After the devastating floods in Central Texas, many have been tracking the number of missing and the number of dead.
Last week, state and local officials said there were 97 people missing in Kerr County. But then, over the weekend, they released a revised figure: three. Yet the death toll there remained unchanged; Kerr county had 107 of the 135 deaths recorded statewide.
Rick Rojas, the Atlanta bureau chief for The New York Times, said this is pretty typical after a disaster of this magnitude.
“The number of missing people is just a big fluid number that reflects more than anything just the chaos and the uncertainty,” he said. “It just takes a long time to just methodically work their way through and find out who’s missing and who actually has been located by this point.”
Part of the difficulty with accounting for people after the flooding in Kerrville specifically came down to the number of people visiting from out of town during the holiday weekend when disaster struck.
“You could have loved ones, friends, family members from afar saying, ‘oh, my person is there. I have not heard from them. Let me report them to this number or this email address,'” Rojas said. “[But] they could have left and just gone home without telling the authorities. There’s any number of reasons why someone might have just been mischaracterized as missing in the immediate aftermath.”
» MORE: Complete coverage of deadly flooding in the Texas Hill Country
The number of missing people goes up fast, but then it takes a long time for authorities to confirm that someone is safe amid search and rescue efforts, Rojas said.
“They had to find them and confirm that they were alive, that they were well, that they were no longer missing,” he said. “And that takes a lot of time. We’re talking about a lot of people in a very big state. And that’s why it took so long. They had to work through that process to be sure.
“Because as one of the police officers in Kerrville said, we understand how important it is to report this information accurately. It’s important not just for the people affected, but for the overall integrity of this emergency response.”
This same steep drop-off in missing people has occurred after other notable disasters recently.
“The assumption is – and the fear is – that this means that that number is going to eventually become the death toll. That doesn’t always happen,” Rojas said. “For instance, with the Paradise Fire in Paradise, California, a few years ago, at one point, the unaccounted for number was 1,300, but the final death toll was 85.”
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Rojas said the high number of missing people reported reflects how uncertain and scary the aftermath of a major weather event can be.
“This happened in the pre-dawn dark of the Hill Country. Houses, cars, people were washed away in this just horrifying way,” he said. “In those early hours, it was a different kind of fear and uncertainty because there was just so much that people didn’t know.
“And I think that’s what this is a reflection of perhaps more than anything, of just how unclear things were in those hours and how people were grasping for any kind of answers and were just dealing with their own fears about the people that they knew that they couldn’t find.”
