BY C STONE | STONE NEWS NETWORK ||| |TEXAS
The news keeps getting worse in Texas for the victims of the Camp Mystic flash flood disaster. Authorities now peg the death toll of at least 100, with 11 still missing from the camp.
Dangerous flash floods are now becoming more frequent. The stark reality is, the only way those campers could escape the tragedy would be by not being there.
The speed and strength of the river cannot be underestimated. It rained a month's worth of water in less than half an hour. And now shattered families are struggling to understand "why".
Waterlines show how high the water level was.
Per the bbc:
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says Donald Trump will likely travel to visit the flood-hit areas of Texas on Friday.
She also hit out at commentary around the National Weather Service, which some have argued did not provide an early flood warning.
She says the NWS provided "early and consistent warnings" and "timely flash flood alerts", and asserted the their "offices were well staffed - in fact one of the offices was over staffed, they had more people than they need. So any claim to the contrary is completely false."
Before the floods, there were concerns that cuts by Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) had adversely affected the weather service.
As the search continues, the focus is increasingly moving to what could have been done, if anything, to prevent this tragedy.
One local campaigner, Nicole Wilson, has already set up a petition with 450 signatures calling for flood sirens to be set up in Kerr County along the Guadalupe River - something in place in other counties.
Such a system has been debated in Kerr County for almost a decade but funds have never been allocated for it.
Nicole told me she thought sirens could have prevented the tragedy: "When you're a child, you expect somebody, an adult's going to come save you... It's incredibly heartbreaking."
Nicole, who has children who also go to summer camps in the area, says she's saddened by the decisions over the years not to invest.
"To have camps, to have RV camps, to have houses that close to a river and it flood like that, I don't understand why Kerrville and Kerr County hadn't invested in flood sirens," she says.
President Trump is expected to visit the area later in the week and Nicole says she wants him to arrive with, as she puts it, "a blank cheque".
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