Flash floods in Texas, the United States, over the Fourth of July holiday weekend claimed the lives of at least 104 people and left many still missing, including girls attending a Christian summer camp.
Among the hardest-hit areas was Camp Mystic, which on Monday confirmed that at least 27 of its campers and counselors had died in the floodwaters.
The flooding struck the Texas Hill Country, a region west of Austin and northwest of San Antonio, where search teams are still working around the clock to locate missing persons.
The catastrophe has raised difficult questions about early warning efforts and how quickly emergency actions were taken.
The Hill Country’s landscape, characterized by dry soil, steep cliffs, and the Balcones Escarpment, makes it especially vulnerable to flash floods. “When warm air from the Gulf rushes up the escarpment, it condenses and can dump a lot of moisture. That water flows down the hills quickly, from many different directions, filling streams and rivers below,” explained Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineering professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio.
Weather experts said the deluge was driven by several contributing systems. One of them was Tropical Storm Barry, which had already made landfall in eastern Mexico and was weakening.
“First and foremost, you had Barry,” said CBS News Philadelphia meteorologist Kate Bilo. She explained that Barry’s moisture was pulled into Texas, where a combination of a low-level jet stream and an upper-level disturbance added to the moisture content.
“Nothing was really moving so you just had all of this rain coming down over the same areas and heavy, heavy rainfall rates because of all of that deep, deep moisture in the atmosphere,” Bilo added.
Flash flood watches began around midday Thursday, but by 4 a.m. Friday, the National Weather Service had issued an urgent warning predicting catastrophic damage and severe risk to human life.
By 5:20 a.m., residents around Kerrville were already witnessing rapidly rising waters. The Guadalupe River surged an astonishing 26 feet in just 45 minutes.
Officials confirmed that in Kerr County alone, home to many youth summer camps, at least 84 people, including 27 children, were killed. Other nearby counties also reported fatalities, bringing the total to at least 104.
Among those still missing were ten girls and a counselor from Camp Mystic.
Families identified some of the young victims, including 8-year-old Linnie McCown of Austin, 8-year-old Eloise Peck of Dallas, and 9-year-old Lila Bonner of Dallas.
Eighteen-year-old Chloe Childress, a counselor from the Houston area and a recent graduate of the Kinkaid School, also died.
A volunteer in Comfort, Texas, who found a T-shirt and backpack with “Camp Mystic” written on them near Ingram along the Guadalupe River, said, “I hope I find the person to return their belongings, not to find closure.”
Among the tragic deaths was Camp Mystic’s owner and director, Dick Eastland, who reportedly died while trying to save girls from the camp.
Local media and the Kerrville community’s obituary pages have been filled with tributes to him and other victims.
The full count of those missing remains unclear, especially with the influx of visitors during the July Fourth holiday. “We don’t even want to begin to estimate at this time,” said Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice on Saturday.
Survivors described the sudden floodwaters as a “pitch black wall of death” and said they had received no emergency alerts in time. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly remarked, “Nobody saw this coming,” calling the event a “100-year flood”—a term used to describe rare and extreme flood events, although it doesn’t factor in the growing impact of climate change.
Though the National Weather Service had warned residents by 4 a.m., many questioned why no evacuation notices were given sooner, particularly to vulnerable areas like youth camps along the river.
Officials acknowledged that the public often becomes desensitized to alerts, especially when previous warnings had turned out to be minor.
Kelly admitted authorities were stunned by the intensity of the flooding. “We had no reason to believe that this was gonna be any, anything like what’s happened here. None whatsoever,” he told “CBS Evening News.”
Efforts to develop a better flood warning system had been discussed, but cost and community concerns stalled progress. Former Kerr County Commissioner Tom Moser noted that a grant application for such a system had been denied. “There was local resistance over the possibility that the sirens could inadvertently be triggered, causing unwanted noise in the community,” he explained.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the state might step in to help fund the system. “If they can’t afford to do it, then let us do it,” Patrick said. “We have a special session starting two weeks from today, and I think we can take that up and do some other things of funding these sirens.”
On Sunday, after repeated questions about the lack of early warnings and evacuations, officials abruptly ended a scheduled news briefing.
Meanwhile, search efforts are continuing despite the looming threat of more rainfall. Rescue teams have been aided by volunteers, search dogs, and drones. Some crews have had to navigate difficult terrain, including areas teeming with snakes.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem praised the U.S. Coast Guard, which she said had rescued more than 200 people. Dramatic footage showed the Coast Guard conducting aerial evacuations near Kerrville as murky floodwaters engulfed the land.
Entire campgrounds and homes were obliterated, with debris scattered across the countryside. “It’s going to be a long time before we’re ever able to clean it up, much less rebuild it,” Judge Kelly said after a helicopter survey of the devastation.
Some survivors fear their communities may never fully recover, recalling similar abandonment in areas destroyed by Hurricane Helene last year.
President Trump signed a major disaster declaration for Kerr County on Sunday and pledged to visit the area Friday. “I would have done it today, but we’d just be in their way,” he said. “It’s a horrible thing that took place, absolutely horrible.”
At the Vatican, Pope Leo offered prayers for the victims during Sunday Mass. “I express my sincere condolences to all the families who have lost loved ones, in particular their daughters who were at summer camp, in the disaster caused by the flooding of the Guadalupe River in Texas in the United States.”
