Flash Flood Warnings Complicate Search

Time and weather forecasts brought even more urgency to the increasingly desperate search for survivors from the Texas flooding on Sunday. Officials said the death toll had reached 70, while 11 girls and a counselor from a summer camp on the Guadalupe River remained among the missing, the New York Times reports. About 850 people have been rescued overall. Former first lady Laura Bush once worked at Camp Mystic, and she and her husband joined the mourning on Sunday, with George W. Bush releasing a statement saying the couple is "heartbroken by the loss of life and the agony so many are feeling."

• New flooding fears: Phones across Kerrville blared with an emergency alert on phones Sunday afternoon announcing a "high confidence of river flooding" near the North Fork of the Guadalupe River, which flows through Hunt. "Move to higher ground," the alert told people in Kerrville. Forecasters are warning of the possibility of several more inches of rain, including in parts of the state already hit hard, per USA Today. Millions of people in central Texas are under flash flood advisories. Gov. Greg Abbott said new storms will mean life-threatening danger across a wider area in the next 24 to 48 hours, per the Washington Post, even as searches continue in Kerr County.

• Federal response: President Trump announced Sunday that he signed a major disaster declaration for Texas, per CNN, and the Department of Homeland Security said FEMA has been activated in the state. "These families are enduring an unimaginable tragedy, with many lives lost, and many still missing," Trump posted.
• The camp: Families were allowed into Camp Mystic, per the AP, while crews nearby operating heavy equipment to pull tree trunks and branches from the water as they searched the Guadalupe River. A woman and a teenage girl, both wearing rubber waders, briefly went inside a cabin. At one point, the pair doubled over, sobbing before they embraced. A 13-year-old survivor said she and her bunkmates didn't know for a while that the rising floodwaters had swamped cabins on the other side of camp and swept campers away, per NBC News. "Eventually when we got that news we were all kind of hysterical," Stella Thompson said, "and the whole cabin was praying a lot and terrified—but not for ourselves."

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• A searcher's despair: Robert Modgling, a plumber in Hunt who joined the search, said he'd come to the realization that the rescue effort had become a recovery effort, per the Times. "We were looking for survivors all morning long" on Saturday, he said. He said a few people were rescued early, "and after that there just weren't any. That part's over." Modgling said he was still dealing with having found the body of a girl, maybe 7 years old, who'd been pinned to a tree. It was "pretty horrible," he said, adding that "I've got a daughter who's about that age." Police took her body, and Modgling said he never learned her name.