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4 things to know about the deadly Texas floods and ongoing search efforts
Search and recovery workers dig through debris at Camp Mystic near Hunt, Texas, on Sunday.
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After a weekend of catastrophic flooding in central Texas, search operations continue as questions swirl about whether officials could have done more to warn people before the river’s rapid rise.
The Guadalupe River swelled more than 26 feet in less than an hour early Friday morning, sweeping low-lying homes, cars and trees downstream and washing away much of Camp Mystic, an all-girls’ Christian summer camp.
At least 78 people are dead and another 41 are known to be missing, officials said on Sunday. Emergency responders have so far rescued hundreds of people by boat, truck and helicopter.
But search efforts have been complicated by fallen debris, heat, snakes and continued rainfall. Flash floods killed at least 11 people in the Austin region on Saturday, and a flood watch is in effect in through Monday evening in south central Texas, including the embattled Kerrville area.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said on Sunday that the state is broadening its area of focus for rescue efforts — citing the lives lost “in the greater region” — but pledged that Kerrville remains a top priority.
“We will remain 100% dedicated, searching for every single one of the children who were at Camp Mystic as well as anybody else in the entire riverbed to make sure that they’re going to be recovered,” Abbott said.
President Trump signed a federal disaster declaration on Sunday to help with those efforts, and said he will visit the state this week. Here’s what else we know so far.
1. The death toll is expected to rise
The death toll in hardest-hit Kerr County includes 40 adults and 28 children, Sheriff Larry Leitha said on Sunday.
Camp Mystic, located on the banks of the Guadalupe River some 18 miles from Kerrville, says it is grieving the loss of 27 campers and counselors. Separately, the death of the camp director was confirmed by family.
The century-old institution was hosting some 750 campers, according to Texas Public Radio. It’s not clear if that death toll includes the 10 campers and one counselor who officials said were missing as of Sunday.
Abbott said Sunday that while a total of 41 people are reported missing, that number is likely much higher.
“Especially in the Kerrville area, there were so many people who were just camping out … adults camping out near the river, people in RVs and things like that,” he said. “There are people who are missing who are not on the known confirmed missing [list] because we don’t yet know who they are.”
Officials urged residents to alert local officials if any of their loved ones may be missing in the Kerrville area — and to avoid potentially dangerous road conditions and so as not to interfere with rescue operations.
Debris is seen in the Guadalupe River in Kerrville, Texas, on Sunday.
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Jorge Salgado/Anadolu via Getty Images
2. Search and rescue efforts continue
Officials say more than 850 people have been rescued so far. The Texas Military Department said on Sunday that it has rescued 520 individuals, through 361 Black Hawk air evacuations and 159 ground rescues.
More than 400 first responders from over 20 agencies have been assisting with the search and rescue efforts in Kerr County. Officials there said on Sunday that there has been a “full response from local, state and national first responders,” with air, water, K9 and other assets involved.
W. Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said on Sunday that those efforts continue even as the state begins recovery operations, like clearing debris and reopening roads.
“That does not mean we are no longer doing search for live victims, because we still are,” he said, adding, “we’re doing everything we can to find their missing loved ones.”
3. Federal forecasters and Texas officials are pointing fingers
Questions are piling up about whether a region nicknamed “Flash Flood Alley” should have done more to prepare for Friday’s deluge, such as evacuating local summer camps.
Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice declined to answer those questions at a press conference on Sunday, saying the “rain hit at the most inopportune time and right in the most inopportune areas.”
Some Texas officials have suggested that the National Weather Service (NWS) didn’t adequately warn them of the extent of the danger, which the federal agency denies.
According to NPR’s timeline, the Texas Division of Emergency Management activated emergency response resources as early as Wednesday. On Thursday, it posted on social media and informed local officials about the risk of potential flooding.
Separately, the NWS’ Austin/San Antonio office issued a flood watch for multiple counties, which it upgraded to a flood warning just after midnight on Friday and expanded in the early morning hours.
By 4:06 a.m, with river levels rising quickly, it warned of an ongoing “very dangerous flash flooding event.” The official social media pages of the City of Kerrville’s Police Department and Kerr County sheriff didn’t post about the emergency until after 6 a.m.
Meteorologists told NPR that it is extremely tricky to predict what a complex weather system will do and then convince people to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Some critics have questioned whether those efforts were further hampered by the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce, which cost the NWS nearly 600 workers earlier this year (some were rehired after backlash).
Trump denied that on Sunday. “I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe, and it’s just so horrible to watch,” Trump said.
Hunt Baptist Church in Texas is offering free water, food, and clothes to anyone in need.
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Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
4. Trump says he will visit later this week
Rice, the Kerrville city manager, said on Sunday that “local and regional partners are committed to a full review of the events and systems in place.”
But with all eyes on rescue and recovery operations, federal and state officials say questions about what went wrong — and future preparedness plans — should be revisited later.
“Let’s focus on finding those who can be found, then we can always assess what we need to do later, going forward,” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said on Saturday.
Trump told reporters on Sunday that he plans to visit Texas this week, “probably Friday.”
“I would have done it today, but we’d just be in their way,” he said.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, told Morning Edition on Monday it’s been heartening to see the level of support Kerr County is getting from people around the world, including donations and volunteer sign-ups.
“But it’s gonna take the community a long time to recover there,” he said.
Texas Public Radio has compiled this guide to how to find and get help in the area.
The maker of Canvas, the software used by thousands of schools and universities around the world, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the hackers that recently breached its systems for the return of stolen data and the destruction of any copies.
ShinyHunters, a hacking group, had claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based company that provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America.
The hackers said they had accessed the data of more than 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, including private conversations between students and teachers as well as personal identifying information such as names and email addresses. Canvas was shut down for hours after the cyberattack on Thursday.
The agreement, Instructure said in a statement, involved the return of the stolen data and confirmation that the data had been destroyed at the hackers’ end. Instructure added that it had been informed that none of its customers would face extortion as a result of the theft.
“While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.
Instructure did not say what it had given the hackers in exchange for the return of the data. The company did not immediately respond to questions about the deal.
Canvas has more than 30 million active users around the world, according to Instructure. The platform is used by teachers and students for coursework management and communications. Instructure said the data compromised in the hack included usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages.
ShinyHunters on Thursday claimed the attack in a message that appeared on students’ Canvas pages and was obtained by The New York Times. The group warned that it would leak an unspecified amount of data on May 12 if it did not receive a response from Instructure. In its May 3 ransom note, the group had threatened to leak “several billions of private messages among students and teachers.”
Not much is known about ShinyHunters, which is believed to have been formed around 2020. Its goal appears to be to obtain personal records and sell them. One of its high-profile attacks was against Ticketmaster in 2024, when the hackers said they had stolen the user information of more than 500 million customers.
Instructure said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on Apr. 29, and again on May 7. The company said it took Canvas offline to investigate the breach, and also informed the F.B.I., the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other international law enforcement partners.
Instructure did not immediately respond to questions about whether any law enforcement agencies were involved in its dealings with the hackers. The F.B.I. advises against paying ransom to hackers, saying it does not guarantee data security and encourages attackers to target more victims.
The National Quarantine Center is located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
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Nebraska Medicine
Sixteen of the 18 passengers transferred to the U.S. from a cruise ship where there was an outbreak of hantavirus arrived in Omaha, Neb., on Monday for evaluation after disembarking the vessel in Spain’s Canary Islands over the weekend.
Of the 15 U.S. citizens and one dual U.S.-British citizen who arrived in Nebraska, all but one are currently being housed in the National Quarantine Unit. That patient tested positive for the virus and was being housed in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, officials said at a Monday news conference. The 15 people in the quarantine unit will continue to be monitored for signs of the illness.
Passengers carry their belongings in plastic bags after being evacuated from the MV Hondius after docking in the Granadilla Port on Sunday in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Spain.
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Nebraska may seem an unlikely location to process these individuals, but it is home to the National Quarantine Unit — the only federally funded quarantine unit in the U.S. — and the separate Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. They are highly specialized facilities located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and widely considered among the best in the world.
The $1 million, five-room biocontainment unit was dedicated in 2005. It was a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the UNMC. It is set up to safely provide medical care for patients with highly hazardous and infectious diseases and was used in 2014 to treat two doctors infected with Ebola. The National Quarantine Unit was completed in late 2019. It cost nearly $20 million, according to the Associated Press. Both facilities were used during the COVID-19 epidemic.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement. “Our teams have trained for decades alongside federal and state partners to make sure we can safely provide care while protecting our staff and the broader community. We are proud to support this national effort.”
Two additional U.S. passengers on the cruise ship — a couple, with one showing symptoms of hantavirus — were transferred for monitoring to Emory University Hospital, where another advanced biocontainment facility is located.
When the biocontainment unit was first dedicated more than 20 years ago, the biggest concerns were anthrax attacks and severe acute respiratory syndrome, more commonly known as SARS, Dr. Phil Smith, who spearheaded the efforts at Nebraska Medical Center to create the biocontainment unit, told the AP in 2020. Smith died last year.
A hallway leading to rooms at the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
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Nebraska Medicine
The quarantine unit features 20 negative-pressure rooms designed to keep potentially harmful particles from escaping by maintaining lower air pressure inside than outside the rooms. The single-occupancy rooms provide patients with attached bathrooms, exercise equipment and Wi-Fi, according to the medical center.
“We have protocols in the quarantine unit that provide for safe care of these of these persons, including just all the activities of daily living so that they can … have a comfortable stay but also have it in an area that’s protected and limits spread of the pathogen,” Dr. Michael Wadman, the medical director of the National Quarantine Unit, said at a Friday news conference.
The biocontainment unit, by contrast, is a patient-care space where people are able to receive medical treatment, Dr. Angela Hewlett, medical director of the biocontainment unit, told reporters Monday.
She emphasized that the facility — which has a 10-bed capacity — operates independently from the quarantine unit and has its own dedicated air-handling system. “We don’t share [it] with any of the rest of the facility,” she said, noting that the unit uses rooftop HEPA filtration and is designed “very differently” from what most people typically imagine in a hospital setting.
One of the rooms in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.
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Nebraska Medicine
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, speaking at Monday’s news conference, welcomed the recently arrived patients, who are among nearly 150 people from 23 different countries who were aboard the MV Hondius when the illness most commonly transmitted to humans through contact with infected rodents broke out. As of Monday, the World Health Organization has reported at least nine cases of hantavirus, including three deaths.
“We’re glad that you’re here,” Pillen said. “We’re going to ensure that you have the best world-class care possible.”
Pillen also sought to reassure Nebraskans that the facilities are safe and secure: “We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time,” he said. “No one poses a risk to public health, just walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha.”
The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship has been identified as the Andes strain of the illness, one that can be spread, though rarely, from person-to-person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause severe respiratory disease, with early flu-like symptoms.
“The Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged, close contact with someone who is already symptomatic,” according to Adm. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spoke at Monday’s news conference. “Even so, we have taken this situation very seriously from the very start.”
“The risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” he said.
The full quarantine period for hantavirus is 42 days, Christine said, but he added that the patients would be allowed to go home if they remained asymptomatic.
“Right now, the passengers that are all in the assessment phase — they’re going to be here for at least a few days while we do assessments and the coordination on what happens next,” he said, adding that they had the option to remain in the quarantine facility for the full period, for “the safest and most effective option for them.”
new video loaded: Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
transcript
transcript
Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
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We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time. No one who poses a risk to public health is walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha or beyond.
By Axel Boada
May 11, 2026
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