Texas floods latest: NASA joins search with specialised aircraft as death toll rises to 119 and 170 still

Texas A&M Forest Service shared photos of crews clearing debris Wednesday after flash floods on July 4 devastated Central Texas.

NASA has deployed two aircraft to support recovery efforts in south central Texas after catastrophic July Fourth floods killed at least 119 people and left nearly 200 missing.

A WB-57 plane took off from Houston on Tuesday to conduct aerial surveys using a high-resolution motion imager, while a Gulfstream III equipped with radar was dispatched from California yesterday to map flood damage.

NASA said the data will help response teams locate survivors and assess infrastructure damage.

A country singer has revealed that several of his close family members, including his brother, were swept away in the deadly Texas floods, which have killed over 100 people.

“Over the weekend, during the devastating flooding that hit Central Texas, my family – like so many others – suffered a heartbreaking and deeply personal loss,” Pat Green wrote in a statement posted on his Instagram account.

“We are grieving alongside countless Texans whose lives have been upended by this tragedy,” said the musician.

Flash flooding has ripped across central Texas since early Friday, claiming lives, destroying homes, and prompting a huge rescue response.

Read more from Madeline Sherratt:

Search and rescue efforts in Central Texas continued Wednesday after flash flooding along the Guadalupe River devastated communities.

A least 119 people have been killed and more than 170 are still missing.

Here are some photos of the aftermath:

Governor Greg Abbott shared a resource for Texas workers struggling after flash floods devastated Central Texas on July 4.

As floodwaters in Texas rose in the early morning of July 4, a local firefighter petitioned for an emergency alert to quickly be sent out, but local officials do not appear to have followed his request until about an hour later, according to leaked audio.

The reported early-morning request raises questions about the timeline of events offered by local officials, who have said they had little advanced warning and no county system in place to alert residents about the floods, a disaster now responsible for at least 119 deaths, with even more still missing.

According to audio obtained by KSAT, at 4:22am, a fireman with the Ingram Volunteer Fire Department reportedly called into emergency dispatch to warn that the Guadalupe River appeared to be rapidly overshooting its banks. Around that time, the river rose as much as 26 feet in 45 minutes, according to state officials.

The firefighter urged officials to authorize a CodeRED alert, an emergency system that would send warning messages to the cellphones of people who had previously signed up for the service.

Read more from Josh Marcus:

Deanne Criswell, former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under former President Joe Biden, has responded to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s calls to eliminate FEMA.

Noem said on Wednesday: “Federal emergency management should be state and locally led rather than how it has operated for decades.

It has been slow to respond. At the federal level, it has even been slower to get the resources to Americans in crisis, and that is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists and remade into a responsive agency.”

Criswell told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Wednesday night in reaction to Noem’s comments:  “A core principle of emergency management has always been locally executed, state managed, and federally supported. FEMA does not run these incidents; they never have, and they come in only at the request of the state in order to support them when it exceeds their capacity.

When we look at a state like Texas, the most capable state probably in the country, that also needed to ask for assistance first through state-to-state mutual aid, and then FEMA, if they need that kind of assistance, what is that gonna say for every other state or small jurisdiction out there when they have a big event and they don’t have the federal government that they’re used to depending on.”

Kaitlyn Carpenter of Ruidoso, New Mexico, was in “absolute shock” when she saw her best friend’s family home being swept away in floodwaters.

“ We had saved her house last year from the flood, so to see it just be taken up in the flood was just, it was horrific. I have no words. It was so surreal,” Carpenter told CNN’s Erin Burnett Wednesday night.

A flash flood in New Mexico on Tuesday killed three people, including two children, and damaged dozens of homes, the Associated Press reported.