More than 160 people still missing after deadly Texas floods, says governor
5 campers and 1 counsellor from Camp Mystic still missing
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says at least 161 people are still missing days after flash floods that killed more than 100 people across central Texas.
Abbott spoke to reporters on Tuesday after taking a helicopter tour of the affected area. He said many of those who are not accounted for were staying in the state's Hill Country but did not register at a camp or hotel.
Abbott said U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to provide whatever relief Texas needs to recover from the flooding, and he read what he said was a text from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. in which Kennedy pledged to declare a public health emergency. Trump planned to visit the state on Friday.
Meanwhile, authorities leading the search for victims of the devastating flooding in Texas deflected intensifying questions on Tuesday about who was responsible for monitoring the weather and warning that flash floods were barrelling toward camps and homes.
Local officials in Kerr County, where searchers have found 87 bodies, said their priority is finding victims, not reviewing what happened in the hours before the floods inundated the state's Hill Country.
During a sometimes tense news conference, officials faced questions about how quickly they responded and who was in charge.
"Right now, this team up here is focused on bringing people home," said Lt.-Col. Ben Baker of the Texas Game Wardens.
Hope of finding survivors was increasingly bleak. Four days have passed since anyone was found alive in the aftermath of the floods in Kerr County, officials said.
Abbott planned to make another visit on Tuesday to Camp Mystic, the century-old all-girls Christian summer camp where at least 27 campers and counsellors died during the floods. Officials said five campers and one counsellor have still not been found.
The search efforts benefited from improving weather. The storms that battered the Hill Country for the past four days began to lighten up, although isolated pockets of heavy rain were still possible.
A wall of water slammed into camps and homes along the edge of the Guadalupe River before daybreak on Friday, pulling 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.
Questions mounted about what, if any, actions local officials took to warn campers and residents who were spending the July Fourth weekend in the scenic area long known to locals as "flash flood alley."
Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said that sending out warnings isn't "as easy as pushing a button." Answers about who did what and when will come later, public officials said.
Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county's chief elected official, said in the hours after the devastation that the county does not have a warning system.
Generations of families in the Hill Country have known the dangers. A 1987 flood forced the evacuation of a youth camp in the town of Comfort and swamped buses and vans. Ten teenagers were killed.
Local leaders have talked for years about the need for a warning system. Kerr County sought a nearly $1-million grant eight years ago for such a system, but the request was turned down by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Local residents balked at footing the bill themselves, Kelly said.
Some camps were aware of the dangers on Friday and monitored the weather. At least one moved several hundred campers to higher ground before the floods. But many were caught by surprise.
The bodies of 30 children were among those that have been recovered in Kerr County, home to Camp Mystic and several other summer camps near the river, Leitha said.
Nineteen deaths were reported in Travis, Burnet, Kendall, Tom Green and Williamson counties, local officials said.
Among those confirmed dead were eight-year-old sisters from Dallas who were at Camp Mystic and a former soccer coach and his wife who were staying at a riverfront home. Their daughters were still missing.
Elizabeth Lester, a mother of children who were at Camp Mystic and nearby Camp La Junta during the flood, said her young son had to swim out a cabin window to escape. Her daughter fled up the hillside as floodwaters whipped against her legs. Both survived.
Search-and-rescue teams used heavy equipment to untangle trees and move large rocks as part of the massive search for missing people. Hundreds of volunteers have shown up to help with one of the largest rescue operations in Texas history.
Piles of twisted trees sprinkled with mattresses, refrigerators and coolers littered the riverbanks.
