About 850 people have been rescued, including some by helicopter, after flash floods in Texas Hill Country killed more than 100 people over the Fourth of July holiday weekend and left others still missing, including girls attending a summer camp.

The devastation along the Guadalupe River, outside of San Antonio, has drawn a massive search effort as officials face questions over their preparedness and the speed of their initial actions, The Associated Press (AP) reported Sunday night.

“This is all of our worst nightmares,” Ginny Goldman, a mother of two teenagers and a senior strategist at REBUILD and Organizing Resilience, which is coordinating relief work and accepting donations for disaster recovery, said in a statement emailed to The Energy Mix.

“Distraught parents desperately searching for their kids, who they dropped off at summer camp for a summer of fun. Entire trailer parks destroyed, with whole families swept away in the raging waters.”

The threat of heavy rain persisted into Sunday, with a flood watch in effect for Hill Country until 10 PM.

Massive Rain Hit at Just the Wrong Time

The floods grew to their worst at the midpoint of a long holiday weekend when many people were asleep, reported AP.

The Texas Hill Country in the central part of the state is naturally prone to flash flooding due to the dry dirt-packed areas where the soil lets rain skid along the surface of the landscape instead of soaking it up. Friday’s flash floods started with a particularly bad storm that dropped most of its 30 centimetres of rain in the dark early morning hours.

After a flood watch notice midday Thursday, July 3, the National Weather Service office issued an urgent warning around 4 AM that raised the potential of catastrophic damage and a severe threat to human life. By at least 5:20 AM, some in the Kerrville City area say water levels were getting alarmingly high. The massive rain flowing down hills sent rushing water into the Guadalupe River, causing it to rise 8 metres in just 45 minutes.

Death Toll Expected to Rise

Death toll is expected to rise and the number of missing is uncertain.

In Kerr County, home to youth camps in the Texas Hill Country, searchers have found the bodies of 84 people, including 28 children, Sheriff Larry Leitha said Monday afternoon. Fatalities in nearby counties brought the total number of deaths to at least 104.

Ten girls and a counselor were still unaccounted for at Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp along the river.

For past campers, the tragedy turned happy memories into grief.

Beyond the Camp Mystic campers unaccounted for, the number of missing from other nearby campgrounds and across the region had not been released.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday had said that there were 41 people confirmed to be unaccounted for across the state and more could be missing.

Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said Monday he couldn’t give an estimate of the number of people still missing, saying only “it is a lot.”

Search-and-rescue crews at one staging area Monday said over 1,000 volunteers had been directed to Kerr County.

Officials Face Scrutiny Over Warnings

Survivors have described the floods as a “pitch black wall of death” and said they received no emergency warnings.

Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, who lives along the Guadalupe River, said Saturday that “ nobody saw this coming.” Various officials have referred to it as a “100-year-flood,” meaning that the water levels were highly unlikely based on the historical record.

And records behind those statistics don’t always account for human-caused climate change. Though it’s hard to connect specific storms to a warming planet so soon after they occur, meteorologists say that a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and allow severe storms to dump even more rain.

Additionally, officials have come under scrutiny about why residents and youth summer camps along the river were not alerted sooner than 4 AM or told to evacuate.

Officials noted that the public can grow weary from too many flooding alerts or forecasts that turn out to be minor.

Kerr county officials said they had presented a proposal for a more robust flood warning system, similar to a tornado warning system, but that members of the public reeled at the cost.

On Sunday, officials walked out of a news briefing after reporters asked them again about delays in alerts and evacuations.

Quick Action By One Summer Camp

Despite an absence of warning by local authorities, one summer camp managed to evacuate in a timely manner ahead of the flood, AP reported.

Mo-Ranch facilities manager Aroldo Barrera saw water from the Guadalupe River steadily rising on the night of July 4 and notified his boss. Camp officials acted quickly on their own, relocating about 70 children and adults staying overnight in a building near the river. With the kids safe, camp leaders including President and CEO Tim Huchton were able to avoid the catastrophe that hit at least one other camp near Hunt, where the 500-acre Mo-Ranch is located.

“They helped them pack up,” Lisa Winters, communications director for Mo-Ranch, told AP on Sunday. “They got them up, they got them out, put them up on higher ground.”

Other places fared much worse.

Monumental Clearing and Rebuilding Efforts

The flash floods have erased campgrounds and torn homes from their foundations.

“It’s going to be a long time before we’re ever able to clean it up, much less rebuild it,” Kelly said Saturday after surveying the destruction from a helicopter.

Other massive flooding events have driven residents and business owners to give up, including in areas struck last year by Hurricane Helene.

“These sorts of floods are becoming more frequent and severe as warming air temperatures produce bigger downpours,” Goldman said in the emailed statement. “This tragedy struck in a part of Texas sometimes called “flash flood alley,” but the quantities of rain that poured down in a 6-hour period were mindboggling.”

While the tragedy of lives lost has dominated headlines, the under-reported story is the impact on the year-round residents along the river, many of whom are working-class people, Goldman added. “An entire trailer park community in Ingram was swept away in that water with families still in their homes. It’s now an empty lot.”

President Donald Trump said he would likely visit the flood zone on Friday.