Officials in flood-hit central Texas on Wednesday once again deflected growing questions over whether more could have been done to warn residents before the July 4 flash floods that killed at least 119 people.
At a morning news briefing in Kerr County, where the vast majority of victims died, Sheriff Larry Leitha defended the actions of emergency responders as the tragedy unfolded in the early morning hours on Friday.
Pressed about how long it took for officials to respond to “Code Red” alerts about the flash flooding, Leitha declined to respond directly, saying his focus was on finding missing people and that a full analysis of what, if anything, went wrong would come later.
“We will answer those questions,” he said. “We’re not running, we’re not going to hide from everything. That’s going to be checked into at a later time. I wish I could tell you that time.”
As of Tuesday evening, there were more than 170 people still unaccounted for, according to figures provided by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, suggesting the death toll could still rise significantly. Searchers have not found anyone alive since Friday.
The Kerr County seat, Kerrville, was devastated when torrential rains lashed the area early on Friday, dropping more than a foot of rain in less than an hour and swelling the Guadalupe River to a height of nearly 30 feet (9 meters).
The death toll in Kerr County was 95 as of Wednesday morning, including three dozen children, Leitha told reporters.
That figure includes at least 27 campers and counsellors from Camp Mystic, a Christian girls’ summer retreat on the banks of the Guadalupe.
In Hunt, a community in western Kerr County, Jose Olvera’s family set up a shrine near the spot where he and his wife were swept away by floodwaters outside their ranch house.
The family found Olvera’s body next to a nearby stream, his foot protruding from underneath a tree branch. His wife remains missing.
“This could have been avoided, something like this,” said Olvera’s son, Macedonio, sitting outside the home and surrounded by debris.
“There are ways to detect things, appropriate alerts to let the community know what is happening.”
Abbott on Tuesday sought to push aside questions about who was to blame for the mounting death toll. Invoking American football as an analogy, he told reporters that blame was the “word choice of losers” in the sport revered in Texas.
“Every football team makes mistakes,” he said. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones who say, ‘Don’t worry about it, man. We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again and we’re going to win this game.'”
The governor said the Texas legislature would convene a special session later this month to investigate the emergency response and provide funding for disaster relief.
Communication Challenges
The state emergency management agency warned last Thursday, on the eve of the disaster, that parts of central Texas faced a threat of flash floods, based on National Weather Service forecasts.
But twice as much rain as forecast ended up falling over two branches of the Guadalupe just upstream of the fork where they converge, sending all of that water racing into the single channel where it slices through Kerrville, City Manager Dalton Rice has said.
The amount of rainfall in such a short period of time made it impossible to order evacuations without further endangering people, Rice said. He also noted that the county is sprawling and rural, with spotty cell phone service, creating communication challenges.
County officials had considered installing an early-warning system about eight years ago but abandoned the proposal after failing to secure state grant money to fund it, according to the Houston Chronicle. Kerr County sits at the centre of a section of Texas Hill Country that is particularly susceptible to flash floods, due to the terrain.
Elsewhere on Tuesday, three people died in New Mexico, two of them young children, when a flash flood swept through the village of Ruidoso in the mountains around 135 miles (217 km) southeast of Albuquerque, the state’s largest city.
The flooding was sparked by heavy rain that fell on wildfire burn scars, causing a rapid runoff of water that saw the Rio Ruidoso River rise to a record 20 feet, five feet higher than its previous historical high, the village said in a statement.
Scientists say climate change has made extreme flood events more frequent and damaging by creating warmer, wetter weather patterns.
(With inputs from Reuters)
