Search and rescue operations in central Texas entered their fifth day on Tuesday after heavy rainfall overwhelmed the Guadalupe River, sending floodwaters through homes and summer camps and killing over 100 people.
The death toll stood at at least 104, including at least 27 children and counselors from the beloved Camp Mystic, a storied Christian girls camp in Kerr County, where flooding hit the hardest beginning on July 4. In Kerr County, at least 56 adults and 28 children were killed. Ten Mystic campers and one counselor remain unaccounted for.
The flooding came in the early morning hours, with rainfall causing the nearby Guadalupe River to surge over 26 feet in less than an hour, according to Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. The rain didn't let up, with the flood risk ongoing and impacting many communities in the central part of the state over the next few days.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
And I'm Juana Summers in central Texas, where today saw more efforts to recover victims of last week's flooding. Scores of people are known to have died. Officials say they don't know how many are still missing. Many hundreds of emergency workers and volunteers are combing through mud, downed trees and debris along more than 60 miles of the Guadalupe River. NPR's Greg Allen reports it is a painstaking process that may take weeks.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Loyd Thornton has been involved in many other search and recovery efforts in the past, but few as challenging as this one.
LOYD THORNTON: There is debris fields up to 35 feet in the air trapped on huge cypress trees. And there are places to where campgrounds were totally wiped out, washed downstream and totally destroyed.
ALLEN: Thornton, a volunteer with Texas EquuSearch, has had a crew out searching debris piles along the river using an airboat.
THORNTON: We're climbing over small islands and debris fields, so we're able to go where a regular boat really has a hard time going.
ALLEN: Thornton has three other EquuSearch volunteers along in his boat. He says that gives him four sets of eyes scan the river and the piles of debris.
THORNTON: The boat and search - we're doing a lot of visual searching now, low speed, searching high up in the trees. Remember the water we saw in places was at least 35 feet high.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: All right, we ready? Let's do it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yup.
(SOUNDBITE OF ENGINE STARTING)
ALLEN: Not far away, in the town of Hunt, Brad Phillip (ph) today was beginning the hard work of gutting his house. It's high up on the banks of the river but was still flooded out. He says the first thing he did after the flood was search the riverbanks for survivors or victims. One was recovered on an island just a few hundred yards from his house.
BRAD PHILLIP: Someone got over there and flagged me down. I flagged a sheriff down. And within minutes, there was a Black Hawk and drones and people over there, and they were able to get a body out.
ALLEN: Today more victims were recovered near the town of Ingram. One of the crews involved in the recovery effort there is from Mexico. It's a nonprofit group that works with several Texas fire departments, Fundacion 911. Jorge Fuentes is with the group.
JORGE FUENTES: Today they went to the river to do some groundwork on the river, and they did find a body just, like, 30 minutes ago.
ALLEN: Fuentes says it was one of two victims recovered from the side, an extremely large debris field.
FUENTES: This area seems to be, like, on a bend. So lots of debris, lots of trash and some of the mobile homes that got that swept down the river got stuck in this area.
ALLEN: Fuentes' group is working with local fire departments. His members' expertise, especially in water searches, is proving invaluable to the search effort. Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice says the operation is still in what he calls the primary phase of the search mission. There are more than 60 miles of river to search, he says, and even with large crews, checking a single mile can take several hours.
Amna Nawaz:
So, I just can't say enough how much our thoughts are with you and with everyone in the community.
I understand you actually knew personally some of the leaders at Camp Mystic and others who were tragically lost in these floods. We're so sorry for your loss. Is there anything that you want to share with us about them and what they meant to this community?
Austin Dickson:
Thank you.
Yes, that is my experience. And my experience is emblematic of so many people in our community. Kerrville is a town of about 25,000 people in a county of Kerr County of 50,000 people. Everybody knows everybody. And so in a tragic event like this, we're all connected to people who have been lost.
I was personal friends with three people who were swept away and have been identified as deceased at this time. And I'm also family friends with someone who lost one of their granddaughters who was a camper at Camp Mystic.
My contacts who were swept away that I knew, one was our high school soccer coach. He and his wife and two children were swept away. I also worked very closely on many projects with a pillar of our community, Dick Eastland, who was an owner and director of Camp Mystic, who died during the flood saving campers on his property.
And I also knew Jane Ragsdale, who was the director and owner of Heart O' the Hills Cam, another summer camp in the Hunt area. These folks are just a few of the names of people who have died, pillars of the community, have given their all to our area and to Texas, and ultimately lost their lives in this flood.
Amna Nawaz:
Austin, we're so very sorry for your loss and for everyone else's there. And we should share that your home, thankfully, your family are safe amid all of this. But we have seen from the pictures how deep and how devastating the damage is.
We heard Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick earlier saying this is the toughest disaster he has ever been a part of in the state of Texas. Do you agree with that? What is it like on the ground right now?
Austin Dickson:
Words are hard to find to describe what it is that we're seeing. And so I — the lieutenant governor has a broader sense of what he has seen in our state certainly that I have. I know that I crossed the Guadalupe River multiple times a day between work and home.
I know that I kayak on the river. And like many people, I woke up on the Fourth of July with in-laws in town visiting, with plans for a barbecue and board games and a fun day. We were thinking about actually maybe going down to the river because it was mild temperatures. And everything changed.
And now the devastation is something that, I mean, it looks like something from a movie. We have got over 20 miles of downed trees throughout the river, floodplain. A lot of these trees are called bald cypress trees. Some are 200 years old, very, very thick and beautiful. And they have been snapped like twigs. We have got refrigerators and washing machines, cars, boats, all sorts of stuff that is stuck up in the trees because the water rose so high.
The cleanup is going to be massive once the authorities in place at the federal, state and local level finish the search-and-rescue operations looking for anybody who is alive in the rubble.
The incident spurred questions about the preparedness of federal agencies such as the National Weather Service (NWS) and others like it as they face the administration’s crosshairs.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses NWS, lost hundreds of staffers to Trump administration cuts, and positions within the Weather Service were among them.
The Austin/San Antonio Weather Service office’s warning coordination meteorologist, who organizes alerting the outside world about agency forecasts, took a Trump administration buyout in April. The office’s Science Operations Officer, who implements new technology and data, also retired around the same time.
At the federal level, the Trump administration has sought to conceal its own culpability for the disaster, claiming that the cuts to the National Weather Service imposed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency did not hinder the agency from issuing timely warnings in the hours before the flash flood struck.
There is no doubt that National Weather Service personnel recognized the danger and did everything they could to sound the alarm. Trump is now hiding behind the dedication and self-sacrifice of the very workers he and Musk were denouncing as parasites and bureaucrats only months ago.
But the efforts of workers were severely hampered by budget cuts, which had forced the early retirement of the warning coordination meteorologist in the San Antonio office—whose primary role was to liaise with local disaster management agencies. At the time of the flood, the San Antonio office had six vacancies out of 26 positions, and the San Angelo office had four unfilled roles out of 23.
Trump has already forced out 20 percent of career employees at FEMA and announced plans to disband the agency after the 2025 hurricane season, turning its functions over to the states. He has denounced climate change as a Chinese-inspired “hoax” and waged war on virtually every federal agency tasked with addressing science, environmental degradation and public health.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Selina Wang, thanks very much.
Want to get more on this now from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Also the former president of Harvard University.
Larry, thank you for joining us this morning.
In "The New York Times" this week, you and Robert Rubin, who also served as president -- as Treasury secretary, called this bill dangerous, said it “posed a huge risk to the economy.”
What are those risks?
FORMER TREASURY SECRETARY LARRY SUMMERS: George, just to start with, what your people have been describing is the biggest cut in the American safety net in history. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that it will kill, over 10 years, 100,000 people. That is 2,000 days of death like we've seen in Texas this weekend. In my 70 years, I’ve never been as embarrassed for my country on July 4th.
These higher interest rates, these cutbacks in subsidies to electricity, these reductions in the availability of housing, the fact that hospitals are going to have to take care of these people and pass on the costs to everybody else, and that's going to mean more inflation, more risk that the Fed has to raise interest rates and run the risk of recession, more stagflation, that's the risk facing every middle-class family in our country because of this bill.
And for what? A million dollars over 10 years to the top tenth of a percent of our population. Is that the highest priority use of federal money right now? I don't think so. This is a shameful act by our Congress and by our president that is going to set our country back.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Part of the president's argument is that economic growth sparked by the bill will alleviate the dangers that you talk about here. The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers is up next, and his council issued a report this week projecting $11 trillion in deficit reduction from growth, higher tax revenue and savings on debt payments.
How do you respond to that?
SUMMERS: It is respectfully nonsense. None of us can forecast what's going to happen to economic growth. What we can forecast is that when people have to hold government debt instead of being able to invest it in new capital goods, new machinery, new buildings, that makes the economy less productive.
What we can forecast is that when we're investing less in research and development, investing less in our schools, that there is a negative impact on economic growth. There is no economist anywhere, without a strong political agenda, who is saying that this bill is a positive for the economy. And the overwhelming view is that it is probably going to make the economy worse.
Think about it this way. How long can the world's greatest debtor remain the world's greatest power? And this is piling more debt onto the economy than any piece of tax legislation in dollar terms that we have ever had.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But, Larry, as you know, experts in the past have raised alarm bells about the deficits, and the economy seems pretty resilient in the face of that.
SUMMERS: George, the best period we have had in the economy was the economy that -- was the period that Secretary Rubin and I wrote about when we served President Clinton and by acting responsibly on the deficit by listening to the CBO rather than expressing contempt for it, we reduced the deficit, set off a virtual -- virtues circle of increased investment, more growth, lower deficits, lower interest rates, and then around the cycle again.
Experts warn about risks. And I can't tell you whether the financial crisis is going to come this year or whether the financial crisis is going to come five years from now. And I'm not going to do cry wolf rhetoric. By the way, I was the one who was saying for a decade after 2010 that deficit reduction didn't need to be a national priority.
But anybody who looks at the numbers sees that we've never had deficits remotely like this or the prospect of debts remotely like this at a moment when the economy was strong and we were at peace anytime in our history. This is a risk that we don't need to run, and for what? To give $1 million a year to the top-tenth of a percent while, in effect, sentencing 100,000 poor Americans to death over the next 10 years because they can't get access to necessary medical procedures, because they can't get driven to a hospital, because their family members can't get supported? This is just wrong.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally --
SUMMERS: Look, there are lots of things, George, that you argue about, and Democrats, Republicans have different perspectives. This is that very rare instance where everybody outside of a mainstream sees something very dangerous happen.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, the president's team argued that tariff revenue is going to help make up some of the shortfall. What's your response?
SUMMERS: Yeah, it probably will collect some revenue at the cost of higher inflation for American consumers, less competitiveness for American producers. 60 times as many people use -- work in industries that use steel as work in the steel industry, and every one of them is less competitive because of the president's tariffs. So, higher prices, less competitiveness, and not really that much revenue relative to what's being given to the very wealthy in this bill.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Larry Summers, thanks very much.
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