We only really have a best guess as to how many people are still missing from the Hill Country floods.
More than 10 days after catastrophic July Fourth floods along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, the official death toll across six Hill Country counties has risen to 132 people, while an estimated 101 remain missing, state officials said Monday.
Local and state officials said the exact number of people still missing, though, is difficult to determine. The figure presented Monday was the first time state and local officials had publicly disclosed an updated estimate since Tuesday, when that figure was 161 people.
At a press conference Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott said that 97 people were missing from the area around Kerrville, the Kerr County seat. Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said the larger estimate of 101 people includes people missing from other counties.
Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said during a commissioners court meeting Monday that the search for missing people could take up to six months, but setting a time estimate is also difficult.
“How long is it going to take? I mean, who knows?” Leitha said.
Abbott said Monday most of those still considered missing were people who did not check into hotels or campsites. Abbott said many of those people were added to the list of people who haven’t been located after friends and family reported them missing.
“Those who are missing on this list, most of them, were more difficult to identify because there was no record of them logging in anywhere,” Abbott said.
Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top official, said during a county commissioners court meeting earlier Monday that local officials don’t know the exact number of how many visitors who traveled to the Guadalupe for the holiday weekend had been caught in the flood.
“We don’t know how many of them there are,” Kelly said. “Don’t be discouraged when you hear that number, we’re doing the very best we can, but it is an unknown at this point.”
Both Kelly and Abbott said officials had a grasp of how many county residents and people at camps along the river are missing.
Before Monday’s updates, local and state officials had provided little public information about the number of people missing after Abbott first put the figure at 161 people from Kerr County. An update to the Kerr County website page providing updates about the number of confirmed deaths and people believed to be missing removed any mentions of both figures when it was updated Friday.
When The Texas Tribune asked spokespeople for Abbott’s office, Texas’ Department of Public Safety and Texas Division of Emergency Management questions last week about how the number of missing people was estimated, they directed reporters to Kerr County officials. The Joint Information Center, a team of county and state employees and volunteers which has been running public communications for the county since the disaster, did not respond to multiple requests last week to clarify how the number was found, but provided the previous, higher number Abbott provided Tuesday.
Recovery teams are thoroughly scouring large debris piles for any people who were swept into the Guadalupe after it swelled in the pre-dawn hours July 4 following heavy rain. Those efforts have been hindered further by continued rain and flooding in areas already impacted by the initial floods, pausing searches across the Hill Country.
The devastating flood is already one of the deadliest natural disasters in recent Texas history. The 1900 hurricane in Galveston claimed over 8,000 lives and the 1921 San Antonio floods killed 215 people. If official estimates that 97 people are still missing is not an overcount, then the final death toll of the Hill Country floods would surpass those of the 1921 floods, potentially making it the second most catastrophic natural disaster in Texas.
I have sympathy for the challenge of knowing who’s missing because of the flood, who’s missing for other reasons, who just hasn’t been accounted for, and so on. It’s entirely possible that some bodies of people who are not currently on this list will be found. It’s likely some will never be found. I have nothing but empathy and compassion for everyone working to find them all.
We’ve talked a lot about the death toll from this disaster, but there were a lot of injuries, too.
The San Antonio-based Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council (STRAC), which coordinates the EMS and hospital response to mass casualty events for a 22-county area, including Kerr County, reported this week that its emergency response to the July 4 floods grew to 130 units, including 61 ambulances.
“We’ve had over 6,600 patient encounters and 182 patients that have been treated and 109 of those were transported to a hospital somewhere,” said Eric Epley, the CEO of STRAC.
Epley said those figures are only for STRAC, a state coordination office for the Texas emergency medical task force, and seven other regional members.
A ninth component oversees the entire statewide task force. Created and funded by the Texas Legislature, the task force has existed since 2010.
He said local EMS transports are not included in the figures, and it’s a summary total for the task force since the Fourth of July.
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He said injuries continue to come in during current search and recovery efforts, which includes dangerous debris removal. Hundreds of emergency workers and 12,000 volunteers remain on the ground.
He said two mobile medical units, each including two doctors, two nurses, and two paramedics, are positioned at both ends of the region that saw the Guadalupe River flooding — one in Kerrville and one at Canyon Lake, west of New Braunfels.
He said the injuries include bumps and bruises and the occasional tetanus shot when someone gets a cut.
Honestly, considering the scope of the flooding, this seems like a fairly modest number. I wish them all a speedy recovery.
Here’s one more story of interest about alarms.
A small East Texas community is in the final stages of installing a state-of-the-art disaster warning system officials have been working toward for years.
Six new sirens will be placed strategically throughout the city of Crockett, about two hours north of Houston. City officials say they applied for a FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant in 2023 after a tornado tore through the county a year prior that caught many residents unprepared.
“We’re in hurricane season. And while we’re not right on the coast, depending on which side of the aisle you’re on, you get the occasional spin off tornadoes,” said Lee Standley, Crockett’s assistant city manager.
Crockett’s success in accessing federal hazard mitigation funds comes amid deafening public outcry about the role government inaction played in the lack of sirens in Kerr County and whether such a warning could have curbed the devastating July 4 flooding death toll. Rural communities notoriously struggle to access such federal funds because densely populated urban cores receive priority and rural governments don’t have the budget to pony up dollars required to match the federal share.
Experts say Crockett’s success is likely due to an uncommon mixture of timing, know-how and will power.
“It takes state and federal agencies working on the ground with the community to make sure they both understand the risk, and — very importantly — that they have the tools and resources they need to do something about it,” said Kristin Smith, a lead researcher for Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based nonprofit that helps communities with land management.
Crockett is up in Houston County, also a very red place. There are definitely obstacles to getting this kind of funding that small rural counties face, but just being dark red is not one of them unless its residents choose to make it one. The state can also provide funding for this sort of thing, which could be addressed by the forthcoming special session. Again, if the Lege wants to do that. Check back in about five weeks.