Race to Save 11 Missing Campers in Floods

2025-01-25 14:46:51

Eleven children attending a Christian camp are still missing as the death toll continues to rise in Texas.

Nearly 80 people have been killed since
raging floodwaters slammed into central Texas on Friday.

The victims include children who vanished along the Guadalupe River banks at Camp Mystic – a Christian
summer
camp where most of the dead were recovered.

At least 27 people at Camp Mystic in Texas died from the flooding the camp confirmed in their first statement since the disaster.

‘This tragedy has devastated us and our entire community. Our hearts are broken alongside the families that are enduring this tragedy, and we share their hope and prayers,’ the camp’s statement said.

Families sifted through waterlogged debris Sunday and stepped inside empty cabins at Camp Mystic.

One girl walked out of a building carrying a large bell. A man, who said his daughter was rescued from a cabin on the highest point in the camp, walked a riverbank, looking in clumps of trees and under big rocks.

A woman and a teenage girl, both wearing rubber waders, briefly went inside one of the cabins, which stood next to a pile of soaked mattresses, a storage trunk and clothes. At one point, the pair doubled over, sobbing before they embraced.

One family left with a blue footlocker. A teenage girl had tears running down her face looking out the open window, gazing at the wreckage as they slowly drove away.

Robert Modgling, a 55-year-old plumber in Hunt, who helped join rescuers told the New York Times: ‘There’s a handful of people that were rescued initially, and after that there just weren’t any. That part’s over.’

The 55-year-old plumber said he found the body of a girl of about 7 or 8 pinned to a tree on Friday morning. ‘I’ve got a daughter who’s about that age,’ he said.

Among those confirmed dead was Sarah Marsh, 8, from Mountain Brook, Alabama, who was at Camp Mystic.

‘This is an unimaginable loss for her family, her school, and our entire community,’ Mountain Brook Mayor Stewart Welch said in a Facebook post.

‘Sarah’s passing is a sorrow shared by all of us, and our hearts are with those who knew and loved her.’

Camp director Richard ‘Dick’ Eastland, 70, died while trying to his campers from the rushing waters that rose suddenly on July 4.

Miraculously, one cabin full of girls managed to hold onto a rope thrown to them by rescuers as they walked across a bridge to safety with water gushing around their legs.

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha says that 11 campers and a camp counsellor are still missing in the powerful floods.

There were about 750 children at Camp Mystic when the floods hit, the sheriff said earlier.

But with each passing hour, the outlook became more bleak. Volunteers and some families of the missing who drove to the disaster zone began searching the riverbanks despite being asked not to do so.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott visited the summer camp for the first time on Sunday describing the scene as ‘horrendously ravaged’.

‘Today I visited Camp Mystic. It, and the river running beside it, were horrendously ravaged in ways unlike I’ve seen in any natural disaster,’ Abbott wrote.

‘The height the rushing water reached to the top of the cabins was shocking. We won’t stop until we find every girl who was in those cabins.’

Authorities faced growing questions about whether enough warnings were issued in area long vulnerable to flooding and whether enough preparations were made.,

It came after a father of three sacrificed himself to
save his family from the Texas flash floods telling them, “I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it. I love y’all.’

Julian Ryan, 27, died after the Guadalupe River in central Texas rose 30 feet and flooded into his family’s home.

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