COMFORT, Texas (Reuters) -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.
“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.
Flash floods in central Texas have killed at least 43 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. Hardest hit 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.
Reuters verified the location of the video by matching buildings and vehicles to satellite imagery and confirmed the date by checking the metadata.
“I’m still in shock today,” Fucci told Reuters.
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 neighbors 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.”
(Reporting by Sandra Stojanovic, Writing by Maria Tsvetkova; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
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