US President Donald Trump has visited flood-ravaged Kerr County in Texas’ Hill Country, where sudden flash floods on July 4 claimed at least 129 lives and left more than 170 missing.
Touring the disaster zone and meeting victims’ families, Trump praised the federal and state response while expressing shock at the scale of devastation caused by the flood.
The Republican leader, First Lady Melania Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott met local emergency services personnel as they also surveyed flood damage along the Guadalupe River.
During a roundtable discussion after touring Kerr County, the epicenter of the disaster, Trump praised both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for their response, saying they both did an “incredible job.”
The Trump administration, as well as local and state officials, has faced mounting questions over whether more could have been done to protect and warn residents ahead of the flooding, which struck with astonishing speed in the predawn hours on July 4, the Independence Day holiday.
In his reaction, the US President said “I think everyone did an incredible job under the circumstances.”
Some critics have questioned whether the administration’s spending cuts at the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which coordinates the government’s disaster response efforts, might have exacerbated the calamity.
Trump officials have said that cuts had no impact on the NWS’s ability to forecast the storms, despite some vacancies in local offices.
Search teams on Friday were still combing through muddy debris littering parts of the Hill Country in central Texas, looking for the dozens still listed as missing, but no survivors have been found since the day of the floods.
Heavy rains sent a wall of water raging down the Guadalupe River early on July 4, causing the deadliest disaster of the Republican president’s nearly six-month term in office.
