Before dawn Friday morning, city manager Dalton Rice went for a jog along the Guadalupe River in Kerrville, Texas. He finished his run around 4 a.m. as a light rain set in. An hour later, he began receiving emergency calls: The river had flooded out of control.
Torrential rains were dumping into the Guadalupe. In just 45 minutes, the river surged about 26 feet (8 meters), sending walls of water sweeping into camps and RV parks busy with Fourth of July holiday visitors.
At least 82 people have died and scores are missing, including children, after the catastrophic flooding devastated an all-girls summer camp. With heavy rains still battering Texas on Sunday, politicians are questioning whether federal, state and local officials were adequately prepared.
The area remains at risk of further inundation as thunderstorms move through west central Texas, bringing pockets of very heavy rainfall in a short amount of time, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasters have extended a flood watch into Monday evening, warning that any additional rain “will almost immediately runoff due to the saturated grounds.”
Texas has been at the epicenter of extreme weather events in recent years. In 2024 alone, Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to millions, a windstorm punched windows out of Houston skyscrapers and a massive wildfire blazed across the Panhandle. The onslaught of disasters has come as warmer ocean waters and moister air, two results of global warming, add fuel to storms.
Climate change also makes it harder to predict the speed at which disasters can spin out of control, like in the Maui wildfires that killed dozens in 2023 and the “rapid intensification” that accelerated Hurricane Milton in Florida last year.
In Texas, the loss of life is so astounding that on Sunday search crews had to break down efforts into a grid pattern to recover bodies, Rice said during a news conference. “We have increased our number of personnel that are navigating the really challenging shores along the bank line,” he said.
Trump Visit
Some politicians are raising questions over the accuracy of weather forecasts issued before the disaster.
“The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of the forecasts,” Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said in a briefing in which he also said the National Weather Service underestimated the severity of the storms.
President Donald Trump said he will “probably” go to Texas on Friday to visit the areas affected by the floods. “I would have done it today, but we’d just be in their way,” he told reporters Sunday.
The weather service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Commerce Department, said that emergency management officials were briefed Thursday morning, a flood watch was posted in the afternoon and by 6:22 p.m., forecasters were warning of flash floods and saying rain could fall at rates of more than 3 inches per hour.
Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat whose district covers parts of San Antonio, said the possible role of staffing cuts at the National Weather Service should be investigated. He said there’s no conclusive evidence that cuts impacted the outcome of forecasts.
“The priority is on making sure that those girls are found and are saved and anybody else who may be missing at this point,” he said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “After that, we have to figure out in the future how we make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
The Texas state legislature will take up the issue of warning systems in a special session, Governor Greg Abbott told reporters later Sunday.
The weather service has two offices in the area, said Tom Fahy, legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization. San Antonio has six vacancies out of 26, while San Angelo has four out of 23 — one of the best-staffed in the US on a percentage basis, he said.
At least 20.92 inches fell southwest of Bertram, Texas, about 35 miles northwest of the capital in Austin, the US Weather Prediction Center said. Two other towns reported more than 20 inches of rain and four more than 15 inches. In some areas, flooding started around midnight on Friday morning.
Many residents in the area said they didn’t receive weather service warnings to their phones before 7 a.m., though reports are mixed.
Andy Brown, a Travis County judge, said during a press conference that he met with survivors in one flooded area who told him they had received alerts from the National Weather Service at noon, before the event began, and then during the night.
Federal officials will look into whether more warnings could have been provided, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a briefing. At the same event, she also said there were federal resources “here on the ground since the beginning of this crisis started, since this weather event did start and even before it came, we were alerted.”
