Pope Sends Condolences To Victims Of Texas Floods
Pope Leo on Sunday sent condolences to the families of devastating floods in Texas which have left at least 50 people dead and nearly 30 more missing, many of them children.
“I would like to express sincere condolences to all the families who have lost loved ones, in particular their daughters who were in a summer camp in the disaster caused by flooding of the Guadalupe River in Texas. We pray for them,” said the US-born pontiff following Angelus prayers.
Rescuers searched through the night to try to locate 27 girls and teenagers missing from a riverside summer camp after flash floods caused by torrential rains on Friday, when the Guadalupe River rose eight metres (26 feet) in just 45 minutes.
Nearly 300 millimetres of rain per hour suddenly fell, a third of the average annual rainfall.
Rescuers in Texas raced against time Sunday to find dozens of missing people, including children, swept away by flash floods that killed at least 59, as forecasters warned of new deluges.
Local Texans joined forces with disaster officials to search through the night for the missing, including 27 girls from a riverside Christian summer camp.
The rain-swollen waters of the Guadalupe River reached tree tops and the roofs of cabins in the camp as girls slept, washing away some of them and leaving a scene of devastation.
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At the camp in Kerr County, blankets, teddy bears and other belongings ended up caked in mud. Windows in the cabins were shattered, apparently by the force of the water.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Camp Mystic on the banks of the Guadalupe River, where some 750 girls had been staying when the floodwaters hit, had been “horrendously ravaged in ways unlike I’ve seen in any natural disaster.”
“We won’t stop until we find every girl who was in those cabins,” he said in a post on social media platform X after a visit to the site.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said heavy rain likely to cause more flooding was falling Sunday as the death toll at the camp and elsewhere rose to at least 59.
“We expect that to go higher, sadly,” Patrick told Fox News Sunday.
The flooding began Friday — the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend — as months’ worth of rain fell in a matter of hours, much of it coming overnight as people slept.
The Guadalupe surged some 26 feet (eight meters) — more than a two-storey building- in just 45 minutes.
Some of the fatalities were found in counties away from the tragedy at the summer camp.
Flash floods, which occur when the ground is unable to absorb torrential rainfall, are not unusual.
The region of south and central Texas where the weekend’s deluge occurred is known colloquially as “Flash Flood Alley.”
But scientists say that in recent years human-driven climate change has made extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and heat waves more frequent and more intense.
