Powerful floodwaters that have torn through Central Texas for days began to ebb in some places on Friday, leaving behind battered homes, blocked roads and shaken residents, even as flash flood warnings blared in other areas.<\/p>\n
At least two people have been reported dead after waters rose rapidly this week across the Texas Hill Country, west of San Antonio and Austin. The same area of the state was ravaged by catastrophic flooding last July.<\/p>\n
This week\u2019s relentless rainfall rivaled, and in certain cases may have even surpassed, what fell last year, when more than a 130 people were killed by the rising Guadalupe River. The death toll last year included 28 at a girls\u2019 summer camp, Camp Mystic.<\/p>\n
Gov. Greg Abbott issued a major disaster declaration on Friday for 28 counties hit hard by flooding as Texans began assessing the damage and, in some cases, rebuilding for the second time.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe worst of the rain is behind us,\u201d Mr. Abbott said at a news conference. But he added that the region\u2019s rivers could continue to rise dangerously in the coming days as water moves downstream. <\/p>\n
This week\u2019s rains transformed many of the region\u2019s usually low and slow moving rivers into violent brown torrents that uprooted trees and swept cars off the road.<\/p>\n
To some in the town of Comfort, along the Guadalupe, the river appeared to rise higher this week than last July.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt looked almost like the ocean,\u201d said Harmony Schwethelm, whose family, for the past 100 years, has owned a riverbank property in Comfort with a few small homes. \u201cIt\u2019s never come up this high.\u201d<\/p>\n
At one point in Comfort, the river rose more than 25 feet in one hour, peaking around 37 feet<\/a>, according to the National Weather Service.<\/p>\n Ms. Schwethelm said that when she had come out before sunrise two mornings ago, she couldn\u2019t see the water, but she could hear the rushing waves. That\u2019s when she and her kids left, she said.<\/p>\n Her experience during the flood last year \u2014 \u201cthe closest I\u2019ve ever been to panic\u201d \u2014 helped her better prepare for this week\u2019s rains, she said.<\/p>\n On Friday, debris littered country roads around Comfort and trees lay near a riverbank, some ripped from the ground. The still-swollen Guadalupe flowed loudly underneath a bridge where tree debris hung from the top of a bent river gauge, a sign of just how high the water had been.<\/p>\n Across the Hill Country, the receding waters left behind severely damaged roads. At least one bridge, on a local road in Uvalde County, had collapsed<\/a>, the state police said.<\/p>\n The governor said more than 570 people had been rescued by state and local responders during the flooding.<\/p>\n At an evacuation center in the tourist town of Fredericksburg, Mike Fellows, a volunteer who also assisted during last year\u2019s floods, said people appeared more ready this time. Crews rescued dozens of people from flooding of the Pedernales River.<\/p>\n \u201cI am feeling better about the response,\u201d Mr. Fellows said. The rolls at the center on Friday showed more volunteers than evacuee check-ins.<\/p>\n Among the evacuated in Fredericksburg was Greg Kaiser, an 80-year-old who lives in an RV park along the Pedernales. Members of the local fire department woke him Thursday morning and helped him wade through waist-high water. <\/p>\n \u201cI would slip down into the water. They\u2019d have to grab me and pull me back up,\u201d he said, speaking at the town\u2019s evacuation center on Friday. <\/p>\n Mr. Kaiser said he was not sure when he could return home, nor if he would even want to live along the river anymore. \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody in their right mind would want to go back there after an incident like this,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The two people who died were a 65-year-old man in the town of Center Point, and a 74-year-old man in Uvalde.<\/p>\n Farther west, along the Rio Grande, floodwaters swept away more than 100 floating orange border barriers that were meant to deter migrants from crossing the river near the city of Eagle Pass, State Representative Eddie Morales Jr. said on social media<\/a>. The city said that the loose barriers prompted the temporary closing of two international bridges<\/a> as a precaution.<\/p>\n After days of rain totaling over two feet in some locations, the deluge was beginning to subside in most of the state. However, the West Texas town of Sonora on Friday saw a torrent of rain and a flash flood emergency, the highest level issued.<\/p>\n Forecasters warned that the rains could last through the morning, exacerbating an already dangerous situation across the Hill Country. But overall, the bulk of the moisture was moving farther west and by Saturday the Hill Country was expected to begin drying out.<\/p>\n Judson Jones contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Powerful floodwaters that have torn through Central Texas for days began to ebb in some places on Friday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378189,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9982,133729,9985,110274,27,29,28,172],"class_list":["post-378188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-floods","tag-fredericksburg-tex","tag-guadalupe-river-tex","tag-rivers","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378188\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}