The number of people missing after the devastating July 4 floods in Texas Hill County has fallen below 100, Gov. Greg Abbott said on Monday. That marks a significant reduction from the 173 unaccounted for that he announced nearly a week ago.
The governor said it was possible that the actual number, which currently stands at 97, was even smaller, as officials tried to weed out erroneous reports. “There’s no certainty that all 97 of those people were swept away by the storm,” he said.
Mr. Abbott said the process of identifying victims had been particularly slow in rural Kerr County, where the bulk of the deaths occurred and where justices of the peace perform death investigations, because the county does not have a medical examiner.
“It required pressure from the state and others to make sure they began to expedite that process,” the governor said. “When a life is lost, that family wants access to their loved one as quickly as possible.”
As of now, he said, everyone who was at a camp or hotel in the flooded area has been identified or accounted for. “Those who are missing on this list, most of them, were more difficult to identify because there was no record of them logging in anywhere” he said, adding that friends, family members and co-workers had reported them missing.
Kerr County officials said that the death toll there had risen to 106 as of late Sunday evening, bringing the number of people killed in the floods to 132 statewide, according to New York Times reporting.
The county has faced lingering questions about its preparations for extreme weather and response to the recent flooding. At a public meeting on Monday morning, officials said they were receiving death threats.
“It’s sad to see the evil that’s out there,” Rich Paces, a Kerr County commissioner, said, adding: “Can you imagine? People cursing us for decisions that we never had a chance to make. They’re just playing a blame game.”
In a separate meeting on Monday morning of the City Council of Kerrville, Brenda Hughes, a council member, lamented “targeted threats” made to individual staff members and asked for increased security measures.
Victims of the flooding included more than two dozen campers and employees at a Christian girls camp in the town of Hunt. Local officials have deflected questions for more than a week about why they were not more immediately responsive to warnings issued by the National Weather Service overnight on July 4, as they have grappled with a continuing effort to find bodies and clear debris.
Officials at the Weather Service were actively reaching out to emergency management officials in the region after the agency issued a 1:14 a.m. warning of “life-threatening flash flooding” in the area. But in the first three hours after that, while the Guadalupe River rose 20 feet, local leaders would remain largely unheard from and did not make use of technology that was available to send out warnings.
The mayor of Kerrville has said that he was awakened only at 5:30 a.m., despite several more flood warnings that had been automatically sent to cellphones and weather radios.
Officials have repeatedly been asked for a timeline of the county’s response, but have not provided one, saying their focus is on search and rescue. In a joint statement, the city and county said they “maintain 24/7 emergency services, which allowed responders to act immediately on July 4th.” They also said they were “committed to a transparent and full review of processes and protocols.”
President Trump has also declined to focus on whether any warnings were neglected. During a visit to Kerr County last week, he was asked about complaints from families of the victims that people along the river were not notified in time to safely evacuate.
“Only a bad person would ask a question like that, to be honest with you,” Mr. Trump replied. “This was a thing that has never happened before and nobody’s ever seen anything — I’ve never seen anything like this.”
There is a long history of flooding in the region, known as Flash Flood Alley. And in recent years, federal regulators approved a series of appeals that removed many of Camp Mystic’s buildings from official federal flood zones.
Frustration was clear among county leaders on Monday. Don Harris, one of the Kerr County commissioners, said that “every day I’m stomping out false rumors.”
Mr. Paces also addressed questions that have arisen over how the county spent $10 million in funds from the American Rescue Plan Act, which was passed under the Biden administration during the coronavirus pandemic. Most of the local share of that money was spent on a new communications system.
The county had previously considered a flood warning system but rejected the idea, saying taxpayers wouldn’t want to pay for it.
“Joe Biden didn’t give us $10 million for a flood warning system, that’s just false information,” Mr. Paces said on Monday. “We did get $10 million in ARPA funds, OK? And we used it for a radio system to help with emergency response.”
Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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