Texas Flood Rescue Teams are still looking for numerous missing people when the number of fatalities increases
The search for more than 170 people is still missing After the floods on the destroyed central texas destroyed on the ground On Thursday until a seventh day, when the number of fatalities continued.
At least 121 people were confirmed deadAccording to the local law enforcement authorities and the Texas Governor Greg Abbott. After the catastrophic weekend storm, which lost the Guadalupe river in the ruins, ongoing searches have been going on to find that the Guadalupe river quickly swelled.
There are 161 people known that they are missing in Kerr County alone, officials said. The county is in the flood -prone Texas Hill Country west of Austin, the state capital, the main burden of the disaster. In other parts of the state, at least 10 people are missing.
At the request of Abbott, President Trump signed a federal disaster declaration that allowed the allowed Federal Emergency Management Agency To use your own teams to support local rescue and restoration efforts while these operations appear. Other storms after the initial floods made the efforts particularly challenging, officials said.
Camp mystical tragedy
A big one Majority of flood deaths appeared in Kerr County, where officials have confirmed that at least 96 people died.
In Camp Mystic, a summer camp of girls with huts along the river in a rural part of the Kerr County near Hunt, At least 27 camper and consultant died in what the camp called “catastrophic flood”. Some survivors said they woke up to water and stormed through the windows.
Leita said on Wednesday that the crews were still looking for five missing camers and a consultant of Camp Mystic.
A child who is not connected to the camp is also missing, said Abbott on Tuesday.
Reuters/Sergio Flores
Hundreds of rescuers, including teams from local, state and state authorities as well as volunteers, are involved in the search, said Texas Game Warten Ben Baker on Tuesday during a press conference.
“It is very tragic when you see human life. But to see a child in this loss of life is extremely tragic,” said Baker to a reporter who asked about the effects on the mental health of the savior.
Abbott said on Tuesday that he received an SMS from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. von Health and Human Services, in which the Ministry of Health and Human Services should declare an emergency for public health for the flash flouts of Texas Hill Country.
“This makes it easier for the providers of health and psychological health care from outside the state to help both by traveling to the region and through telemedicine,” said Abbott that the news was.
26 feet water rose from the Guadalupe River
Friday was the last time that a missing person was found alive in Kerr County, according to the authorities. But the search team continued to be checked Miles of the Guadalupe River Hoping to locate others who may have been lost in the floods that Kerr County flooded, Baker told reporters.
The river runs about 230 miles through a region between Austin and San Antonio, starting in Kerr County and ends along the golf coast. It is referred to “flood of falls alley” because the site makes it vulnerable to floods.
Officials in five other counties in Texas have also confirmed the deaths in the flood: Travis County, which also includes Austin as well as Burnet, Kendall, Williamson and Tom Green County.
In the early morning hours of Friday morning, the Guadalupe River in Hunt, in Kerr County, rose to about 26 feet -Etwa The height of a two-story building in the building runs of only 45 minutes, said the governor of Texas, governor Dan Patrick, during a press conference.
Camp Mystic was “terribly devastated”, Abbott later wrote in a social media post after visiting the website. Around 650 people lived there, including around 550 children, so inspection records published by the Texas Health Service Ministry and on July 2 – just two days before the flood.
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According to the records, Camp Mystic “had a written process plan that should be implemented in the event of a catastrophe”, which “was published in the administrative office on site of the camp”. But exactly what the plan contained is not clear. In contrast to at least one other camp along the Guadalupe River, whose employees spoke with the Associated Press, Camp Mystic no longer evacuated to a higher soil before flooding.
Officials from the district of Kerr said on Wednesday that the evacuation from the Hill Country is not always the best procedure during a storm, and an earlier explanation that was set up according to the floods that were published according to the floods, which said that disaster responses are complex in the Hill Country Terrain.
Rural areas such as Hunt are full of single -lane bridges that are known as “low water transitions” that create “islands” of impassable land slightly flooded and scattered, said Johnathan Lam from the police authority in Kerrville, a city in the district of Kerr. The same locations have an inconsistent cell service and are difficult to reach for first aiders.
“In Hunt, the Highway 39, the Guadalupe always crosses and again and again,” said Lam. “And all of these water crossings with low water, when flooded, they create islands on which you cannot get in, and they cannot get out, caught people in their houses and caught people in their vehicles. And that happened on the morning of July 4th.”
A temporary crew, which consisted of two Kerville officials, an emergency doctor and some volunteer firefighters, did 13 hours on Friday for 13 hours until the emergency services were reached in top-class vehicles around 5 p.m. on Wednesday.
Check the weather forecasts
Whether communities on the way of flooding received appropriate warnings Was checked strongly and is the subject of an ongoing debate. For the most part, officials from the district of Kerr have refused to respond to the requests from the reporters on this matter during their daily news conferences.
Some asked if The Rumps of the Trump government's cuts at the beginning of this year against the national weather service and his parents' agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, might prevent the local forecast to prepare the public sufficient for the extent of the floods.
Mr. Trump and his team have repeatedly rejected all proposals that federal writers affect the forecast or emergency provision before flooding.
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A CBS news analysis found that 22 warnings For Kerr County, the National Weather Service spent the storms and the floods, which used an escalating language over time. But some residents said they had neither received emergency harvest on their telephones nor did they understand how serious the situation had really become until it actually happened.
The Weather Service Offices in San Antonio and San Angelo have published warnings for the areas affected by floods. Officials from the union who represent national weather service workers said CBS News that 23 meteorologists are occupied between these offices, which together have 10 free positions.
In San Antonio, the office lacks a warning coordination meteorologist, an important role, which essentially connects between forecasters and emergency management agencies in the region to plan how information about an extreme weather event is distributed to the public and which steps are necessary to protect them.
Nim Kidd, the head of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said that his office received a forecast on Wednesday that had predicted several centimeters of rain, but “the amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in one of these forecasts.”
Dalton Rice, the city administrator of Kerrville in Kerr County, said during the same briefing that the storm had “predicted more rain than forecast”.
Rob Kelly, the judge of Kerr County, said at a press conference on July 4 that the district had “no warning system” to make the public aware of about competition. District officers had previously Discussed a public alarm system But do not continue because of the costs. The former commissioner of Kerr County, Tom Moser, said CBS News that the district had applied for a grant for the construction of the system in the past, but the application was not approved.
“If you can't afford it, let us do it,” said Lt. Governor Patrick on Monday and found that the state of Kerr County could offer resources to implement a system. “We have a special session that starts two weeks today, and I think we can do this and do some other things to finance these sirens.
When Abbott was asked about the emergency warnings on Tuesday, he said that everything would be discussed in the state legislative session.
“We will address every aspect of this storm to ensure that we set up the systems that are needed to prevent fatal flood events like this in the future,” he told reporters.
The board of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority had the financing and a contract to develop a flood surveillance system for the area. According to the joint information center, which has been set up since the floods, preliminary meetings are planned for the project, which is planned for mid -July. This project aims to create a “central dashboard to support local flood surveillance and emergency reaction”, said a spokesman for the center in a statement on CBS News.
“While real-time stream flow and precipitation data are already available via various sources, this new tool will bring these data records for Kerr County on a platform to improve user-friendliness for emergency managers,” said the explanation and added:
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