US President Donald Trump arrived in Texas on Friday, as questions were swirling about the authorities’ response to catastrophic floods that have left at least 120 people dead, including dozens of children.
The Republican leader and the First Mrs. Melania Trump flew by helicopter in the land of the central Texas hills to meet with the first correspondents, families and local officials, a week after a river of rainfall, swept their houses.
As they touched on Kerrville, a city in the worst Kerr County province, where at least 96 people are confirmed dead by historical floods, they were welcomed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
“We will be there with some of the big families” of flood victims, Trump told reporters before leaving the White House, calling for destruction as a “terrible thing”.
The search for more than 170 missing people, including five girls in the summer camp, entered the eighth day as rescue teams were combed through the mounds of debris and mud.
Read more:The Texas Flood Death Toll Hits 120? 170 is still missing
But without reporting the living rescues this week, concerns have been inflated that the number of deaths could be increased.
Trump has removed questions about the impact of his cuts on federal services in response to the flood, which he described as a “100 -year disaster” that “no one expected”.
On Thursday, Kristi Noem’s head of the Internal Security Department defended the immediate response as “fast and effective”.
Later on that day, with Texas officials addressing questions about why emergency evacuation messages to residents and visitors along the floods of the Guadalupe River were delayed in some cases several hours, Trump expressed support for a flood warning system.
“After seeing this horrible event, I would imagine that you would alarms in some form, where alarms will go up if they see large quantities of water or whatever it is,” Trump told NBC News in a telephone interview.
“But local officials were hit by just like everyone else,” he said.
The floods, among America’s most deadly in recent years, have also re -raised questions about Trump’s plans for the gradual abolition of the FEMA federal reaction service instead of greater state responsibility.
FEMA began its response to the floods of Texas over the weekend, after Trump signed a large statement of disaster to release federal resources.
But the president has so far avoided addressing questions about his future. Noem insisted that FEMA should be “eliminated” in its current form at a meeting of the Review Government on Wednesday.
Also read:Pets reunited with owners after floods of Texas as best animal girlfriends society help rescue efforts
Kerr County officials, sitting on the Guadalupe River in an area called “Flash Flood Alley”, said at least 36 children were killed in the disaster early on the weekend of July.
The details have appeared on the reported delays of early notifications locally that could have saved lives.
Experts say the forecasts did their best and sent timely and precise warnings despite the sudden change of weather.
Sheriff County Kerr Larry Leitha said: “It was between 4:00 or 5:00 (AM) when I got alert” of incoming emergency calls.
ABC News reported on Thursday that at 4:22 am On July 4, a firefighter at Ingram, upstream of Kerrville, had asked the Kerr County Sheriff’s office to warn residents of nearby hunting until the next flood.
The network stated that Ksat’s subsidiary received a sum of the call and that the first notice did not arrive at the Kerr County Codered system for full 90 minutes.
In some cases, he said, warning messages did not arrive by 10:00 am, when hundreds of people had already scanned.
The flood of the Guadalupe River was particularly devastating for summer camps on its banks, including Camp Mystic, where 27 girls and consultants died.
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