerators and coolers now litter the riverbanks. The debris included reminders of what drew so many to the campgrounds and cabins in the Hill Country — a volleyball, canoes and a family portrait.

Nineteen 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 football coach and his wife who were staying at a riverfront home. Their daughters were still missing.

Search-and-rescue crews at one staging area said Monday that more than 1,000 volunteers had been directed to an area of hard-hit Kerr County.

Families were allowed to look around Camp Mystic beginning Sunday morning. A man whose daughter was rescued from a cabin on the highest point in the camp walked a riverbank, looking in clumps of trees and under big rocks.

One family left with a blue footlocker. A teenage girl had tears running down her face as they slowly drove away, and she gazed through the open window at the wreckage.

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 neighbour was trapped in her attic, they went back and rescued her.

“Then they were able to reach their tool shed up higher ground, and neighbours throughout the early morning began to show up at their tool shed, and they all rode it out together,” Brown said.

Among those confirmed dead were an 8-year-old girl from Mountain Brook, Alabama, who was at the camp, and the director of another camp up the road.

Two school-age sisters from Dallas were missing Sunday after their cabin was swept away. Their parents were staying in a different cabin and were safe, but the girls’ grandparents were unaccounted for.

On Thursday, the National Weather Service advised of potential flooding 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.

Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said one of the challenges is that many camps are in places with poor cellphone service.

President Donald Trump signed a major disaster declaration Sunday for Kerr County and said he would likely visit Friday. He said it wasn't the time to talk about whether he was still planning to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency and added that he doesn't plan to rehire any of the federal meteorologists who were fired this year as part of widespread government spending cuts.

“This was a thing that happened in seconds. Nobody expected it,” the president said.

Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, said recent cuts to FEMA 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.”