Texas Flooding Death Toll Rises

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As of Monday evening, the death count stood at 104, with dozens more people missing. Rescuers, operating from boats and helicopters, said on Monday morning that more than 850 people had been saved. Survivors told harrowing stories of floating on mattresses, clinging to trees, and watching relatives swept away in the waters. 

There were also displays of heroism: Scott Ruskan, a Coast Guard swimmer who had never been on a rescue mission before, helped evacuate 165 stranded people from the flooded Camp Mystic. Silvana Garza Valdez and María Paula Zárate, two young Mexican women working as counselors at the camp, were praised by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for leading their campers to safety after writing the children’s names on their arms in permanent marker in case the worst happened. And Julian Ryan, a 27-year-old resident of Ingram, Texas, died after he severed an artery punching out a window in his house to save his family from the rising waters.

Hundreds of officials from local, state, and federal agencies are in the region to administer disaster relief and continue search efforts. But as the days pass since the floods hit, it becomes less and less likely that those missing will be found alive. “This will be a rough week,” said Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring Jr. at a press conference Monday morning. “We need your prayers.” 

Even though it’s one of the deadliest flooding events in Texas history, floods are not uncommon in this region of the state. Just last month, storms and flooding killed 13 people in the nearby city of San Antonio. The Hill Country is shot through with winding rivers flowing over bedrock-lined riverbeds surrounded by rocky bluffs, earning the central part of Texas the nickname “flash flood alley.” When record-breaking levels of moisture in the air, deposited by the remnants of a tropical storm from the Gulf of Mexico, reached the headwaters of the Guadalupe River near the small town of Hunt, it created a deadly combination. “Imagine the storm sits over the flood wave and moves at roughly the same speed downstream as the wave of water,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a video livestream on Monday. “That is exactly what happened for a very extreme, very sudden, literal wall of water.” 

As the search for the missing continues, politicians have raised questions about whether more could have been done to mitigate the flood’s destruction. Texas officials have criticized the National Weather Service (NWS), claiming the agency failed to accurately predict the amount of rainfall in the area over the weekend. “The original forecast that we received on Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted three to six inches of rain in the Concho Valley and four to eight inches of rain in the Hill Country,” Texas Division of Emergency Management chief W. Nim Kidd said at a press conference on Friday. “The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts.”

Other officials have maintained that the flood caught them by surprise. “No one knew this kind of flood was coming,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the highest-ranking elected official in the county, told reporters. 

NWS struggled to predict exactly where the heaviest rains would fall—and how much rain there would be. However, it issued a flood watch on Thursday afternoon, and at 1:14 a.m. Friday morning—more than three hours before the first floods were reported—sent out urgent flash flood warnings for Kerr County, pinging cellphones in the area. NWS also upgraded the event to a flash flood emergency, a designation reserved for extremely severe incidents, at 4:03 a.m. 

“[The flooding] wasn’t something that necessarily caught anybody by surprise. The forecasted rain totals were lower than what we saw. That continues to be a challenge in meteorology,” Chris Vagasky, a Wisconsin meteorologist, told TMD. “Pinpointing the exact location of the heaviest rainfall amount with the exact amount that is going to fall, that’s beyond the capabilities of science right now.” 

But some people, including elected officials, have questioned whether personnel shortages caused by federal layoffs inhibited the weather service’s ability to predict the flooding. “Accurate weather forecasting helps avoid fatal disasters,” Sen. Chris Murphy said in a post to X. “There are consequences to Trump’s brainless attacks on public workers, like meteorologists.” Sen. Chuck Schumer has requested a probe into whether the staffing shortages contributed to the deaths in Texas.

The White House maintains that staffing issues were not a factor. “It’s not the administration’s fault that the flood hit when it did. But there were early and consistent warnings, and again, the National Weather Service did its job,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Several experts concurred, despite there being vacancies at local NWS offices in Texas. “In this particular instance, I don’t think it had a significant impact, but it could have impacts down the road,” Vagasky said.

Vagasky also emphasized that NWS’s warnings—a flood watch the day before and alerts for the area where the flooding was expected to begin—worked as expected. “The forecast process worked really well,” he said. “It’s always a matter of the last mile. That’s what we talk about with getting the warnings to the people in the way that gets them to respond the way you want them to.” 

Several factors could have contributed to some people not being able to reach safety despite the NWS alerts. Phones without service may not have received the flood warnings, and users can turn off the emergency alerts. At Camp Mystic, for instance, campers are not permitted to carry cell phones and other devices. Additionally, some residents of the flood-prone area may have ignored the warnings. 

“Clearly, there was a major failure here between the weather service making these forecasts and issuing these warnings and the people who really needed to receive them and understand them either not receiving them or perhaps not understanding their context,” Swain said. “But there’s also an onus on local officials who have really tried to pass blame onto the weather service, which frankly, just does not appear to be accurate in this case.” 

While Kerr County officials have faulted the NWS forecasts, they have come under scrutiny for not installing warning systems or sirens typical of flood-prone areas. In 2017, the county lost out on a $1 million grant to fund a project implementing a flood warning system. The project to build the system was deemed too expensive, and Judge Kelly said taxpayers weren’t willing to pay for the safety measures.

But after this weekend’s tragedy, communities across the region will likely reevaluate how they approach flood preparedness. And in the meantime, the Hill Country faces a long road to recovery. “This is not a time for partisan finger-pointing and attacks,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said Monday. “Now, after we come through search and rescue, after we come through the process of rebuilding, there will naturally be a period of retrospection where you look back and say, ‘OK, what exactly transpired, what was the timeline, and what could have been done differently to prevent this loss of life?”

Worth Your Time

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• Writing for Christianity Today, Jill Nelson chronicled one documentary film crew’s efforts to tell the story of Ukrainian Christians under siege. “The filmmakers interviewed Mykhailo Brytsyn, pastor of Grace Church in Melitopol, and showed footage of Russian soldiers taking over a Grace Church service in September 2022. They also have Baptist pastor Okleh Perkachenko detail his narrow escape after drones targeted a prayer meeting in his yard and returned to the same place two days later, destroying his parked car. A drone struck his van while he was driving his kids, then targeted his house when he returned home,” Nelson wrote. “Moscow’s attacks on non–Russian Orthodox churches began during its first invasion in 2014. … [Film producer Colby] Barrett said his conversations with Christians in Ukraine deeply impacted his faith. The film team interviewed more than 40 people in seven cities. The Ukrainians reminded him of the persecuted church in the New Testament. ‘You’ve got this scrappy group of believers that are being basically hunted by an empire that does not like them at all,’ he said.”

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In the Zeitgeist

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Let Us Know

Do you know anyone who has been affected by the flooding in Texas?