By Rich McKay and Jonathan Allen
(Reuters) -The death toll in Kerr County crept up to 87 on Tuesday as search and rescue teams recovered three more bodies in the flood-ravaged hills of central Texas, according to officials in the county worst hit by the disaster.
Rescue teams from federal agencies, neighboring states and Mexico have joined local efforts to search for survivors, which have been hindered by thunderstorms and downpours. As they work through lists of people reported missing, the teams have not found a living survivor in Kerr County since Friday.
The floods have killed at least 109 people including dozens of children.
“The work is extremely treacherous, time-consuming,” Lieutenant Colonel Ben Baker of the Texas Game Wardens said at the press conference. “It’s dirty work. The water is still there.”
Torrential rains before dawn on Friday deluged the Guadalupe River, which burst its banks and killed dozens of people, leaving behind mangled piles of debris, trees and cars. Local and federal emergency officials have faced days of angry questions about whether they could have warned people in flood-prone Texas Hill Country sooner.
At least 56 adults and 30 children have been killed in Kerr County, Sheriff Larry Leitha said at a press conference in Kerrville, the county seat, with more than two dozen victims yet to be identified. Authorities have not determined if the 87th victim was an adult or child.
Some of the flood victims were sleeping at Camp Mystic, a riverside Christian girls’ summer camp near the town of Hunt; five children and one camp counsellor were still unaccounted for on Tuesday.
The sheriff rebuffed several questions about the county’s emergency management operations and preparedness, and declined to say who in the county was ultimately in charge of monitoring weather alerts and issuing a flood warning or evacuation order.
He said his office first started getting 911 emergency calls between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. on Friday, several hours after the local National Weather Service station issued a flash-flood alert. “We’re in the process of trying to put (together) a timeline,” Leitha said.
The floods killed at least another 22 people outside Kerr County, according to local sheriffs’ and media reports, with seven dead in Travis County, seven dead in Kendall County, five dead in Burnett County, two in Williamson County and one in Tom Green County.
U.S. President Donald Trump, a Republican, plans to visit the devastated region this week, a spokesperson said. Democrats in Washington have called for an official investigation into whether the Trump administration’s job cuts at the National Weather Service affected the agency’s response to the floods.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Rod Nickel and Deepa Babington)
