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Texas floods: At least 161 people still missing in one county

2025-07-09 07:49:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

At least 161 people are still missing in a single Texas county, four days after deadly and devastating flooding hit parts of the state last week, Gov. Greg Abbott said, as hopes of finding survivors alive are fading. The missing in hard-hit Kerr County include five campers and a counselor from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp for girls located on the banks of the Guadalupe River. At least 109 people have died in the disaster, including 94 in the Kerrville area alone, Abbott said at a news conference Tuesday.

Texas is not alone. New Mexico also faced a flash flood emergency, with the National Weather Service (NWS) warning of major flooding Tuesday evening. In Texas, frantic search and rescue efforts continue, with Abbott vowing that emergency crews "will not stop until every missing person is found." Abbott added that more missing people are likely to be added to the list in the coming days and urged people to report anyone they think is missing.

Gen. Thomas Suelzer of the Texas National Guard said the search effort includes Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters with rescue cranes. He said there are 13 Black Hawk helicopters assisting in the search effort, including four that arrived from Arkansas. He added that authorities are also using harvester drones. Rescue teams from multiple agencies are working together in the rescue effort, including agents from the Border Patrol, the FBI and the National Guard.

More than 250 rescue workers from various agencies have been deployed to the Kerrville area alone to help with the search and rescue effort. One of the rescue volunteers, named as Tim, told the BBC he had never seen destruction on this scale before.

"I've experienced the flooding in East Texas and Southeast Texas, as well as hurricanes, and this is a nightmare," he said.

Another rescue volunteer, named Justin, compared the effort to "trying to find a single straw in a haystack."

"There's a wide trail of destruction for miles, and there aren't enough body-searching dogs to go through all that land," he told the BBC.

"It's hard to access a lot of it with heavy machinery. The guys are trying to touch it with tools and hands, and they're not even damaging it at all - not for lack of trying."

Questions have been raised about whether authorities gave enough warning of flooding before the disaster and why people were not evacuated earlier. Experts say a number of factors contributed to the tragedy in Texas, including extreme weather, the location of vacation homes and the timing. The governor, who had spent part of the day surveying the flood zone, said authorities had issued a storm warning and were aware of possible flash flooding, but "didn't know the magnitude of the storm." No one knew it would lead to a "tsunami wall of water 30 feet high," he said.

The governor responded to a question about who was “to blame” for the high death toll by saying, “That’s the losers’ choice.” He made a sports analogy, saying that American football teams make mistakes; champion teams are the ones that don’t “point fingers.”