Rescuers were searching for more than two dozen girls missing from a summer camp in Texas after a flash flood killed at least 50 people, 15 of them children.
The Guadalupe River that runs through the Hill Country in central south Texas rose by 26ft (8 metres) in 45 minutes in the early hours of Friday, according to officials, bursting its banks and destroying roads and property, including Camp Mystic where 27 missing girls were staying.
The disaster struck as people across the US gathered to celebrate Independence Day. More than 850 people have been rescued, some of whom were clinging to trees, in what is being called a once in a century flood.
The search and rescue operations involved helicopters, drones, 900 boats and more than 1,300 personnel, officials said, but were hampered by limited access to some areas, especially where roads had been washed away.
“We will be relentless in ensuring that we locate every single person who’s been a victim of this flooding event,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a press conference in Kerrville. “We’re not going to stop today or tomorrow. We will stop when the job is completed.”
The National Weather Service issued a further warning in the early hours on Sunday about the continued risk of flash flooding across central Texas, as rain continued to fall on saturated grounds. Weak winds meant developing thunderstorms with heavy downpours would move very slowly, it said.
The governor signed an expanded state disaster declaration, bringing the number of affected counties to 20, following additional storm damage and rainfall overnight.
Two of those counties include the cities of Austin and San Antonio, the third-largest metropolitan area in the state, where torrential rain has been falling for days. The governor also signed a request for a federal disaster declaration.
US President Donald Trump said the flooding and deaths were “terrible” and “shocking” as he pledged federal support.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem deflected questioning about the timing of warnings issued ahead of the floods, following cuts by the administration to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Weather Service.
She said the technology behind the warning system was “ancient” and that the Trump administration was working to upgrade it. “We know that everybody wants more warning time, and that’s why we’re working to upgrade the technologies that been neglected [for] far too long,”
Officials in Kerr County, north-west of San Antonio, said that the extreme rainfall had not been forecast, adding that there was no warning system in place.
“We had no reason to believe this was going to be anything like what’s happened here,” said Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the top local elected official. “Nobody saw this coming.”
But the National Weather Service said it had issued a flood watch for the area on Thursday at around 1pm local time, with the first flash flood warning for Kerr County issued in the very early hours of Friday.
Hannah Cloke, a professor of hydrology at the University of Reading in the UK, said the downpour “seems to have been well forecasted by multiple forecasters around the world, several hours in advance”.
“It is not good enough for authorities to say they were not aware that floods were coming. Warnings were available but the message just didn’t get through,” she said.
The Texas Hill Country is no stranger to floods because of its geography. The area, called “flash flood alley” is marked by narrow, serpentine valleys and steep rocky hillsides that funnel water downstream into nearby creeks and rivers.
When heavy rains come, the water cannot soak quickly into the ground because of the area’s thin layer of topsoil overlying limestone and granite.
The Trump administration has axed hundreds of jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Weather Service, with critics arguing that the moves would impair the country’s ability to produce life-saving forecasts.
Scientists have warned that climate change is increasing the risk of devastating storms and intense rainfall because warmer air holds more moisture. A flash flood — a rapid inundation of low-lying areas — killed more than 200 people in Valencia in Spain last year.
Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical & climate hazards at University College London, said the “tragic events in Texas are exactly what we would expect in our hotter, climate-changed world”.
“There has been an explosion in extreme weather in recent years, including more devastating flash floods caused by slow-moving, wetter, storms, that dump exceptional amounts of rain over small areas across a short time,” he said.
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