Dozens rescued as deadly floods hit Central Texas

Dozens of people were rescued as torrential rain hammered Central Texas for a third straight day, overwhelming roads and rescue crews across a fast-rising flood zone. Gov. Greg Abbott said more than 70 people had been rescued, and San Antonio fire officials said they had responded to at least 70 water rescues as the rain kept falling.

A flash flood emergency was declared in parts of Central Texas after more than a foot of rain inundated communities, stranded drivers and forced evacuations. In the Texas Hill Country, the Guadalupe River rose with alarming speed early Friday morning, climbing to about the height of a two-story building and leaving search teams racing against fast-moving water.

The danger was especially acute in Kerr County, where officials declared a local state of disaster because of extreme, life-threatening flooding from heavy rains that fell Thursday, July 3, and overnight into Friday, July 4. Search and rescue operations continued as dozens of people remained missing, including more than 20 children from Camp Mystic, the all-girls camp in the county.

The scale of the disaster kept growing in the days that followed. By July 9, at least 120 people had died and dozens more were still missing across the Texas Hill Country, turning the flooding into one of the deadliest weather disasters in recent Texas history.

The region’s vulnerability was not a surprise to weather experts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service place the Texas Hill Country in an area often called Flash Flood Alley, where terrain and storm patterns can turn heavy rain into deadly runoff with little warning. That risk was on full display as communities that had already been hit by drought faced a sudden wall of water, with rescue crews moving from one emergency call to the next.

CBS News correspondent Jason Allen reported from the flood zone as the crisis unfolded, with emergency response stretched by the volume of rescues and the number of people still unaccounted for. In Central Texas, the flooding exposed how quickly repeated extreme rainfall can overwhelm warning systems, roads and river crossings in communities built for growth but still exposed to the force of the Hill Country’s flood-prone landscape.