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'It's just crazy': Texas residents recount deadly floods, hope for miracle to find missing
The hardest hit area was Camp Mystic, a nearly century-old girls camp, where dozens of young girls were swept away in the flood waters
- PUBLISHED: Sun 6 Jul 2025, 10:26 AM
Tonia Fucci, a Pennsylvania resident visiting her grandmother for the Independence Day weekend, woke early on Friday to the sound of heavy rain "coming down in buckets."
Along with the rain, she heard something else - loud, startling cracking noises.
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"It's indescribable, the sounds, of how loud they were, which turned out to be ... the massive cypress trees that came down along the river," she told a Reuters reporter in an interview the next day.
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Flash floods in central Texas have killed at least 50 people, including 15 children, authorities said on Saturday as rescuers continued a frantic search for dozens more campers, vacationers and residents who were still missing.
The hardest hit area was Camp Mystic, a nearly century-old girls camp, where dozens of young girls were swept away in the flood waters, leaving many dead and many more still missing.
Fucci, who was staying in Comfort on the banks of the overflowing Guadalupe River, filmed on her phone a torrent of muddy water flooding the road to her grandmother's house and two recreational vehicles in a parking lot, with their wheels submerged in water.
"I'm still in shock today," Fucci said.
She said she had little hope anyone would be found alive.
"There's so many missing children and missing people. You just want them to be found for the sake of the families. But, you know, it's not going to be a good ending... There's no way people could have survived the swiftness of the water."
Fucci said she had received National Weather alerts on her phone hours after the flood had already hit. The residents of the town had to rely on one another, as they ran to their neighbours to see who needed help before rescue teams arrived.
"Something I've never seen before. You knew it was tragedy," Fucci said, recalling how quickly the river flooded the town.
"It wasn't slowing, it wasn't slowing. And debris and furniture and RVs were coming down the river."
'It's just crazy'
In Kerrville on Saturday, the usually calm Guadalupe was flowing fast, its murky waters filled with debris.
"The water reached the top of the trees. About 10 meters or so," said resident Gerardo Martinez, 61. "Cars, whole houses were going down the river."
Flash floods, which occur when the ground is unable to absorb torrential rainfall, are not unusual.
But scientists say that in recent years human-driven climate change has made extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and heatwaves more frequent and more intense.
A father named Michael was searching the camp for his eight-year-old daughter.
"I was in Austin and drove down yesterday morning, once we heard about it," he said, adding that he was hoping for a "miracle."
Soila Reyna, 55, a Kerrville resident who works at a church helping people who lost their belongings, witnessed the devastation unfold.
"It has been years since we had a flood, but nothing like this," Reyna said.
"Nothing like as catastrophic as this, where it involved children, people and just the loss of people's houses... It's just crazy," she added.
(With inputs from AFP)