At least 120 people are dead from the devastating flooding in the Texas Hill Country.
Kerr County was hit the hardest, with at least 95 deaths, including 36 children. President Donald Trump signed a disaster declaration for the county and the Federal Emergency Management Agency is on the ground there.
Search and rescue operations are ongoing.
Here’s how the news is developing.
At 4:22 a.m. on Friday, as Texas’ Hill Country began to flood, a firefighter in Ingram – just upstream from Kerrville – asked the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office to alert nearby residents, according to audio obtained by ABC affiliate KSAT. But Kerr County officials took nearly six hours to heed this call.
“The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on State Highway 39,” the firefighter said in the dispatch audio. “Is there any way we can send a CodeRED out to our Hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?”
“Stand by, we have to get that approved with our supervisor,” a Kerr County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher replied.
The first alert didn’t come through Kerr County’s CodeRED system until 90 minutes later. Some messages didn’t arrive until after 10 a.m. By then, hundreds of people had been swept away by the floodwaters.
The statewide death toll has climbed to 120, with 172 people still considered missing, officials said.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday released the planned agenda for an upcoming special legislative session.
Four of the 18 agenda items were related to devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country.
The flood-related agenda items included legislation to improve flood warning systems, flood emergency communications, relief funding for hill country floods and natural disaster preparation & recovery.
“We delivered on historic legislation in the 89th Regular Legislative Session that will benefit Texans for generations to come,” said Abbott. “There is more work to be done, particularly in the aftermath of the devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country. We must ensure better preparation for such events in the future.”
A Kerrville-area river authority executed a contract last month for a flood warning system that would’ve been used to help with emergency response, local government officials said in response to a request by ABC News.
“An initial kickoff meeting was scheduled for mid-July,” an unidentified spokesperson for the area’s Joint Information Center wrote.
A review of minutes of local government meetings shows that some county commissioners, sheriffs and other leaders have urged improved flood warning systems in the area for decades.
During a meeting on April 17, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority’s Board of Directors unanimously voted to select a company to develop a flood warning system in Kerr County.
The contract was for “a centralized dashboard to support local flood monitoring and emergency response,” which would allow emergency managers to view real-time streamflow and rainfall data all on one platform, according to local officials.
The system would not issue public alerts, but would serve as “a decision-support resource intended to complement existing infrastructure,” officials said.
The spokesperson for the Joint Information Center told ABC News, “In light of recent events the timeline [of the new system] will be reevaluated.”
In hard-hit Kerr County, the death toll has climbed to 95, including 36 children, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said at a news conference Wednesday.
The statewide death toll stands at 118.
Kerr County’s number of missing persons remains at 161, including five campers and one counselor from Camp Mystic.
“This incident will be reviewed — you have my word,” the sheriff said, adding that improvements will be made if needed.
Kerrville police commended the officers who in the darkness of early Friday morning “realized that areas of town that traditionally don’t flood were going to flood, and that low lying areas close to the river were in danger.”
“Our officers spent hours going back and forth in that first hour. They evacuated over 100 homes and evacuated and rescued over 200 people,” Kerrville police community services officer Jonathan Lamb said.
Officers went “door-to-door, waking people up, convincing them that, ‘Yes, the floodwaters are coming, and you need to leave now,'” he said. “They rescued people out of vehicles. They rescued people out of homes that were already flooding, pulling them out of windows.”
Lamb said the tragedy would have been worse without officers’ quick-thinking.
