An even heavier evaluation is feared this Thursday, July 10 after the floods that have already left one hundred dead in Texas, where the possibilities are now scarce to find about 170 missing.
Several days after the tragedy, the investigation continued all day on Wednesday in this state of the southern United States, reached by torrential rains and mortal floods on July 4, on the day of the American national holidays.
Rescuers continued their excavations in an attempt to locate 173 people who still lack the call and whose list “could probably be low,” according to Texas governor, Greg Abbott. Last Tuesday, he said that in Kerr’s only county, 161 people were “considered missing”, a figure based on the number of people reported as disappeared by friends, family and neighbors.
County officials confirmed this figure on Wednesday, while twelve people are not in the rest of the State.
“Our number 1 task is to find all the missing persons,” insisted the governor in X.
There are still at least 170
In total, at least 119 dead linked to floods identified themselves in the center of Texas, according to local authorities. Kerr County, the most affected, deplores 95 dead, including 36 children, according to Sheriff Larry Leitha.
Among these victims are 27 boys and monitors of the Christian vacation camp for the girls of the camp, on the shores of the Guadalupe River, which housed some 750 people. Five campers and a camp instructor were still missing on Wednesday, according to Sheriff Leitha, who confirmed that another child was not found, who was not in this vacation center.
More than 2,000 rescuers, police and specialists have converged in the location of the disaster, he said. Helicopters, drones and cinofilo equipment have mobilized for several days.
By emphasizing the difficult conditions in which rescuers work, in the middle of the mud and vegetation groups, Kerville police manager Jonathan Lamb said how hundreds of people had been rescued.
Police had “door to door and waking up” on Friday and sometimes “left the windows” of their homes or caravans flooded, journalists told.
The tragedy, “as horrible as it is, it could have been much worse,” he added.
Questions about weather alerts
President Donald Trump has to go to Texas on Friday, a week just after the tragedy, accompanied by his wife Melania.
Last Monday, the White House punished the criticism that the budget cuts in national weather services gathered the reliability of forecasts and alerts. During press conferences on Tuesdays and Wednesday, local officials dodged the questions about the speed of alerts.
“There will be a return of the experience” after examining what happened, said Sheriff Leitha, while recognizing that “these questions must have an answer.”
Sudden floods
The sudden floods that arrived in the region were caused by torrential rains very early on Friday, which increased the waters of the Guadalupe of eight meters in just 45 minutes, during which it fell 225 millimeters of rain, more than a quarter of the average annual precipitation.
Sudden floods, caused by torrential rains that dry soil cannot absorb, are not uncommon. But according to the scientific community, climate change caused by human activity has made meteorological events more frequent and more intense, such as floods or droughts.
“It is a Texas area that suffers the two ends of the climate change spectrum (…) droughts become more extreme” and “when rain comes, it causes this heavier precipitation, with a greater probability of sudden floods,” said Shel Winkley, a meteorologist.
In the neighboring state of New Mexico, torrential rains caused a flood on Tuesday at the Mountain Station of Raidoso, causing the death of at least three people.
Source: BFM TV
