Residents in central Texas were observing a day of prayer on Sunday for at least 68 people killed and others missing in Friday’s devastating flash flooding, as a search and rescue operation for survivors began to morph into a grim exercise of recovering bodies.
Relatives continued an anxious wait for news of 11 girls and one camp counsellor still unaccounted for from a riverside summer camp that was overwhelmed by flash flooding from the Guadalupe River, which rose 26ft (8 meters) in 45 minutes on Friday morning after torrential pre-dawn rain north of San Antonio.
At least 59 people were confirmed killed in Kerr county, many of them children, and nine more fatalities were reported in neighboring counties.
Authorities said about 850 people had been rescued, with more than 1,700 people involved in the search and rescue operation.
By Sunday morning, water levels had fallen to just a foot or two higher than before the flood.
Further rain on Saturday and into Sunday morning hampered search efforts of crews using boats, helicopters and drones. The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, promised responders would remain at the scene until every individual was recovered. He said he instructed responders to assume all missing persons were still alive.
The US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, remained in Texas after Abbott signed a request for a federal emergency declaration that would free additional resources to support local efforts. President Donald Trump approved it on Sunday.
Noem defended the federal response to the disaster at a press conference Saturday afternoon, promising that “relief will be coming”. Yet questions continued to swirl over the Trump administration’s actions that some believe could have contributed to the severity of the event.
In particular, harsh budget cutbacks affecting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) have left numerous key weather forecasting offices short of staff, including the Austin-San Antonio office of the National Weather Service (NWS).
Officials defended the service on Sunday, insisting warnings of flash flooding were issued in advance. But some residents said they hadn’t received them. And an initial NWS forecast had called for only 3-6in of rain – not the intense downpour that triggered the deadly flooding.
Matthew Stone, 44, of Kerrville, said police came knocking on doors – but that he had received no warning on his phone.
“We got no emergency alert. There was nothing” until suddenly there was “a pitch-black wall of death”, Stone said.
Republican Texas congressman Chip Roy, whose district includes Kerr county, said at the Sunday press conference that actions taken before and during the flooding would be scrutinized.
“There’s going to be a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of second-guessing,” he said. “There’s a lot of people saying ‘why’ and ‘how,’ and I understand that.”
Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas decision of emergency management, said Friday that early NWS forecasts “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw”. His comments prompted a defense of the service Sunday by the private weather service AccuWeather, which said in a statement that Friday’s pre-dawn warnings “should have provided officials with ample time to evacuate camps such as Camp Mystic and get people to safety”.
Meanwhile, Tom Fahy, legislative director for the NWS employees organization, told CNN that he believed the service’s Texas offices had “adequate staffing and resources”. Yet he said the Austin-San Antonio office was missing a warning coordination meteorologist, a crucial link between the NWS and emergency managers.
A Noaa official told the network that the vacancy, along with several other key roles, were the result of the White House offering early retirement incentives after Trump’s second presidency began in January.
Abbott said late Saturday that he had visited Camp Mystic, a popular Christian summer retreat for youths on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Hunt.
The camp, which had more than 700 girls in attendance at the time of the flood, was overrun by a torrent of water, sweeping away 27 that were initially missing. The number of missing from there by Sunday had dropped to 11, as the death toll climbed, according to officials.
Sarah Marsh, an eight-year-old girl from Mountain Brook, Alabama, who was at the camp, was found dead Saturday, as was Jane Ragsdale, director of the nearby Heart O’the Hills camp, who was described by friends as a “pillar of the community”.
“It, and the river running beside it, were horrendously ravaged in ways unlike I’ve seen in any natural disaster,” Abbott said in a post to X after touring the ruins of the Camp Mystic with rescue crews.
“The height the rushing water reached to the top of cabins was shocking. We won’t stop until we find every girl who was in those cabins.”
Identities of more of those killed were becoming known on Sunday, as survivors shared extraordinary stories of how they were spared.
Two children from Dallas, Blair Harber, 13, and her 11-year-old sister Brooke, were among those confirmed dead, by officials at the Catholic high school they attended. They were staying at a riverside cabin with their grandparents, who are missing.
Their father, RJ Harber, who was staying with his wife in an adjacent cabin, told CNN that Blair “was a gifted student and had a generous kind heart” and that Brooke “was like a light in any room, people gravitated to her and she made them laugh and enjoy the moment”.
High school soccer coach Reece Zunker and his wife, Tina, were among the Kerr county victims, the Kerryville Daily Times reported – and their two children are missing.
The newspaper also identified teacher Jeff Wilson among the victims, with his wife, Amber, and son Shiloh unaccounted for.
Officials in Burnet county told KHOU TV that a local fire department chief was among three fatalities there.
The Associated Press contributed to this report