Texas flood rescue teams continue to search for missing people as death toll climbs

The search for people still missing after flash floods devastated Central Texas has entered a fifth day, with death tolls from various counties collectively topping 100 and expected to climb.

At least 109 people are confirmed dead as of Tuesday afternoon and over 100 people remain unaccounted for, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said during a news conference. Rescue operations were underway to find anyone lost in the debris after last week’s catastrophic storm, which caused the sprawling Guadalupe River to swell rapidly to near-unprecedented levels.

In Kerr County alone, there are 161 people known to be missing, Abbott said, and at least 12 people are missing in other parts of the state.

President Trump has signed a federal disaster declaration at the request of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, allowing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to deploy its own teams to support local rescue and recovery initiatives as those operations press on. Ongoing storms have made the efforts especially challenging, officials said, but National Weather Service forecasts indicated conditions would begin to abate Tuesday. 

Camp Mystic tragedy

Kerr County — located in the flood-prone Hill Country west of Austin, the state capital — bore the brunt of the disaster. Of all of the deaths confirmed so far, 94 were from that county alone, officials said Tuesday.

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 and surviving campers described as “catastrophic flooding.” They said they woke up to water rushing through the windows. Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said Tuesday 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, said Texas Game Warden Ben Baker at a Tuesday news conference. They have recovered the bodies of 56 adults and 30 children since Friday, when the floods first hit, but have yet to identify 26 of them, Leitha said at the briefing.

“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.

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 26 miles of the Guadalupe River on Tuesday in hopes 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 counties along the river have confirmed 22 additional deaths in the flooding: seven in Travis County, which includes Austin; five in Burnet County; seven in Kendall County; two in Williamson County; and one in Tom Green County, where the San Angelo Police Department said 62-year-old Tanya Burwick died in floodwaters that submerged her vehicle as she was driving.

During the early hours of Friday morning, the Guadalupe River in Hunt rose to about 26 feet — roughly the height of a two-story building — over the course of 45 minutes, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said at a news conference Friday. 

Camp Mystic was “horrendously ravaged,” Abbott wrote in a social media post after visiting the site, which had about 750 children staying there when the flood happened.

Sisters Natalie and Emily Raiford told CBS News correspondent Jason Allen about finding a young camper who’d been swept down the river for six miles before being rescued.

“All of the sudden we just hear somebody say, ‘help, help,'” one of the sisters recalled. “She said that her cabin was flooding and someone opened a window and she just flew out of it.”

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 at 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 forecasts offices also 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 at 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 built the system but the application was not approved.

“If they can’t afford to do it, then let us do it,” 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.'”