KERRVILLE, Texas (Reuters) -Search teams plodded through muddy riverbanks and flew aircraft over flood-ravaged central Texas on Monday as hopes dimmed of finding survivors among dozens still missing from a disaster that has claimed at least 96 lives, many of them children.
Three days after a torrential predawn downpour transformed the Guadalupe River into a raging, killer torrent, a Christian girls’ summer camp devastated by the flash flood confirmed that 27 campers and counselors were among those who had perished.
Ten girls and a camp counselor were still unaccounted for, officials said on Monday, as search-and-rescue personnel faced the potential of more heavy rains and thunderstorms while clawing through tons of muck-laden debris.
The bulk of the death toll from Friday’s calamity was concentrated in and around the riverfront town of Kerrville and the grounds of Camp Mystic, situated in a swath of Texas Hill Country known as “flash flood alley.”
By Monday afternoon, the bodies of 84 flood victims – 56 adults and 28 children – were recovered in Kerr County, most of them in the county seat of Kerrville, according to the local sheriff.
As of midday Sunday, state and local officials said 12 other flood-related fatalities had been confirmed across five neighboring south-central Texas counties, and that 41 other people were still listed as missing outside Kerr County.
The New York Times, one of numerous news media outlets publishing varying death tolls, reported that at least 104 people had been killed across the entire flood zone.
Debate also intensified over questions about how state and local officials reacted to weather alerts forecasting the possibility of a flash flood and the lack of an early warning siren system that might have mitigated the disaster.
On Monday, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick vowed that the state would “step up” to pay for installing a flash-flood warning system in Kerrville by next summer if local governments “can’t afford it.”
“There should have been sirens,” Patrick said in a Fox News interview. “Had we had sirens here along this area…it’s possible that we would have saved some lives.”
‘ROUGH WEEK’ AHEAD
While authorities continued to hold out hope that some of the missing would turn up alive, the likelihood of finding more survivors diminished as time passed.
“This will be a rough week,” Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring Jr said at a briefing on Monday morning.
Camp Mystic, a nearly century-old Christian girls’ retreat on the banks of the Guadalupe was at the epicenter of the disaster.
“Our hearts are broken alongside our families that are enduring this unimaginable tragedy,” the camp said in a statement on Monday.
Richard “Dick” Eastland, 70, Mystic’s co-owner and director, died trying to save children at his camp from the flood, local news media reported. He and his wife, Tweety Eastland, have owned the camp since 1974, according to its website.
“If he wasn’t going to die of natural causes, this was the only other way, saving the girls that he so loved and cared for,” Eastland’s grandson, George Eastland, wrote on Instagram.
MISHAP IN THE SKY
Authorities lost one of their aviation assets on Monday when a privately operated drone collided in restricted airspace over the Kerr County flood zone with a search helicopter, forcing the chopper to make an emergency landing. No injuries were reported, but the aircraft was put out of commission, according to the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office.
National Weather Service forecasts on Monday predicted that up to 4 more inches of rain could douse Texas Hill Country, with isolated areas possibly receiving as much as 10 inches (25 cm).
Officials said the region remained especially vulnerable to renewed flooding due to the saturated condition of the soil and mounds of debris already strewn around the river channel.
State emergency management officials had warned on Thursday, ahead of the July 4 holiday, that parts of central Texas faced the possibility of flash floods based on National Weather Service forecasts.
But twice as much rain as was predicted ended up falling over two branches of the Guadalupe just upstream of the fork where they converge, sending all of that water racing into the single river channel where it slices through Kerrville, City Manager Dalton Rice said.
Rice said the outcome was unforeseen and unfolded in a matter of two hours, leaving too little time to conduct a precautionary mass evacuation without the risk of placing more people in harm’s way.
Authorities in flood-prone areas like the Guadalupe River basin also must balance the odds of misjudging a catastrophe against not wanting to “cry wolf,” he said.
Still, a team of European scientists said climate change has helped fuel warmer, wetter weather patterns that make extreme rain and flood events more likely.
“Events of this kind are no longer exceptional in a warming world,” said Davide Faranda, of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). “Climate change loads the dice toward more frequent and more intense floods.”
The Houston Chronicle and New York Times reported that Kerr County officials had considered installing a flood-warning system about eight years ago but dropped the effort as too costly after failing to secure a $1 million grant to fund the project.
(Additional reporting by Marco Bello and Sandra Stojanovic in Comfort, Texas; Rich McKay in Atlanta; Alexandra Alper, Tim Reid and Deborah Gembara in Washington; Nathan Howard in Morristown, New Jersey; Ryan Jones and Bhargav Acharya in Toronto; Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; and Nathan Layne in New York; Writing by Steve Gorman and Joseph Ax; Editing by Timothy Heritage, Mark Porter, Stephen Coates and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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