The confirmed death toll from Fourth of July holiday floods that ravaged the central Texas Hill Country — including a river bank cluttered with children’s summer camps — stood at 120, after police lowered it by one from a day earlier.
And the urgent search for more than 170 people still missing entered a seventh day.
Hundreds of workers in Kerr County and other central Texas communities continue to comb through piles of muddy debris, but with no live rescues reported this week, worries have swelled that the death toll could still rise.
With US President Donald Trump preparing to visit the disaster zone Friday with First Lady Melania Trump, new questions have emerged about when the first emergency alerts reached the hundreds of people in the path of nature’s fury.
At a news conference Thursday Kerrville police Sergeant Jonathan Lamb deflected a question about police radios being unable to communicate with county and emergency officials, perhaps hampering rescue efforts as the flood raged.
“I don’t have any information to that point,” he responded.
Lamb said people from all over Texas were volunteering to help with the search effort, offering their own equipment such as boats and earth moving vehicles, and suggested there was a glut of good will.
“I don’t want to say it’s been a problem, because we’re so grateful for the amount of people who want to come to this community to help,” Lamb said.
“But it’s important that we have certified professional search teams out there right now.”
Several local and state officials in recent days have deflected questions that sought to clarify Kerr County’s specific actions as the disaster rapidly unfolded.
ABC News reported early Thursday that at 4:22 am on July 4, a firefighter in Ingram, upstream of Kerrville, had asked the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office to alert residents of nearby Hunt of the coming flood.
The network said its affiliate KSAT obtained audio of the call, and that the first alert did not reach Kerr County’s CodeRED system for a full 90 minutes.
In some cases, it said, the warning messages did not arrive until after 10:00 am, when hundreds of people had already been swept away by raging waters.