Texas Floods Live | Rescue Operations | Search Teams Hunt for Missing in Shocking Debris Zone | N18G
#TexasFloods #TexasRescueLive #TexasDebrisHunt LIVE FROM TEXAS: Heart-Stopping Rescue Ops in Flood-Ravaged Zones
The situation in Texas has turned dire as massive floods sweep through entire neighborhoods. First responders and rescue crews are now in a race against time to find survivors buried under debris and fast-moving waters.
This exclusive coverage gives you a close-up look at the ongoing efforts to retrieve the missing, recover stranded families, and assess the damage. Shocking visuals of debris fields, collapsed homes, and flooded roads paint a grim picture of the devastation.
00:00One Hope House staffer called her the heart and soul of the place, one of the kindest people he'd ever met.
00:06Sadly, there will be many more reports like hers.
00:10CNN said Lavendera has more right now on the search for the missing.
00:14Passing through the gates of the Last Gap Ranch in Centerpoint, Texas,
00:19volunteer firefighter Razor Dobbs takes us to the edge of a sunflower field.
00:24The beauty eclipsed by heartbreak.
00:26Yeah, there's been a lot of victims in this area right here.
00:29And this is a place that's home to you.
00:31This river is this whole community's home.
00:36This river is like the backbone.
00:37This river is where people that grew up on this river and their kids are growing up on this river.
00:43This is the story of one spot along the Guadalupe River and the monumental task of finding the missing.
00:49This is a pinprick.
00:53This is a little bitty one frame of a whole movie of equipment.
00:59Right.
01:00I mean, this this operation right here is going for 30 miles plus all the way back to campus.
01:06And and so it is crazy.
01:09Breaking news that could shed light on what happened almost a week ago as one of the worst natural disasters in recent memory began to unfold.
01:17Dispatch audio from central Texas about a half hour before the first emergency warning was issued for the hardest hit county along the Guadalupe River.
01:25Now, the first call we have is from a firefighter at 337 a.m. local time.
01:30The calmness of his voice is remarkable.
01:32All things considered.
01:35Yes, ma'am.
01:36Just for your 43, the Guadalupe is starting to come up and shoemaker is no longer passable at this time.
01:41That's the Guadalupe River rising in one of the main streets flooded.
01:47And from that point on, as the audio shows, problems were growing fast.
01:50Respond to 2029 Highway 39 at two zero two nine Highway 39.
01:58It's going to be for a water rescue.
02:02Have callers house flooded.
02:04We're getting multiple calls off of 39.
02:07People are stating their houses are flooding.
02:10We're trying to advise them to get to higher area.
02:12Now, the next piece of audio is of what we reported on last night.
02:17A firefighter requesting an emergency alert be issued to the community and the dispatcher not able to make that call.
02:25Is there any way we can send a code red out to our hunt residents asking them to find higher ground or stay home?
02:3210-4, stand by.
02:33We have to get that approved with our supervisor.
02:37Well, as we reported last night, it would be 90 minutes from that call to when Kerbal's mayor told the Texas Tribune that he finally received a code red alert.
02:47Now, during that time, the Guadalupe River would overflow in a wall of water several stories high at its peak.
02:52And the 911 calls would just keep coming.
02:57We received a phone call at our fire station to have a lady.
03:00She's frantic.
03:00She's at Casa Bonita 117 Corto Way or Casa Bonita Lodges.
03:07And she said her children are on top of one of the cabanas and they're trapped.
03:13Well, the area is home to many summer camps, as you know.
03:16This one, boys rode out the worst of it in the rafters of their cabin when water reached the top of their bunks.
03:22Camp Mystic, for girls, though, was, of course, the hardest hit.
03:24This is a new image of some of the evacuation efforts early on.
03:28In a moment, we'll be joined by one of the staffers who was there that night and took this photo.
03:32But as would become clear, though, 27 campers and staffers, many of the campers as young as eight, tried to get out and didn't make it.
03:39And when daylight came a few hours later, the true dimensions of it all became clear.
03:43In addition to all the dead, dozens and dozens of people missing.
03:47And tonight, they still are, upwards of 160 people in addition to the 120-plus fatalities.
03:53And as to that dispatch audio tonight, the man who recorded it and helped install Kerr County's code red system spoke with CNN's Erin Burnett about the timing of the alerts that followed.
04:02So are you saying as early as 3.27 a.m. that things could have played out very differently in terms of alerts and code reds and, frankly, just to be blunt, hundreds possibly of lives saved?
04:17Well, it's too late for Hunt.
04:20The water's up, and the volunteer fire department guy's been there.
04:25He knew it was coming because he's awake and he's sitting in his truck looking at it.
04:29But the water's come up, and the wall of water's heading down to Ingram.
04:33So you hear some radio traffic in a little bit that's going to warn people that warn to tone out Ingram that they need to start evacuating the RV park downriver.
04:45And I fully believe that a really quick action could have, and I'm not going to hindsight at all, but a quick action could have helped people downriver.
04:57But at 3.30, once it hit 4.30, it was just too late.
05:03The code red would have been ineffective, in my opinion.
05:07Well, for more on the timeline, we're joined by CNN's Shimon Prokupes, who is in Kerr County.
05:12So, Shimon, we know that the National Weather Service sent a flash flood warning just after 1 a.m. early on the morning of July 4th.
05:18Have local officials explained if they were monitoring the weather in the hours between when that warning went out and when they started to send alerts out to residents?
05:28No, they've not, Anderson, and that's the key thing in all of this.
05:32It wasn't until hours later when you hear from city officials one of them was running, another one gets woken up, you know, much later than 1 o'clock when the flooding is actually occurring.
05:44And I think that is what's so significant about that audio that we just heard, is that everything that that audio tells us is that by the time authorities were in the midst of this, they were dealing with this, it was already too late.
05:57People were already in danger and they were surprised by all of this, the people, the community was because all of this happened in the middle of the night.
06:06And we have no information from any of the authorities here on the local level, the county officials, the city officials, that any of them were monitoring the weather at 1 in the morning, at 2 in the morning, at 3 in the morning.
06:18When days before the Texas Department of Emergency Management was putting out press releases telling people, beware, this is coming.
06:27There could be a concern here.
06:28We have no accountability from locals as to what they were doing, how they were preparing, and whether or not they were communicating with state officials who were having these concerns, Anderson's.
06:39And that is the thing, that is the key now here, what were they doing, how were they preparing, were they anticipating any of this, were they in communication with the weather services, any meteorologists, any people down and up the river to see what was going on.
06:55And so far, there is nothing here from the officials on that.
06:59I understand you're in a hard hit area right now that only a few media outlets have been able to get access to before.
07:04What are you seeing?
07:05Well, Anderson, it's just shocking.
07:09We are lucky enough to sort of tell these stories because this community wants this story told because this area has been cut off from public access by the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state police here.
07:24This is Bumblebee Hill.
07:25It's in Ingram.
07:27But I just want to show you here, Anderson, the devastation here.
07:30This is, you know, not really that close to the river, but these are all the homes that suffered from the water damage.
07:37You see all of the destruction and the garbage and people starting to clean up their homes.
07:42People were on the roofs of these homes as the floodwaters were rising, riding out the storm to try and survive.
07:51I want to just quickly show you one other thing, Anderson, just to show you the power of this river and what was happening here.
07:58Here's how this went.
08:00This river is, that's 39.
08:03So it's on the other side of that road.
08:06It went over that road, through this creek, up the back way here, all the way into this house, Anderson.
08:14And quickly, one more thing I want to show you, this here is the waterline.
08:19This is the waterline into this home.
08:22The people were sleeping.
08:23There were eight people in this home, including kids, and they wrote.
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09:06That the waters would rise in such a way.
09:12I mean, this house, when they built this house, it was even built higher by them so that they could avoid any potential flooding.
09:19And even that didn't work.
09:20And that water went across the street into all of those homes.
09:24Just, you know, Anderson, just utter devastation here.
09:27And it's just so sad to see all this, Anderson.
09:30Just so sad.
09:32Yeah.
09:32I'm glad they were able to get onto the roof in time.
09:36Shimon, thank you very much.
09:37We learned a bit tonight about another one of the now more than 120 men, women, and children who lost their lives almost a week ago.
09:44Sherry Richardson was just a few weeks away from her 65th birthday.
09:47She was a grandmother of five, a mother of two.
09:50She lived in a small cabin near the nonverbal disabled adults and children that she worked with, with an organization called Hope House.
09:57They all got out okay, but she didn't make it.
10:00One Hope House staffer called her the heart and soul of the place, one of the kindest people he'd ever met.
10:05Sadly, there will be many more reports like hers.
10:09CNN's Ed Lavendera has more right now on the search for the missing.
10:12Passing through the gates of the Last Gap Ranch in Centerpoint, Texas, volunteer firefighter Razor Dobbs takes us to the edge of a sunflower field.
10:23The beauty eclipsed by heartbreak.
10:26Yeah, there's been a lot of victims in this area right here.
10:29And this is a place that's home to you.
10:31This river is this whole community's home.
10:35This river is like the backbone.
10:37This river is where people that grew up on this river, and their kids are growing up on this river.
10:43This is the story of one spot along the Guadalupe River and the monumental task of finding the missing.
10:49This is a pinprick.
10:53This is a little bitty one frame of a whole movie of equipment.
10:59Right.
10:59I mean, this operation right here is going for 30 miles plus.
11:04Yeah, all the way back to Camp Vista.
11:05Yeah.
11:06And so it is crazy.
11:09It could shed light on what happened almost a week ago as one of the worst natural disasters in recent memory began to unfold.
11:17Dispatch audio from central Texas about a half hour before the first emergency warning was issued for the hardest hit county along the Guadalupe River.
11:25Now, the first call we have is from a firefighter at 337 a.m. local time.
11:30The calmness of his voice is remarkable, all things considered.
11:33Yes, ma'am.
11:36Just for your 43, the Guadalupe is starting to come up, and Shoemaker is no longer passable at this time.
11:43That's the Guadalupe River rising in one of the main streets, flooded.
11:46And from that point on, as the audio shows, problems were growing fast.
11:51Respond to 2029, Highway 39, 2029, Highway 39.
11:58It's going to be for a water rescue.
12:01Have callers house flooded.
12:04We're getting multiple calls off of 39.
12:06People are stating their houses are flooding.
12:10We're trying to advise them to get to a higher area.
12:13Now, the next piece of audio is of what we reported on last night.
12:17A firefighter requesting an emergency alert be issued to the community, and the dispatcher is not able to make that call.
12:23Is there any way we can send a code red out to our hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?
12:3210-4, stand by.
12:33We have to get that approved with our supervisor.
12:36As we reported last night, it would be 90 minutes from that call to when Kerrville's mayor told the Texas Tribune that he finally received a code red alert.
12:46Now, during that time, the Guadalupe River would overflow in a wall of water several stories high at its peak, and the 911 calls would just keep coming.
12:56We received a phone call at our fire station to have a lady.
12:59She's frantic.
13:01She's at Casa Bonita 117 Corto Way, or Casa Bonita Lodges, and she said her children are on top of one of the cabanas, and they're trapped.
13:13Well, the area is home to many summer camps, as you know.
13:16This one, boys rode out the worst of it in the rafters of their cabin when water reached the top of their bunks.
13:22Camp Mystic, for girls, though, was, of course, the hardest hit.
13:24This is a new image of some of the evacuation efforts early on.
13:27In a moment, we'll be joined by one of the staffers who was there.
