KERRVILLE — Recovery efforts for more than 100 missing people lost in the deadly July 4 flood in the Texas Hill Country ramped up again this week after another deluge of rainfall in the area. On Wednesday, quiet lingered over residents who surveyed the damage and paid respects to the victims of the flash flood.
A washed-out Guadalupe River appeared stuck in time nearly two weeks after the catastrophe in Kerr County and surrounding areas. Large trees laid on their sides and remnants of debris lingered throughout what was left. Some residents of the area, like 71-year-old Virginia Mann, say it’s unlike anything they’ve seen in the river before.
“Nothing like this, no devastation along the river banks and with debris that high,” she said. “I mean, big 18-wheelers can be buried in them. I mean, they are digging out and finding big trucks underneath there.”
Mann and her husband live about 17 miles outside of Kerrville in an area called Mountain Home. They visited town on Wednesday for supplies after her driveway was washed away in more rainfall this week. She said her yard has been left saturated after receiving at least 8 inches of rain during the past few days.
Earlier this week, search crews temporarily suspended their operations after an additional 10 inches of rain fell on the area.
Elsewhere in Central Texas, the Leander area north of Austin was hit with devastating flash floods, and a Big Sandy Creek bridge connected to a Leander housing community of about 200 homes was impassable.
Recovery efforts around Kerrville remained in full force Thursday as search and rescue crews continued looking for missing people. Several Central Texas roads remain closed, including a main Kerr County highway into Hunt — an area teeming with law enforcement and volunteers.
Helicopters circled overhead, making frequent trips across the river.
Spread across a long chain-link fence in downtown Kerrville were hundreds of flowers, sticky notes and photographs of several of the men, women and children who were discovered dead after the floodwaters surged early July 4. A photograph of Greta Toranzo, a 10-year-old flood victim from Houston, was adorned with stickers and surrounded with flowers, a stuffed pig and an American flag.
Toranzo, a Houston ISD student, was missing for longer than a week before she was found dead in Kerr County. She was one of more than two dozen girls who died in the flood while attending Camp Mystic in Hunt. Earlier this month, more than 100 people gathered at a candlelight vigil in front of Toranzo’s school to pray for her and others who were considered missing at the time.
At least 134 people have died in flash floods across the state this month, including 107 in Kerr County alone.
Questions have been raised about whether residents were given timely warnings before the wall of floodwaters came their way. The National Weather Service issued flood watch warnings the night before, and alerts were escalated around 1 a.m. warning that people in the area were in immediate danger, according to news reports.
But for residents like Mary Denay, those dings on her cell phone were all too familiar. She said catastrophic storms were nothing new for her as she had previously lived in south Louisiana and then in Houston for 20 years.
When she received the initial alert on her phone before the July 4 flood, she said it wasn’t supposed to rain for another five hours, so she went back to bed.
“I had just gone to sleep,” Denay said. “Then the second alert came on. I mean, we got quite a few alerts. But the thing is, some of these people didn’t even have cell service.”
Cell service is particularly spotty further down the road in Hunt, where Camp Mystic is situated. Her story reflects the fatigue many have reported after barrages of emergency alerts over the years.
In an interview with NBC News this week, Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said his weather alerts on his cell phone were turned off when the floodwaters surged.
“I could see the river, and the river was just, it was wider than it normally was, number one, and every tree was laid, it looked like you had taken a knife and scalped the tree and then laid it down,” Denay recalled as she looked across the Guadalupe River flood damage Wednesday.
In a statement Wednesday, Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring, Jr. said the city will take a hard look at how emergency alerts were delivered during the flood.
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