More than 161 people are missing and at least 109 have died after the devastating floods that took place in Texas (USA) last weekend, the state governor, Greg Abbott said Tuesday.
“We have to find each of the people (…) That is the number one priority,” said the Republican leader during a press conference from Hunt (Texas), one of the peoples most affected by the disaster.
Only in Kerr’s county
The authorities in this region launched a system for people to register their loved ones and have collated this information with the identified bodies.
“We have been obtaining information about people who were not registered in a summer camp or in a hotel and who had come here but did not know them,” said the Republican. The list of missing “most likely” will increase, he added.
The tragedy in this state has been deepened by the number of victims who are minors, until now 30 in Kerr, including 21 confirmed and 6 missing deaths from a Christian camp for young people and girls.
Local authorities have been questioned by residents and experts for not having ordered the evacuation of areas near the river, despite heavy rains.
Given the pressures, Abbott announced in the press conference that a special session of the state legislature will be convened to examine “every aspect of the storm” and ensure that there are the necessary systems to prevent other tragedies in the future.
Speaking, Kerr, Larry Leitha Jr.’s sheriff, said it is not his priority to make an evaluation of the authorities’ response on July 4.
“Right now, there are three priorities: to locate the people who are still lost, identify them and notify their relatives,” he said.
Several Kerville residents told Efe that they received flood alerts and heavy rains in the early hours of July 4, but they were not asked to evacuate or move towards another area.
Since 1:00 on Saturday, the National Meteorology Service (NWS) began to issue alerts about the threat of floods in the flag and Kerr counties.
In one of the first press wheels after the disaster, the authorities recognized that the rain forecasts underestimated rainfall.
Some experts, however, have expressed doubts about how prepared the region was, given the magnitude of the tragedy.
“It seems that they could have taken (…) preventive measures to reduce the risk of deaths if the organizers of the affected camps and the local authorities had attended the warnings of the government and of private weather sources,” said the main meteorologist of the company ACCUWEATHER, according to the local medium The Texas Tribune.
In total, between the night of July 3 and the morning of 4 they accumulated between 12.7 and 27.9 centimeters of rain in the counties of Kerr, Flag, Tom Green and Kendall, according to the NWS.
