At Least 5 Are Killed And 12 Are Missing As Storms Ravage Texas And Oklahoma

Violent weather in Oklahoma and Texas left at least five people dead and more than a dozen missing over the long weekend. In Dallas, above, the Trinity River overflowed its banks. Credit Louis Deluca/The Dallas Morning News, via Associated Press

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.

At least 13 people were reported killed in Ciudad Acuña, a Mexican border town west of San Antonio, after a tornado struck. Credit Ramiro Gomez/Reuters

“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.

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