By Rich McKay
(Reuters) -A frantic search continued on Saturday for about two dozen people still missing from a century-old Christian girls’ camp in central Texas after flash floods in the area killed at least 24 at the start of the U.S. Independence Day weekend and prompted the rescue of hundreds of others.
In a break for rescue crews, authorities said flood waters on Saturday were receding in the area around the Guadalupe River, about 85 miles (137 km) northwest of San Antonio, where at least 237 people were rescued, with more than 100 by helicopters. Another 23-to-25 people from the Camp Mystic summer camp were missing, most of them reported to be young girls. The river waters rose 29 feet rapidly near the camp.
The U.S. National Weather Service said that the flash flood emergency has largely ended for parts of Kerr County in south-central Texas Hill Country, about 65 miles (105 km) northwest of San Antonio, following thunderstorms that dumped as much as a foot of rain early on Friday.
A flood watch, however, remains in effect until 7 p.m. on Saturday from the San Antonio-Austin, Texas, region, with scattered showers expected throughout the day, said Allison Santorelli, a meteorologist with the NWS Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.
“In terms of the Guadalupe River, the extreme flood waters have receded,” she said. “It’s no longer at extreme flood stages. And we’re not expecting additional impacts.”
At a news conference late on Friday, almost 18 hours after the July Fourth crisis began, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said search-and-rescue operations would press on through the night and into Saturday.
Abbott said resources devoted to the effort would be “limitless.”
President Donald Trump said on Friday that “we’ll take care of them,” when asked about federal aid for the disaster.
Dalton Rice, city manager for Kerrville, the county seat, told reporters on Friday that the extreme flooding struck before dawn with little or no warning, precluding authorities from issuing advance evacuation orders as the Guadalupe River swiftly rose above major flood stage.
“This happened very quickly, over a very short period of time that could not be predicted, even with radar,” Rice said. “This happened within less than a two-hour span.”
State emergency management officials had warned as early as Thursday that west and central Texas faced heavy rains and flash flood threats “over the next couple days,” citing National Weather Service forecasts ahead of the holiday weekend.
The weather forecasts, however, “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw,” W. Nim Kidd, director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, told a news conference on Friday night.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; editing by Diane Craft)
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