Rescuers in the United States are scrambling to find dozens of children who went missing from a Christian summer camp in the state of Texas during flash floods triggered by a powerful storm, as the death toll from the disaster has risen to at least 43 people.
Officials in hard-hit Kerr County said on Saturday that the toll included 15 children.
They said 850 others had been rescued from the area, which lies about 137km (85 miles) northwest of San Antonio.
The destructive, fast-moving waters rose 26 feet (8 meters) on the Guadalupe River in just 45 minutes before daybreak on Friday, washing away homes and vehicles. While the National Weather Service (NWS) said the flash-flood emergency had largely ended for Kerr County – the epicentre of the flooding – it warned of more heavy rain to come, maintaining its flood watch until 7pm local time (00:00 GMT on Sunday).
Authorities still have not said how many people were missing beyond 27 children from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp along a river in Kerr County, where most of the dead were recovered.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said an unknown number of visitors had come to the area for an Independence Day celebration by the river.
“We don’t know how many people were in tents on the side, in small trailers by the side, in rented homes by the side,” he said on Fox News Live.
Governor Greg Abbott promised that authorities would be relentless and work around the clock to rescue and recover victims, adding that new areas are being searched as the water recedes.
“We will find every one of them,” he said.
Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said more than 1,000 rescuers were on the ground to help with search-and-rescue efforts. Helicopters and drones were being used, with some people being plucked from trees. US Coast Guard helicopters had flown in to assist.
“They are looking in every possible location,” Rice said, adding that crews were facing harsh conditions while scouring waterlogged rivers, culverts and rocks.
Camp Mystic had 700 girls in residence at the time of the flood, according to officials. Another girls’ camp, Heart O’ the Hills, said on its website that co-owner Jane Ragsdale had died in the flood, but no campers had been present as it was between sessions.
Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou-Castro said that rescue workers had promised to “not give up until the very last person is found – either alive or their body is recovered”.
“That might be a tall order given just how catastrophic these floods were. We’re talking about a region that is dotted with hills and with canyons,” she said.
She added that children in the camps had been particularly vulnerable to the floodwaters, “which rose by 8 metres [26 feet] in less than an hour, overnight, as they slept”.
Authorities under scrutiny
The flooding in the middle of the night on the Fourth of July holiday weekend caught many residents, campers and officials by surprise.
Authorities have come under increasing scrutiny over whether they issued proper warnings and whether enough preparations were made.
State emergency management officials had warned as late as Thursday that west and central Texas faced heavy rains and flash flood threats “over the next couple days”, citing NWS forecasts ahead of the holiday weekend.
The weather forecasts, however, “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw”, W Nim Kidd, director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said during a news conference on Friday night.
“A lot of questions are being asked about why there weren’t earlier evacuations,” said Al Jazeera’s Zhou-Castro. “They knew there might be rain, they just didn’t know where it would hit, and when it did, it indeed was catastrophic.”
On Saturday morning, US President Donald Trump said the federal government was working with state and local officials to respond to the flooding.
“Our Brave First Responders are on site doing what they do best,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, adding that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem would soon be on the ground.
At a news conference alongside Noem on Saturday, Governor Abbott said he was expanding a state “disaster declaration” to get federal assistance for counties affected by the floods.
“We will ensure that every asset and resource the state has is going to be made available to every county that’s a subject of this disaster declaration”, he said, adding that Trump “loves Texas” and was “deeply concerned about all the families who’ve been affected”.
Noem said a “moderate” flood watch issued the previous day by the NWS did not accurately predict the extreme rainfall and that the Trump administration was working to upgrade the system.
The administration has cut thousands of jobs from the NWS’s parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, leaving many weather offices understaffed, said former NOAA director Rick Spinrad.
He said he did not know if those staff cuts factored into the lack of advance warning for the extreme Texas flooding, but that they would inevitably degrade the agency’s ability to deliver accurate and timely forecasts.
“People’s ability to prepare for these storms will be compromised. It undoubtedly means that additional lives will be lost and probably more property damaged,” he said.
The weekend disaster echoes a catastrophic flood almost 40 years ago along the Guadalupe River.
In 1987, a bus and a van leaving a church camp encountered floodwaters, and 10 teenagers drowned trying to escape, according to a NWS summary of that incident.
