The death toll on catastrophic floods in Texas reached 78 on Sunday (6), including 28 children, police said, while searching for missing girls from a summer camp still in the middle of more rain.
Larry Leitha, Kerr County Sheriff in Texas Hill Country, epicenter of the floods, said 11 girls and a counselor are still missing from a camp near the Guadalupe river, which overflowed after torrential rainfall that hit the central region of Texas on Friday (4), the US Independence Day holiday.
Authorities said on Saturday that more than 850 people were rescued, including some trees clinging, after a sudden storm poured up to 38 cm of rain in the region, about 140 km northwest of San Antonio.
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Criticism of Trump
Some experts questioned whether courts in the Trump government’s federal labor, including at the agency that supervises the National Meteorology Service, led authorities not to accurately predict the gravity of floods and issue appropriate alerts before the storm.
President Donald Trump and his government have carried out thousands of job cuts at the controlling agency of the National Meteorology Service, the Ocean and Atmospheric National Administration (NOAA), leaving many staffing meteorology offices, said former NOAA director Rick Spinrad.
He said he did not know if these staff cuts were responsible for the lack of prior notice for the extreme floods of Texas, but reported that they would inevitably degrade the agency’s ability to provide accurate and timely forecasts.
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Internal Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who supervises Noaa, said that a “moderate” flood alert issued on Thursday (3) by the National Meteorology Service did not accurately predicted the extreme rainfall and said the Trump government was working to update the system.
Joaquin Castro, Texas’s Democratic Congressman, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program that staff reduction in weather service could be dangerous.
“When there are sudden floods, there is a risk that if there are no staff … To make this analysis, make predictions in the best way, it can lead to a tragedy,” said Castro.
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(com Reuters)
