'We’ll keep searching': Inside the grueling recovery effort after Texas’ deadliest flood in decades

In the flood-ravaged heart of Texas Hill Country, the wreckage remains staggering more than 10 days after catastrophic flooding on July Fourth. The Guadalupe River rose 27 feet in under an hour, swallowing towns like Kerrville, Hunt and Center Point. The death toll has reached 132, with 106 fatalities recorded in Kerr County alone. At least 101 people are still missing, many of them tourists with no formal check-ins, no records, and no clear trail.

Recovery teams, including local deputies, state officials, out-of-state crews, and hundreds of trained volunteers, are out every day working in dangerous, neck-deep waters filled with twisted debris, chemical runoff, and snakes. The search zones are physically brutal and emotionally charged.

“We’re just searching. We’ll keep on searching,” Ismael Aldaba, 51, founder of Fundación 911, told People. His 42-person volunteer team has spent days combing massive debris piles. “We’ve seen a lot of personal items: clothing 20, 25, 30 feet up in trees, chairs that were stuck on top. You can’t get your mind around it to understand how that happened. So many things were up there that shouldn’t be up there. We found shirts from certain camps in the water, sandals, jump ropes, shoes, toys, little floating rafts, kayaks.”

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said during a Monday commissioners meeting that recovery efforts could stretch on for as long as six months, but it’s impossible to say for certain. “How long is it going to take? I mean, who knows?” Leitha said, according to The Texas Tribune.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott called the ongoing operation “unrelenting” during a press conference on July 14, emphasizing that the state’s top priority is saving lives, recovering the lost, and stabilizing communities in the aftermath.

Continued thunderstorms last weekend triggered flash flood watches across the region, forcing volunteers in Kerrville to temporarily retreat to higher ground. River gauges across Central Texas — including the Lampasas and San Saba — jumped up to 30 feet in hours. Search efforts paused, then resumed.

Many of those still missing are believed to be tourists drawn to the Hill Country for the holiday weekend. They weren’t logged at hotels or campsites.

“It’s the tourists who came in for the 4th weekend, the concert, the fireworks. We don’t know how many came, we don’t know where they are, we don’t know how many we lost,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said, according to CNN.

At one point, the list of missing stood at 161. Days later, it dropped to 101. The drop in the number of people listed as missing doesn’t necessarily mean fewer lives were lost. In the aftermath of a mass-casualty event, it’s common for the missing count to fluctuate as information is sorted out. Some people are later confirmed dead. Others check in with family, are located by authorities, or were never in danger but had no way to report their whereabouts.

In the early chaos, names are often added to the list from concerned friends, duplicated across databases, or mistakenly marked as missing when they've already been identified. Travis County officials recently reduced their own missing count from 10 to four after realizing some individuals appeared on both the missing and confirmed-dead lists, The Texas Tribune reported.

A similar pattern unfolded during the 2023 wildfires in Hawaii, when the number of people unaccounted for peaked at around 3,000. The final death toll was 102.

As time passes, the data becomes clearer. “Certainly, by the end of the first month, you've got a good idea of what you're looking for,” Lucy Easthope, an international adviser on disaster recovery efforts, told The Texas Tribune. “And sometimes in flooding, we've seen the Earth only yield its final death toll some months, and maybe even years, later.”

July in Texas is unforgiving. As the days stretch on, so does the heat. AccuWeather RealFeel® Temperatures have surged past 100 F across the region, forcing search crews to hydrate constantly, rotate shifts, and take shelter when they can. Even the dogs — many deployed from out-of-state K9 units — are beginning to wear down.

Still, the work continues.

Recovery crews in wetsuits wade through waist-high sludge under a blistering sun. They lift waterlogged debris by hand. Others use excavators to claw through the banks of the Guadalupe. Photos from the Center Point Volunteer Fire Department show workers buried to their necks in flood wreckage — driven by urgency, reverence, and something deeper.

“This is about closure,” one volunteer wrote on social media. “It’s about giving someone the chance to say goodbye.”

The work begins when cadaver dogs pick up the scent of human remains, giving what handlers call a “positive mark.” Canine units sniff out scent trails atop mountains of wreckage; waterlogged vehicles, snapped trees, torn fencing, propane tanks.

“You catch the smell. You mark a dog, you have a mark and the place goes quiet,” Joe Rigelsky told CNN, describing the moment his team realizes they've found something. Rigelsky, a founder of the Christian nonprofit Upstream International, is part of the grim effort to recover victims still missing after catastrophic flooding swept through Texas Hill Country.

That’s when the digging starts. In some cases, power saws are brought in to cut through large debris. More often, the searchers get on their knees and dig through layers of mud, tangled branches and trees, roofing, siding, and shattered pieces of people’s lives. Some piles take days to sift through.

Along the banks of the Guadalupe River, the process repeats again and again. The river winds for 40 miles through Kerr County where nearly 100 people have died, including 36 children. The debris trail continues for miles downstream into Kendall County, where additional bodies have been recovered. Among the dead are not only people, but livestock and other animals swept away by the floodwaters, Rigelsky added.

In Hunt and Ingram, families return to the footprints of what used to be homes. Some sift through soaked baby books and broken furniture. Others stand in silence. Volunteers with Kerrville Pets Alive and Austin Pets Alive are working around the clock to reunite flood-surviving animals with their owners. In some cases, the pets are the only survivors.

A banner now hangs across a Walmart in Ingram: Kerrville Strong. It’s more than a slogan. Local churches have become donation hubs. Restaurants are handing out hot meals. High school teams are clearing debris beside exhausted fire crews. More than 14,000 volunteers have shown up, some local, many from out of state. They keep coming.

Drier weather settling into central Texas on Wednesday is likely to stick around through the end of the week to bring several days of mostly rain-free weather for rescue and recovery efforts, AccuWeather meteorologists say. But, the drier conditions come at a cost; with more sunshine, high temperatures are likely to rise for the second half of the week.

Officials say the full recovery will take months, maybe years. But for now, the focus is narrow: one pile at a time, one name at a time, one family at a time.

"Our No. 1 job is always saving lives, protecting lives, and finding those who have lost their lives," said Governor Abbott. "That is a 24/7 operation that we are unrelenting in continuing to pursue. We as a state are going to be able to respond and recover from this. We are community. We are Texas strong."

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