How searchers are agonizingly scouring for Texas flood victims, including children – and absorbing an emotional toll

CNN

10-07-2025

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EDITOR'S NOTE: This story includes graphic descriptions some readers may find disturbing.
The intense flurry of search activity at what was once an RV park in Kerr County, Texas, paused for a moment Wednesday morning when the body of an infant was pulled from the debris.
'You know, all of this was moving faster than it was just a minute ago. You catch the smell. You mark a dog, you have a mark and the place goes quiet,' said Joe Rigelsky, a founder of Upstream International, a Christian nonprofit involved in the grim task of searching for the scores of people missing from devastating floods that struck Texas Hill Country nearly a week ago and killed more than 100 people.
The cadaver dogs detect the scent of bodies, give a 'positive mark' to their handlers and the searchers start digging into the ravaged landscape. Power saws whirred as Rigelsky spoke to CNN. Nearby, searchers on their knees dug with their hands through muddy soil and rubble. The smell of decay wafted through the air. Among the dead, Rigelsky said, are livestock and other animals that also were carried away by the fast-moving waters.
When searchers get a mark, they'll use 'equipment to hopefully clear some of the heavier debris and keep them hand poking and digging,' Rigelsky said.
The scene plays out over and over along piles of debris stretching for miles, largely along the Guadalupe River, which severely flooded early Friday and winds through 40 miles of Kerr County, where the toll is the worst: nearly 100 deaths there alone, including 36 children. The debris stretches several more miles downriver in nearby Kendall County, where some bodies also have been found.
On Tuesday evening, Rigelsky said, there were two marks from a dog nearby. Searchers dug up a truck. And while the dog kept marking the vehicle, no body was found. The next day was different.
'This morning … they ended up taking an infant out of this area,' he said.
'Last night going home to my wife, it was the discouragement of knowing that you had a mark but didn't find anything,' he said. 'So going to bed … knowing that we still had work to be done here, yeah, that's heavy.'
More than a summer's worth of rain had fallen in the area overnight into Independence Day, swelling part of the Guadalupe River from about 3 feet to 30 feet in just 45 minutes and transforming the beloved waterway into a killer. The flooding laid waste to communities across Kerr and Kendall counties, where neighborhoods and RV parks, as well as the 18 or so youth camps attended by thousands of kids each summer, were swept away in its fury.
The state's deadliest freshwater flooding in more than a century quickly killed numerous people – including locals celebrating Independence Day, child campers and camp leaders – while destroying homes, businesses and cabins.
A captain with the Virginia Beach Water Rescue Team, whose crews are assisting in Texas, said it will likely take 'days, if not weeks,' to thoroughly search along the Guadalupe River.
'We have a long, long way to go to really thoroughly search this area,' Capt. Max McQuarrie said Tuesday, noting that crews will be looking at 60 miles of river.
At least 150 people were reported missing in Kerr County alone, where the river begins.
Crews were contending with treacherous terrain, downed trees, mounds of debris and the searing Texas heat, McQuarrie said.
'It's going to be a slow, methodical process … to really provide the answers that everyone's looking for,' he said.
Many people died trapped in cabins along the river. Others presumably drowned or died in their cars or RVs, which now lay overturned, smashed and piled together at various locations. Accounting for people camping in RVs and calculating the number of RVs in the area at the time have been particularly challenging, officials said.
And debris piles, grimly, may contain more than wood and mud and belongings – a point that authorities have had to stress to the public.
Kerrville police Sgt. Jonathan Lamb on Wednesday urged residents to not use heavy equipment on 'debris piles until they've been checked by a search party because it's possible there are victims in that debris pile.' Officials also urged people to avoid burning debris.
As local authorities fended off questions about their preparation and early response to the disaster, they sought to focus on the efforts of first responders who managed to safely rescue people from vehicles and homes. 'I know that this tragedy, as horrific as it is, could have been so much worse,' Lamb told reporters.
'It's surreal, when you see the raw power of what this water did, and it is emotionally taxing on them, and they will push themselves to the point of exhaustion, trying to find and bring these people's loved ones home,' Amanda Nixon, a disaster trauma specialist, said of search personnel on the scene. 'I try to just let them be human in the moment and feel what they need to feel, and let them know that's OK.'
Josh Gill, incident coordinator for the United Cajun Navy, called the magnitude of the devastation 'unbelievable – one of the worst that I've ever seen.'
'The hardest part is working through the emotions. We know that there's children missing and there's families missing — trying to work through the emotions,' Gill told CNN. 'We want to hit every treetop, every rubble pile and find as many people as we possibly can, and we still hope, every morning, and we pray that we're going to find survivors.'
United Cajun Navy chaplain Tony Dickey's voice cracked as he recalled the strain of the search effort.
'You take the first responders, the search and rescue guys that are out here on the river, they're taking an extreme, hard, traumatic, emotional hit,' he told CNN Wednesday.
'If you were one of them going through a debris pile, and you pull that debris back, and there lays one of these precious children, that image is there. But they're willing to take that emotional toll to bring that loved one home to that family.'
A small army of searchers from across the US and even Mexico continued to work the perilous terrain on Thursday – aided by helicopters, drones and boats, as well as dogs and mules.
'You talk to any of those guys on those ground teams and they're tell you they're not going home until they find everybody,' said Mike Toberer, president and CEO of Mission Mules, a Christian nonprofit that provides disaster relief. The mules help searchers traverse the difficult terrain, which includes toppled trees and overturned vehicles.
In Kerr County, Rigelsky, who founded the Texas nonprofit with his wife of 23 years, Sami, said: 'Every day that there's a missing person, that's all hands on deck.'
CNN's Lauren Mascarenhas, Rebekah Reiss, Chris Boyette, Zoe Sottile, Sarah Dewberry, Alisha Ebrahimji, Ashley Killough and Michelle Krupa contributed to this report.