Texas floods | Nearly 70 dead, including 21 children

(Hunt, Texas) The assessment of floods in Texas, in the south of the United States, now is around 70 dead and will further increase, local authorities announced on Sunday, engaged in the increasingly desperate search for disappeared children in the disaster.

For Kerr’s only county, the most affected, “we have identified 59 deaths”, 38 adults and 21 children declared the sheriff, Larry Lethia, during a press conference, stressing that this assessment should further rise in the coming hours.

Among the approximately 750 children participating in a Christian summer camp for girls on the banks of the Guadalupe river, the number of missing people is now 11 children and an instructor, said the sheriff.

“We are witnessing the discovery of bodies everywhere,” said the administrative manager of the city of Kerrville, Dalton Rice.

To the 59 dead in the county of Kerr are added nine deaths counted in neighboring counties.

These sudden floods were caused by torrential rains in the center of the state very early Friday, the day of the American national holiday, which raised the waters of the Guadalupe of eight meters in just 45 minutes. It suddenly fell nearly 300 millimeters/rain, a third of the average annual precipitation.

In Hunt, the locality where the summer camp is located, 50 volunteers came from several cities in Texas to participate in research, in small groups of two or three.

Adam Durda, 45, was three hours away with his wife, Amber, to try to find four young people in her twenties who lived in a house “carried away by the waves”, at the request of the family of one of them, he explains to AFP.

“Help them mourning”

Another volunteer, Justin Morales, 36, confides having discovered with his companions on Saturday the bodies of “two little girls”, then Sunday morning that of another “trapped in a tree”, stressing that it was one of the residents of the summer camp who were missing.

“We are happy to be able to help families mourn,” he says. “This is why we are here,” he adds.

President Donald Trump, who dispatched his Minister of Internal Security, Kristi Noem on the spot, signed a disaster declaration in order to provide Texas with the means of the federal government.

“There are currently more than 400 rescuers of more than 20 agencies deployed in the county,” said Sheriff Lethia.

Helicopters and drones are engaged in research and the Texas National Guard as well as the United States Coast Guard has sent reinforcements.

The American pope Léon XIV expressed his “sincere condolences on Sunday to all the families who lost dear beings, in particular their daughters who were in a summer camp during the tragedy”, in a declaration in English at the end of the prayer of the Angelus.

Meteorological services maintained their surfaced flood alert on Sunday until 7 p.m. local Monday).

“Additional precipitation of 50 to 100 millimeters are possible, with isolated pockets in the area approaching 250 millimeters. It is very difficult to predict exactly where the big rains will occur in this case, ”according to the most recent meteorological bulletin.

Sudden floods, caused by torrential rains that the 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, droughts and heat waves.

In mid-June, 13 people had perished due to floods in San Antonio, not far from the area affected on Friday, following torrential rains.