DALLAS — Texas officials labored to account for more than 160 people originally reported missing along the Guadalupe River after the deadly July Fourth floods before ultimately concluding that most were safe and only three individuals still haven’t been found, the top executive in the hardest-hit county said Monday.
“Most of them were tourists that came into town and left and went back home and didn’t report that they were there,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said at a special meeting of the county commissioner court. He called the process a “Herculean effort.”
The flash floods killed at least 135 people in Texas, and most of the deaths were in Kerr County, where destructive, fast-moving water rose 26 feet (8 meters) on the Guadalupe River, washing away buildings and vehicles in the area about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of San Antonio.
The sharp revision in the number of missing by Kerr County officials on Saturday followed a familiar pattern in the often chaotic aftermath of large-scale disasters. Hundreds of people were reported missing in the initial days after the floods through a phone hotline and email address, which launched investigators on an “exhaustive effort” to verify the status of each of those individuals, Kerrville police spokesperson Jonathan Lamb said.
“We understand how critical it is to report this information accurately — not only for the families affected but for the integrity of our emergency response as a whole,” Lamb said.
Drastic changes in the missing count after a disaster aren’t unusual.
For instance, the death count from the 2023 Maui fire was eventually found to be just over 100 — far below the 1,100 initially feared missing.
In 2017, a wildfire in Northern California’s wine country killed more than 20 people, but most of the 100 people initially reported missing were located safe.
The 2018 wildfire that largely destroyed the California town of Paradise ended up killing nearly 100 people, though Butte County investigators at one point had the names of more than 3,000 people who were not accounted for in the early days of the disaster. The names were whittled down when the list was published in the local paper, and many people realized for the first time that officials were looking for them.
Texas’ Hill Country is a popular tourist destination, where campers seek out spots along the Guadalupe River amid the rolling landscapes.
Vacation cabins, RV parks and youth campgrounds fill the riverbanks and hills of Kerr County, including Camp Mystic, a century-old Christian summer camp for girls where at least 27 campers and counselors died in the floods.
The flooding was far more severe than the 100-year event envisioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, experts said, and it moved so quickly in the middle of the night that it caught many off guard in Kerr County, which lacked a warning system.
At a July 14 news conference, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had lowered the number of still-missing in the state to about 100 and suggested that pinning down that number was difficult. In the days after the floods, officials had put the number of missing at about 170 statewide with all but about 10 coming from Kerr County alone.
Campers, residents or people who registered at RV parks or hotels are easier to account for, Abbott said. Others may have been reported missing by a friend, family member or coworker.
In Travis County, which includes Austin, the floods killed at least 10 people. The sheriff’s office has said one person remains on their missing list but may be removed if they can verify sightings of the person.
Kristen Dark, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, said investigators work the missing person and decedent list “just like we would work any other cases.” For instance, if someone reports that they haven’t seen their neighbor, deputies might begin by reaching out to the neighbor’s employer and family.
“They use all kinds of different avenues to see if they can find out either that the person hasn’t been seen or that the person is alive and here’s where they are,” she said.
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Associated Press writer Nadia Lathan in Austin contributed to this report.