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A Christian girls’ summer camp in central Texas said yesterday that at least 27 campers and counsellors were among those who perished in the catastrophic flooding over the July 4 weekend, while emergency responders still searching for dozens of missing people faced the prospect of more heavy rains and thunderstorms.
The death toll from Friday’s floods exceeds 95, and officials expect it to rise as search teams waded through mud-laden riverbanks and flew over the flood-stricken landscape, even as they still hope to find more survivors.
“This will be a rough week,” Mayor Joe Herring Jr said.
The vast majority of the victims – 48 adults and 27 children – died in Kerr County, where the Guadalupe River was transformed by pre-dawn torrential downpours into a raging torrent in less than an hour on Friday. The waters tore through Camp Mystic, a nearly century-old Christian girls’ retreat on the banks of the river.
“Our hearts are broken alongside our families that are enduring this unimaginable tragedy,” the camp said in a statement yesterday. Ten girls and a camp counsellor are still missing, officials said yesterday.
“Texas is grieving right now,” US Senator Ted Cruz said. “The pain, the shock of what has transpired these past few days has broken the heart of our state.”
Richard ‘Dick’ Eastland, 70, the co-owner and director of Camp Mystic, died trying to save the children at his camp during the flood, multiple media including the Austin American-Statesman reported.
Eastland and his wife Tweety Eastland have owned the camp since 1974, according to the camp’s website.
“If he wasn’t going to die of natural causes, this was the only other way, saving the girls that he so loved and cared for,” Eastland’s grandson, George Eastland, wrote on Instagram.
In Hill Country, where the worst flooding occurred, almost 10cm of more rain were expected to fall, with isolated areas getting up to 25cm of rain, said Allison Santorelli, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Centre in College Park, Maryland.
Santorelli said that the potential new floods could be particularly dangerous because of the water-saturated soil and all the debris already in and around the river.
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