Texas floods kill 78, including 28 children as girls’ camp becomes epicentre of tragedy

A Christian all-girls camp in central Texas said on Monday that 27 campers and counselors were among those who perished in the catastrophic flooding over the July 4 weekend, while emergency responders still searching for dozens of missing people faced the prospect of more heavy rains and thunderstorms.

The death toll from Friday's floods has reached 78, including 28 children, and officials have said it is likely to rise as search teams waded through mud-laden riverbanks and flew over the flood-stricken landscape. The bulk of the dead were in the riverfront Hill Country Texas town of Kerrville, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said.

The Guadalupe River that runs through Kerrville was transformed by pre-dawn torrential downpours into a raging torrent in less than an hour on Friday. The waters tore through Camp Mystic, a nearly century-old Christian girls' retreat on the banks of the Guadalupe River.

"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, the co-owner and director of Camp Mystic, died trying to save the children at his camp during the flood, multiple media including the Austin American-Statesman reported.

Eastland and his wife Tweety Eastland have owned the camp since 1974, according to the camp's 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.

In Hill Country where the worst flooding occurred, 2 to 4 inches of more rain were expected to fall, with isolated areas getting up to 10 inches of rain, said Allison Santorelli, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

Santorelli said that the potential new floods could be particularly dangerous because of the water-saturated soil and all the debris already in and around the river.

The weather service issued a flood watch through 7 p.m. on Monday in the region.

State emergency management officials had warned on Thursday, ahead of the July Fourth holiday, that parts of central Texas faced the possibility of heavy showers and flash floods based on National Weather Service forecasts.

Confluence of disaster

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 and other public officials, including Governor Greg Abbott, said the circumstances of the flooding, and the adequacy of weather forecasts and warning systems, would be scrutinized once the immediate situation was brought under control. In the meantime, search-and-rescue operations were continuing around the clock, with hundreds of emergency personnel on the ground contending with a myriad of challenges.

"It's hot, there's mud, they're moving debris, there's snakes," Martin told reporters on Sunday.

Thomas Suelzar, adjutant general of the Texas Military Department, said airborne search assets included eight helicopters and a remotely piloted MQ-9 Reaper aircraft equipped with advanced sensors for surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Officials said on Saturday that more than 850 people had been rescued, some clinging to trees, after the sudden storm dumped up to 15 inches of rain across the region, about 85 miles (140 km) northwest of San Antonio. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was activated on Sunday and was deploying resources to Texas after President Donald Trump issued a major disaster declaration, the Department of Homeland Security said. U.S. Coast Guard helicopters and planes were aiding search and rescue efforts.

Scaling back federal disaster response

Trump said on Sunday that he would visit the disaster scene, probably on Friday. He has previously outlined plans to scale back the federal government's role in responding to natural disasters, leaving states to shoulder more of the burden themselves.

Some experts questioned whether cuts to the federal workforce by the Trump administration, including to the agency that oversees the National Weather Service, led to a failure by officials to accurately predict the severity of the floods and issue appropriate warnings ahead of the storm. Trump's administration has overseen thousands of job cuts from the National Weather Service's parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, leaving many weather offices understaffed, former NOAA director Rick Spinrad said.

Trump pushed back when asked on Sunday if federal government cuts hobbled the disaster response or left key job vacancies at the Weather Service under Trump's oversight.

"That water situation, that all is, and that was really the Biden setup," he said, referencing his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden. "But I wouldn't blame Biden for it, either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe."

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Fox News on Monday that there did not appear to be a specific breakdown in the National Weather Service systems.

"The alerts went out several hours in advance, but the rise in the level of water, and how quickly that happened, just really was unprecedented for this area," she said.