Authorities in US state face questions on whether or not they issued correct warnings upfront of rain-fuelled flooding.
Rescuers within the US state of Texas are scrambling to find greater than two dozen youngsters nonetheless lacking from a Christian summer season camp after a strong storm brought about flash floods that authorities say have killed not less than 27 individuals.
Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha informed reporters on Saturday that the dying toll included 9 youngsters.
Leitha mentioned round 800 individuals had been evacuated from the area, about 137km (85 miles) northwest of San Antonio, as flood waters receded on Saturday morning.
Torrential downpour on Friday brought about the fast-flowing Guadalupe River to rise almost 9 metres (29 toes) close to the Camp Mystic summer season camp, the place round 750 youngsters have been staying.
Twenty-seven attendees have been nonetheless unaccounted for, based on Dalton Rice, metropolis supervisor of the close by city of Kerrville in Kerr County.
The Coronary heart O’ The Hills summer season camp, situated about 1.6km (1 mile) from Camp Mystic, confirmed on Saturday that its director, Jane Ragsdale, was among the many lifeless.
Whereas the Nationwide Climate Service (NWS) mentioned the flash-flood emergency had largely ended for Kerr County – the epicentre of the flooding – it warned of extra heavy rain to come back, sustaining its flood watch till 7pm native time (00:00 GMT on Sunday).
Rice mentioned that greater than 1,000 rescuers have been on the bottom to assist with search-and-rescue efforts. Helicopters and drones have been getting used, with some individuals being plucked from timber. US Coast Guard helicopters had flown in to help.
“They’re wanting in each doable location,” mentioned Rice, including that search crews have been dealing with harsh situations whereas scouring waterlogged rivers, culverts and rocks.
Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou-Castro mentioned that rescue employees had promised to “not hand over till the final individual is discovered – both alive or their physique is recovered”.
“That may be a tall order given simply how catastrophic these floods have been. We’re speaking a few area that’s dotted with hills and with canyons,” she mentioned.
She added that youngsters within the camps had been significantly weak to the floodwaters, “which rose by eight metres [26 feet] in lower than an hour, in a single day as they slept”.
Authorities underneath scutiny
The flooding in the course of the night time on the Fourth of July vacation weekend caught many residents, campers and officers without warning.
Authorities have come underneath rising scrutiny over whether or not they issued correct warnings and whether or not sufficient preparations have been made.
State emergency administration officers had warned as late as Thursday that west and central Texas confronted heavy rains and flash flood threats “over the following couple days”, citing NWS forecasts forward of the vacation weekend.
The climate forecasts, nonetheless, “didn’t predict the quantity of rain that we noticed”, W Nim Kidd, director of the Texas Division of Emergency Administration, mentioned throughout a information convention on Friday night time.
“Quite a lot of questions are being requested about why there weren’t earlier evacuations,” mentioned Al Jazeera’s Zhou-Castro. “They knew there may be rain, they simply didn’t know the place it might hit, and when it did, it certainly was catastrophic.”
On Saturday morning, US President Donald Trump mentioned the federal authorities was working with state and native officers to reply to the flooding.
“Our Courageous First Responders are on web site doing what they do finest,” Trump wrote on his Fact Social platform, including that Secretary of Homeland Safety Kristi Noem would quickly be on the bottom.
The weekend catastrophe echoes a catastrophic flood nearly 40 years in the past alongside the Guadalupe River, the place a bus and a van leaving a church camp encountered floodwaters and 10 youngsters drowned attempting to flee, based on a NWS abstract of the 1987 storm.
