KERRVILLE, Texas (Reuters) -President Donald Trump defended the state and federal response to deadly flash flooding in Texas on Friday as he visited the stricken Hill Country region, where at least 120 people, including dozens of children, perished a week ago.
During a roundtable discussion after touring Kerr County, the epicenter of the disaster, Trump praised both Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for their response, saying they both did an “incredible job.”
The Trump administration, as well as local and state officials, has faced mounting questions over whether more could have been done to protect and warn residents ahead of the flooding, which struck with astonishing speed in the pre-dawn hours on July 4, the U.S. Independence Day holiday.
Trump reacted with anger when a reporter said some families affected by the floods had expressed frustration that warnings did not go out sooner.
“I think everyone did an incredible job under the circumstances,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but only a very evil person would ask a question like that.”
Some critics have questioned whether the administration’s spending cuts at the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which coordinates the U.S. government’s disaster response efforts, might have exacerbated the calamity.
Trump officials have said that cuts had no impact on the NWS’s ability to forecast the storms, despite some vacancies in local offices.
But the president has largely sidestepped questions about his plans to shrink or abolish FEMA and reassign many of its key functions to state and local governments.
“I’ll tell you some other time,” Trump said on Tuesday, when asked by a reporter about FEMA.
Before the most recent flooding, Kerr County declined to install an early-warning system after failing to secure state money to cover the cost.
Lawrence Walker, 67, and a nearly three-decade veteran resident of Kerrville, said the county and state had not spent enough on disaster prevention, including an early-warning system.
Asked about the quality of the government response, he said, “It’s been fine since the water was at 8 feet.”
The Texas state legislature will convene in a special session later this month to investigate the flooding and provide disaster relief funding.
Abbott has dismissed questions about whether anyone was to blame, calling that the “word choice of losers.”
DOZENS STILL UNACCOUNTED FOR
Search teams on Friday were still combing through muddy debris littering parts of the Hill Country in central Texas, looking for the dozens still listed as missing, but no survivors have been found since the day of the floods.
Heavy rains sent a wall of water raging down the Guadalupe River early on July 4, causing the deadliest disaster of the Republican president’s nearly six-month term in office.
As sun poked through dark clouds on Friday morning, search crews in hard hats painstakingly walked inch-by-inch along the ruined banks of the river, marking damage and looking through wreckage.
After the president arrived in Kerr County in the early afternoon, Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott drove to an area near the river, where Trump received a briefing from first responders amid debris left in the wake of the flood.
The county is located in what is known as “flash flood alley,” a region that has seen some of the country’s deadliest floods.
More than a foot of rain fell in less than an hour on July 4. Flood gauges showed the river’s height rose from about a foot to 34 feet in a matter of hours, cascading over its banks and sweeping away trees and structures in its path.
Kerr County officials say more than 160 people remain unaccounted for, although experts say that the number of people reported missing in the wake of disasters is often inflated.
The dead include at least 36 children, many of whom were campers at the nearly century-old Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer retreat on the banks of the river.
Jon Moreno, 71, a longtime Kerrville resident whose property on high ground was spared, praised the government response – local and federal.
He has heard the debate about what more could have been done – including sirens – but said he did not think it would have made much difference, given people’s desire to build along the flood-prone riverbanks.
“It’s unavoidable,” he said. “All those people along the river – I wouldn’t want to live there … It’s too dangerous.”
At Stripes, a gas station in Kerrville, the building was tagged in large white letters, accusing “Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill” of cutting “our emergency funding.”
The president’s massive legislative package, which cut taxes and spending, won approval from the Republican-controlled Congress last week and was signed into law by Trump on the same day that the flooding hit Texas.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Maria Alejandra Cardona in Kerrville; Additional reporting by Nicole Johnson, Kevin Lamarque and Rich McKay; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Frank McGurty, Nick Zieminski and Diane Craft)
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