AUSTIN,
Tex. — Louie Bond called it a tsunami, a surge of water that began
late Saturday night with torrential rains in Texas’ Hill Country and
raced down the bluff-lined valley carved out by the Blanco River.
By
the time it reached the vacation getaways and retiree cabins
overlooking the river at Wimberley, some 30 miles southwest of here, the
surge was 40 feet high, sweeping away bridges and homes and ancient
stands of cypresses as if they were bath toys.
One
of the homes held 36-year-old Jonathan McComb, his wife and two
children and two other families from their Corpus Christi hometown —
nine in all, including at least three children. On Monday, Mr. McComb
was in a San Antonio hospital with a collapsed lung and broken bones.
The
other eight were missing, along with four others from the area,
apparently lost in the torrent that capped weeks of rain and violent
weather across Texas and Oklahoma. The weekend’s weather left at least
five people dead in the two states, and more heavy rain and tornadoes
pummeled Texas on Monday.
“It
had been raining here for weeks, a lovely wet spring after years of
drought. The ground was saturated,” said Ms. Bond, a magazine editor and
former editor of Wimberley’s newspaper. “The cypress trees along the
river are stripped down to bare toothpicks.”
Wimberley and nearby San Marcos, a pair of Blanco River towns off the Interstate 35 corridor
linking Austin and San Antonio, appear to have been the hardest-hit
towns in the United States. But in Ciudad Acuña, a Mexican city of about
140,000 on the border due west of San Antonio, a tornado that leveled
blocks of buildings at sunrise Monday killed at least 13 people.
In
Oklahoma, weekend storms killed two people: a firefighter in Claremore,
near Tulsa, who was swept into a storm drain Sunday, and a Tulsa woman
who died Saturday after her automobile hydroplaned on a highway.
In
Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott added 24 counties on Monday to at least a dozen
that were declared disaster areas earlier this month because of
weather. Forecasters predicted more rain and severe weather across the
state the rest of this week.
On
one level, this spring’s rains have been a blessing, all but
obliterating an acute drought that had gripped part of the state for
five years. But the weather has also been punishing. Officials
recommended on Monday that outside Houston, families leave about 400
homes below Louis Creek Dam, which was said to have been weakened by
steady rain and at risk of failing.
Mr.
Abbott, who flew across the Blanco River valley on Monday, said at a
news conference that the damage there was “absolutely devastating.”
In
Hays County, which includes San Marcos and Wimberley, an overnight
curfew imposed Sunday was renewed Monday as residents and workers began
assessing the damage to at least 1,200 homes, including at least 350 in
Wimberley that were destroyed. San Marcos authorities said one
unidentified man had been killed Sunday.
“I’ve
been here for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said
Will Conley, a Hays County commissioner. “Bridges that have never seen
water flow over them had 20 feet of water over them.”
“We’ve
had worse flooding in the general area,” he said, “but we have not seen
a surge of the river to this degree in recorded history.”
In
the picturesque country around Wimberley, the Blanco River’s banks are
sprinkled with bed-and-breakfasts and rental cottages. Last weekend, Mr.
McComb, his 33-year-old wife, Laura, and their sons, Leighton, 4, and
Andrew, 6, were staying in one home with two other Corpus Christi
families, Ralph and Sue Carey and Randy and Michelle Charba.
To
their west, a cloudburst in the Blanco River’s upper reaches dumped at
least 10 inches of rain late Saturday, unleashing a flash flood.
Not
long ago, said Ms. Bond, the magazine editor, local officials initiated
a so-called reverse-911 system, intended to make mass telephone calls
to local residents in the event of an emergency. “Everyone’s phone went
crazy,” Ms. Bond said. “It was a massive effort to call people, to wake
people up and get people out.”
Whether
Mr. McComb and the other guests got a call is not known. Bert Cobb, a
Hays County judge, told The Associated Press that floodwaters peaked
about 4 a.m. Sunday at more than 40 feet. He said witnesses saw the
McComb house slip from its foundation into the river, then smash into a
bridge.
Mr.
McComb’s father, Joe McComb, told The Corpus Christi Caller-Times that
his son managed to reach the river’s banks despite being hit in the head
by debris. Mr. Cobb, the county judge, said that only pieces of the
house had been recovered.
Source:nytimes.com