Live Updates: More Flooding Looms as Searchers Scramble to Find Missing
An alert sent Sunday afternoon warned people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground. The death toll rose to 80, and dozens remained unaccounted for, including 10 girls from a summer camp on the river.
July 6, 2025, 7:27 p.m. ET4 minutes ago
Tyler PagerWhite House reporter
...Trump, who has called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be eliminated, deflected questions about the future of the agency on Sunday, just hours after he signed an emergency declaration directing federal resources to Texas. “FEMA is something we can talk about later, but right now they’re busy working so we’ll leave it at that,” he told reporters in New Jersey before flying back to Washington.
July 6, 2025, 7:25 p.m. ET6 minutes ago
Nicholas Bogel-BurroughsReporting from Kerr County, Texas
Near Kerrville, water that had receded earlier on Sunday has once again overtaken a stretch of road, keeping some residents from returning home. April Andrews, 48, said she had driven along Goat Creek Road without a hitch earlier in the day, but water was rushing over the street by Sunday evening.
1 hour ago
Amy Graff is a reporter on The Times’s weather team.
The threat of flash flooding continues in Hill Country.
The chance for heavy rain and flooding in Texas Hill Country was not over on Sunday afternoon, as the National Weather Service issued more flash flood warnings and urged people along portions of the Guadalupe River to seek higher ground.
The air overhead remained packed with moisture, and any thunderstorms that form could be accompanied by heavy rains, including in Kerr County and the Guadalupe River Basin, which has been devastated by deadly flash flooding.
The Weather Service office for Austin, San Antonio and the surrounding areas warned that thunderstorms could increase through the afternoon.
“It’s just sort of beginning, so we’ll see what happens in the next couple of hours,” Bob Fogarty, a meteorologist with the Weather Service, said around 3 p.m.
At 4:15 p.m. local time, rain was falling over Kerr County. More than two inches of rain was possible on Sunday in the basin.
An inch or two of rain in three hours could cause the Guadalupe to flood again. “It’s just a question of where the rain falls,” Mr. Fogarty said.
Just before 4 p.m., the Weather Service issued several flash-flood warnings for portions of Hill Country, including for Hunt and Ingram.
“Move immediately to higher ground,” the agency said.
A large portion of Hill Country, including Kerr County, also remained under a flood watch through 7 p.m. on Sunday. The Weather Service said additional rainfall could range from two to four inches, with pockets of up to 10 inches.
A watch is a heads-up that conditions are favorable for flooding, while a warning is an order to take immediate action because flooding is expected to occur or is already happening.
Thunderstorms are notoriously difficult to forecast accurately. Meteorologists can identify a large area where storms are likely, but pinpointing the time and location of a storm is a challenge.
Mr. Fogarty compared predicting a thunderstorm to placing a pot of water on the stove and waiting for it to boil. “Now, try to pick out where the first bubble is going to form,” he said. “That’s what forecasting this is like.”
The thunderstorms in Central Texas are forming in an atmosphere with unusually high moisture that has flowed in from the Gulf. Mr. Fogarty said that there was little wind and that the storms were moving slowly and dumping rain over localized areas for long periods of time.
“We rely on weather models, and the models have not done a really good job with this whole event,” he said. “The atmosphere is unusually moist.”
Troy Kimmel, a meteorologist and retired University of Texas at Austin professor, said that short-range models, which use supercomputers to forecast weather, were “worthless” in the weather event that began July 4. “There’s something unique about this system that made it difficult to forecast,” he added.
The chance for heavy rain and flash flooding was expected to continue across portions of Hill Country on Monday, with drier weather likely on Tuesday, said David Roth, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center.
A large body of research indicates that the heavy rain that is causing the deadly flooding in Texas is becoming more frequent and extreme because of climate change. Warm air holds more moisture than cool air, and as temperatures rise, storms can produce bigger downpours. When they meet with outdated infrastructure or inadequate warning systems on the ground, the results can be catastrophic.
Raymond Zhong contributed reporting.