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Recovery efforts are still underway in the Texas Hill Country. Over a week after the deadly Independence Day Floods killed over 120 people, there are still over 100 missing, despite continuous efforts around the clock from state, local, and federal authorities, as well as civilian volunteers.
Among the civilian volunteers is Brian Trascher with the Cajun Navy. He says that unfortunately, recovering victims will continue to be a slow process. He explained, "One of the problems with finding people is that getting to the areas where we think a missing person might be is very difficult."
The process of getting to and recovering the remains of a victim is made even more complicated because of the massive amounts of debris from the storms. Trascher said that "there could be debris stacked 30 or 40 feet high. And a lot of times, when someone drowns, they'll get caught up in this debris, and they'll end up where the debris is."
This means crews and volunteers have to carefully make their way to these debris piles and then slowly search and dismantle them.
Trascher says this process isn't going to speed up any time soon and emphasized how truly difficult it is to actually locate victims, saying, "It's not just like an open field where you'll just find people like a Civil War battlefield. It's really like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles. But they have some very specialized, highly trained people out there."