4 questions that are still unanswered about Texas' deadly floods
Officials have avoided specific explanations of what steps were taken in advance of the intense downpour. Forecasts on July 3 suggested it could threaten the scenic Texas Hill Country where hundreds of locals, tourists and campers were sleeping overnight. At least 120 people were killed and more than 160 people are believed to still be missing.
Here's what is still unknown about the hours before, during and after the deadly flash flood.
How did officials prepare?
The full extent of Texas officials' readiness is unclear.
Two days before the flood, the Texas Division of Emergency Management activated state emergency response resources and then increased the readiness level the following day. State officials have said early forecasts did not pinpoint where the most intense rains would hit, so equipment and personnel were staged only in several areas, although they have not given specifics.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said that prior to a briefing call on July 3, a regional coordinator personally reached out to local officials to make sure they were aware. 'The message was sent,' Patrick said.
In Kerr County, where the devastation is most extensive, Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring said this week he did not know what state emergency management resources were deployed ahead of time.
'I'm not going to contradict the information you have, but I will tell you, personally, I did not receive a telephone call,' he said.
How quickly did Texas authorities act?That's still unknown.
Since the flood, Kerr County officials have repeatedly deflected questions about the details and timelines of their response.
The National Weather Service issued a flash-flood warning at 1:14 a.m. Friday to mobile phones and weather radios. The warning was updated at 4:03 a.m. to a flash-flood emergency.
The Kerrville Police Department and the Kerr County County Sheriff's Office began to post on Facebook around 5:15 a.m. warning residents of dangerous flooding. But it remains unclear how, if at all, emergency officials utilized CodeRED, the vendor used for alerting the public to emergency situations and disasters.
An Associated Press review of wireless emergency alerts sent in Texas between July 3 and July 5 found dozens sent by the NWS via a FEMA system to local cellphones that warned of the potential for flash floods. There were none listed as sent by Kerr County agencies until one July 6.
How prepared was Camp Mystic?
Texas inspectors had signed off on Camp Mystic's plans for an emergency just two days before the floodwaters inundated the all-girls Christian summer camp, killing more than two dozen people.
Camps are responsible for developing their own emergency plans, which are evaluated by inspectors to ensure they meet several state requirements, including procedures for evacuation.
Camp Mystic this week did not respond to requests for comment on its emergency plan.
The camp had 557 campers and more than 100 staffers at the time between its Guadalupe and Cypress Lake locations.
It's not clear how threatening the July Fourth forecast appeared to camp leaders. The area is naturally prone to flash flooding, but this was an especially bad storm that hit overnight while most people are asleep, experts said. The landscape created the conditions for what some witnesses described as a fast-moving wall of water, which seems to have overtaken the cabins with the littlest campers.
When will we find out more details?Officials have not given a timeline.
They've repeatedly said their focus for now is on searching for the missing. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county's highest ranking official, has said officials 'did not know this flood was coming.' He has not spoken at any of the county's daily news conferences since July 5.
William 'Dub' Thomas, Kerr County's emergency management coordinator who has been in the job since November 2015, has not participated in any briefings with the media. On Monday, Thomas attended an emergency meeting of the county commissioner's court but declined an opportunity to address elected officials.
Kelly and Thomas have not responded to interview requests sent to them and the county.
Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha has insisted his priority remains the current response, but also said this week an 'after action' review of the events leading up to and during the flood will come later.
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Associated Press data journalist Christopher Keller contributed to this report.
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Travel + Leisure
an hour ago
- Travel + Leisure
How to Help Those Impacted by the Texas Floods Right Now
Braving the heat with donation bags in hand and shirts that read 'San Antonio loves Kerr County,' more than a thousand locals packed a downtown bar Wednesday night for a joint run hosted by several of the city's run clubs, raising so much money for their Hill Country neighbors that one organizer quipped, San Antonio 'broke Cash App" in their eagerness to help. The charity run raised more than $14,000 for the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund and filled several trucks full of supplies. This is just one example of how Texans are determined to rally to support for Kerr County, a Hill Country region of 56,000 residents hit by devastating flash floods on Independence Day. Home to towns like Kerrville, Comfort, and Ingram, Kerr County has long been an escape for Texans seeking a slice of nature away from the big cities of Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas, with activities like tubing on the Guadalupe River. Tragically, the river many saw as a place of peace and community became the source of devastation in the early hours of July 4. Deadly flash floods swept through Kerr County before dawn on July 4, as the Guadalupe River surged to up to 35 feet, per USGS—more than double its flood stage—killing more than 100 people, including dozens of children, according to county officials. Among the hardest-hit areas was Camp Mystic, a historic summer camp for young girls. At least 161 people remain unaccounted for as of July 10, according to CBS News , as search and rescue efforts continue at the time of publication. The Guadalupe River in Kerrville, Texas on July 6, 2025. Desiree Rios/The Washington Post via Getty Images Kerr County government officials have provided a list of the most up-to-date needs and vetted organizations on the official county website. According to officials, cash donations are the most necessary at the time of publishing, with the following organizations giving 100 percent of donations to relief efforts. Other organizations in need of monetary donations: Those able to donate blood can sign up via the American Red Cross or the South Texas Blood & Tissue Center. Want to volunteer? The best way to assess current volunteer needs is by calling the Salvation Army Kerrville at 830-465-4797. Some Texas-based organizations have contributed money, boots on the ground, and hot meals. H-E-B, the Lone Star State's largest grocery chain that was founded in Kerrville in 1905, donated $5 million to their hometown, in addition to other means of support. "For 120 years, the Butt family has proudly called Kerrville home,' said Howard Butt III, H-E-B CEO, in an official statement. 'Our hearts ache for the children, families, and communities facing tremendous loss throughout Texas in the wake of these floods." James Avery, also founded in Kerrville in 1954, is donating 100 percent of its sales from the "Deep in the Heart of Texas" charm to flood relief efforts until Aug. 4. For every order placed to a Texas merchant, Doordash is donating $1 to the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country's Kerr County Flood Relief Fund up to $250,000 for direct resources to organizations making a difference on the ground. Kendra Scott, a jewelry company founded in Austin, Texas, is donating 100 percent of its proceeds from the Everlyne bracelet collection to support the ongoing efforts in Texas Hill Country. For the most up-to-date list of immediate needs for Kerr County, visit: Kerr County Texas City of Kerrville
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
New floods lead to rescues and evacuations across Texas
A storm system brought a new round of dangerous flooding across North and Central Texas on Sunday, leading to rescues and evacuations in multiple counties and suspending search efforts for victims of catastrophic floods that killed at least 120 people in the Hill Country a week ago. Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday afternoon that the state was conducting rescues in San Saba, Lampasas and Schleicher counties, with evacuations taking place in Lampasas, Menard, Kimble and Sutton counties. "We are expanding operations in all affected counties — all while monitoring the rising waters in Kerrville," Abbott said in a post on X. Kerrville, in Kerr County, is where rescue and recovery operations have focused after the Fourth of July floods in the Hill Country. Dozens of Texans had been rescued from the Lampasas area by mid-Sunday afternoon, Abbott said. One rescue was made in Schleicher County Sunday morning, according to the county Sheriff's Office. Some rescues have also been made in San Saba County, Emergency Management Coordinator Marsha Hardy said, as police and volunteers spread out this morning to alert residents of both mandatory and recommended evacuation orders. Hardy said the evacuations have gone without issue, and she hopes the rest of the rain won't cause any more major problems so they can shift to recovery efforts. 'It's now a matter, once again, of everybody working their way back home, probably tomorrow, and seeing what kind of damage they might have received,' Hardy said. Sunday afternoon, U.S. Rep. August Pfluger R-Texas, who represents San Saba, posted: 'Please take this seriously as the river is rising faster than it did on July 4.' Officials in Kendall and Menard counties told residents in some parts that evacuations are currently voluntary. Emergency crews in Kerr County suspended their search for victims of last week's flash floods on Sunday morning, resuming in the western parts of Kerr County by 3 p.m. The Ingram Fire Department ordered search crews to immediately evacuate the Guadalupe River corridor until further notice, warning the potential for flash floods was high. Search and rescue efforts were expected to resume on Monday, depending on river flow, Fire Department spokesperson Brian Lochte said. On a Facebook post, the department warned area residents to stay away from river beds and roads. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported "major" floods at the San Saba River at San Saba, which reached 27 feet by 1:30 p.m. Sunday, and at the Lampasas River at Kempner, which reached 33 feet. San Saba County Judge Jody Fauley issued a mandatory evacuation order for some parts of the county as the National Weather Service forecast the San Saba River would crest higher than 31 feet by midnight. By 3:20 p.m. Sunday, floodwaters had begun to recede in Lampasas, said Julian Thorpe, a communications representative at the Lampasas Sheriff's Office. 'We've made sure everyone has been evacuated from the areas that need to be evacuated. The only ongoing issue that I'm aware of is that the Kempner bridge is blocked off,' Thorpe said, adding that he didn't have details about rescues in the area. NOAA also reported 'moderate' floods at the Leon River at Gatesville and Cowhouse Creek near Pidcoke in Coryell County and at the Llano River near Junction in Kimble County. Sunday evening, the National Weather Service extended its flood watch for the region to 9 a.m. Monday, explaining that one to three inches of rain was possible overnight. An alert from the weather service's Austin-San Antonio office issued early Sunday warned that the Central Texas region is particularly susceptible to flooding as the soil remains 'near to saturation or at saturation levels' from the July 4 storms. That weekend, the destructive, fast-moving waters rose 26 feet on the Guadalupe River in just 45 minutes before daybreak on July 4, washing away homes and vehicles. Ever since, searchers have used helicopters, boats and drones to look for victims and to rescue people stranded in trees and from camps isolated by washed-out roads. This summer, flash flooding driven by bursts of heavy rain turned deadly elsewhere in Texas. In San Antonio in June, more than 7 inches of rain fell over a span of hours, prompting dozens of rescues from the fast-rising floodwaters and killing at least 13. With information from the Associated Press Disclosure: Facebook has been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here. Shape the future of Texas at the 15th annual , happening Nov. 13–15 in downtown Austin! We bring together Texas' most inspiring thinkers, leaders and innovators to discuss the issues that matter to you. Get tickets now and join us this November. TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Texas flash flood is a preview of the chaos to come
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway. Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm? Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it. President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people's everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable. Climate change doesn't chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we're now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year's cataclysmic floods. We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can't hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck. The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall. There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week's extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain 'this very exceptional meteorological condition.' That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000. The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world's leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It's one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense. What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump's administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment. Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation's chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation's seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency's core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has — as of last week — signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the country's industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is 'in alignment with evolving priorities' of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating. Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. But the country faces a larger and more daunting challenge, because this disaster — like the firestorms in Los Angeles and the hurricanes repeatedly pummeling Florida and the southeast — once again raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. It might be that in an era of what researchers are calling 'mega rain' events, a flood plain should now be off-limits.
