With more than 170 still missing, communities must reconcile how to pick up the pieces around a waterway that remains both a wellspring and a looming menace.

Plans to develop a flood monitoring system in the Texas county hit hardest by deadly floods were scheduled to begin only a few weeks later.

Camille Santana tragically lost her life during the Fourth of July floods that swept through Central Texas. Three other members of her family remain missing.

In the last nine years, federal funding for a system has been denied to the county as it contends with a tax base hostile to government overspending.

Bubble Inn saw generations of 8-year-olds enter as strangers and emerge as confident young ladies equipped with new skills from the great outdoors and lifelong friends – bonds that would one day prove vital in the face of unfathomable tragedy.

At least 120 people have been found dead since heavy rainfall overwhelmed the river and flowed through homes and youth camps in the early morning hours of July 4. Ninety-six of those killed were in the hardest-hit county in central Texas, Kerr County, where the toll includes at least 36 children.

Many Catholics in the region have been stepping up to help, converging on Notre Dame Parish in Kerrville, located in the hardest-hit community along the Guadalupe River.

KERRVILLE, Texas (AP) — Over the last decade, an array of Texas state and local agencies missed opportunities to fund a flood warning system intended to avert a disaster like the one that killed dozens of young campers and scores of others in Kerr County on the Fourth of July.