At least two people have died in flash flooding that has hammered central Texas for three consecutive days, Governor Greg Abbott confirmed Thursday. One man was swept away while in an RV. One woman was also swept away in floodwaters. More than 230 people have been rescued, with 2,350 emergency personnel deployed across the region.
Three separate flash flood emergencies were issued Thursday across Texas Hill Country, a region often called "Flash Flood Alley." The affected areas included Kerrville, Hunt, Uvalde, and Knippa. Evacuations and water rescues were reported in all four areas, with water entering buildings and roads cut off by rising rivers.
The Guadalupe River at Hunt rose from 9 feet to 19 feet between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. Central time. By just before 6 a.m., the gauge at Hunt measured 37 feet. The river gauge at Center Point rose 32 feet in four hours. The National Weather Service in San Antonio posted on X: "CATASTROPHIC flooding is occurring. Move to higher ground now! Guadalupe River is rapidly rising and will continue!"
A second flash flood emergency was later issued along the Pedernales River, just north of the Guadalupe. The gauge at Fredericksburg rose to more than 31 feet. A large flood wave moved downstream from Kerrville through Center Point, Comfort, Waring, Sisterdale, Crown, and Bergheim. Authorities anticipated a second wave later Thursday but did not believe it would reach the levels seen in the morning.
Engineers assessed the Highway 87 bridge over the Guadalupe River into Comfort, Texas, after fears that the force of the water had made it unstable. The engineers concluded the bridge was structurally sound for the time being. Fast-moving water carrying debris could be seen passing beneath it.
Up to 20 inches of rain had fallen in the Uvalde area over the previous 48 hours, more than six months of normal rainfall. Precipitation totals exceeded two feet in some areas, according to John Nielsen-Gammon, a professor of meteorological sciences at Texas A&M University and the Texas state climatologist, who spoke to ABC News.
The storm system sat over the region due to an unusually strong upper-level ridge that allowed for a completely clockwise circulation, Nielsen-Gammon said. That disturbance combined with a mesoscale convective vortex, a warm low-pressure circulation, that pulled moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. Marshall Shepherd, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, described the setup to ABC News. "It's really kind of an ideal setup from a rain production standpoint," Shepherd said.
The flooding is striking the same region where more than 130 people died during flash floods over the Fourth of July weekend in 2025, including 25 children and two counselors at Camp Mystic, an all-girls camp near Kerrville along the Guadalupe River. Camp Mystic did not reopen this year and filed for bankruptcy earlier in 2026.
Shepherd said the current event may be more extreme than last year's. "From a meteorological and a hydrological perspective, it may be at an even more extreme than the 2025 flood event," he said. However, because the flooding developed more slowly this time, Nielsen-Gammon said it may have given people more time to act. "Hopefully we've learned some lessons, and people had more plans and knew what to do," said Troy Kimmel, a retired professor of meteorology for the University of Texas and an incident response meteorologist for emergency management, who spoke to ABC News.
Carter Lopez, 30, a resident of Boerne, Texas, told BBC News he helped pull people from the water near his apartment. His downstairs neighbors had nearly four inches of water flood their home and had to take shelter in his unit. Lopez said last year's floods were not "quite as bad" as what he witnessed this week. "This is not something we could really prepare for," he said.
Abbott said no camps along the river had sustained damage as of Thursday afternoon and that warning sirens were activated and functioned properly. The governor said his administration would continue doing everything possible to protect lives as river levels were still expected to surge.
