by By Jane Ross
Kerrville, Texas (Reuters) thousands of first aiders still combed on Thursday by piles of mud -covered in Texas Hill Country, in the hope of finding and killing at least 120 in the long term of the region in the long term.
Search teams sent a dozen states to Kerr County, where the vast majority of the victims died when heavy rains sent a water wall along the Guadalupe river in the times of July 4.
At least 96 people, including 36 children, died in Kerr County, and officials said on Thursday morning at a briefing. Another 161 people are not taken into account. The last person who was found alive was on Friday, according to the authorities.
The dead included 27 campers and employees of Camp Mystic, a Christian summer retreat of the all-girls on the river bank. Five girls and one consultant from the camp are still missing, officials said.
Kerr County is the focus of the so -called “flood of falls alley” in central texas, a region in which some of the country’s most fatal floods were seen.
On July 4, more than one foot fell in less than an hour in early July. Flood measuring devices showed that the height of the river rose from about one foot to 30 feet (10.4 meters) within a few hours, collecting his banks and trees and structures went out on his way.
Hundreds of members of the community gathered on Wednesday at a service at the Tivy High School in Kerrville to remember the victims.
Pupils and adults prayed and sang, hugging themselves during the monument in the school football stadium and holding back their tears.
The school’s football coach, Reece Zunker, and his wife Paula, a former teacher, were among the victims. According to the school district, their two children were missing from Sunday.
“Zunker was a very hard guy,” said art teacher Marti Garcia, who attended the event on Wednesday. “I only had the belief that he would pull it out.”
The authorities in Kerr County were asking whether more could have been done in the early morning hours of July 4th to draw the residents’ attention to the rising floods and bring some of them to higher soil.
The district declined to install an early warning system years ago after not securing the costs of the state grant for the costs of the costs.
The officials sworn to check the events to determine what may have gone wrong, but emphasized that their current focus is on rescue and recovery.
The state legislator will be convened later this month in a special meeting to examine the floods and provide disaster relief finance.
In the meantime, the governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham, announced on Thursday that after discussions with the secretary of the home protection secretary Kristi NoEM, 15 million US dollars for the mountain village of Ruidoso had promised three people, including two children on Tuesday.
Around $ 12 million of the federal disaster financing is previously promised, but never paid to build dikes to protect the community after forest fires from fall floods last year, said Lujan Grisham.
(Reporting by Jane Ross; Additional reporting by Jonathan Allen, Rich McKay and Andrew Hay; writing by Joseph Ax; Editor of Chizu Nomiyama)
