Death toll from Texas flash floods tops 100, with scores still missing
The death toll from the July Fourth flash flood that ravaged a swath of central Texas Hill Country rose on Tuesday, July 8, to at least 109, many of them children, as search teams pressed on through mounds of mud-encrusted debris for scores of people still missing.
The bulk of fatalities and the search for additional victims were concentrated in Kerr County and the county seat of Kerrville, a town of 25,000 residents transformed into a disaster zone when torrential rains struck the region early last Friday, unleashing deadly flooding along the Guadalupe River.
The bodies of 94 flood victims, more than a third of them children, have been recovered in Kerr County alone as of Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said at a late-afternoon news conference after touring the area by air.
He said 161 other people were known to be missing in the flood zone.
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00:00It's important that we also be conducting other business affecting this storm.
00:06The hearts of our fellow Texans are breaking every single day because of what people of this community and the surrounding area are going through.
00:17There's nothing more important on our hearts and minds than the people of this community, especially those who are still lost.
00:26I told them what we were doing, not just today, but what we are going to be doing for the days, weeks, and months to come.
00:35This is what they needed to hear.
00:38They need to know Texas is in this with the people in the Hill Country right here.
00:46We are not leaving until this job is finished.
00:50First, the numbers that I have is that there are 94 fatalities, 94 fatalities associated with this flooding event in this area.
01:06Separate from that, in other flooding events in other parts of the state of Texas, there's another 15 fatalities for a total of 109.
01:17To put this into perspective, just in the Kerr and Kendall counties alone, there are far more fatalities than there were in Hurricane Harvey.
01:28That's how catastrophic this is.
01:31Just in the Kerr County area alone, there are 161 people who are known to be missing.
01:41And again, that comes from combined law enforcement efforts, 161 known people who are missing.
01:47And again, know this, we will not stop until every missing person is accounted for.
01:58So obviously, the local officials who were on the ground at the time would know the most about that.
02:03But let's talk about it in this way.
02:06That's going to be one of the issues that we begin to address in less than two weeks in the state legislature.
02:11We're going to address every aspect of this storm to make sure that we're going to have in place the systems that are needed to prevent deadly flooding events like this in the future.
