The deadliest natural disaster in the United States was caused by flooding. In 1900, a hurricane hit the island city Galveston in southeast Texas with 125 mile per hour winds and 15 feet of standing water, ultimately killing about 8,000 people, according to the National Weather Service.

The exact number of deaths caused by floods can be difficult to determine because many are the product of hurricanes, which also kill with heavy winds that knock down trees and power lines. The death toll from a hurricane can include fatalities that aren’t specifically caused by flooding.

Still, the available data begins to describe the scope of the tragedy of the recent Texas floods. Among all deadly flooding events in the United States, including those caused by levee failures, seasonal rains and hurricanes, the Hill Country floods will most likely rank among the deadliest since 1925.

Below are some other major floods that rank among the most catastrophic:

Mississippi River Flood (1927)

Months of heavy rainfall overwhelmed the Mississippi River and caused its levee system to fail, flooding enormous swaths of Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, and stranding hundreds of thousands of people without food or water. The floods killed 246 people, according to the Weather Service.

Hurricane Helene (2024)

In September, Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane. It tore through the Gulf Coast of Florida, plowed through Georgia and walloped the Blue Ridge Mountains, washing out roads and causing landslides. It also destroyed towns across western North Carolina and became the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland in nearly two decades. The storm killed 250 people, 94 of which were deaths from flooding, according to a National Weather Service report.

Ohio River Flood (1937)

The Ohio River, which stretches through several states including Indiana, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, overflowed so much that it submerged entire towns and displaced roughly a million people. The flood resulted in roughly 350 deaths, according to the National Weather Service.

Hurricane Katrina (2005)

One of the most intense hurricanes to ever touch the U.S. mainland, Katrina breached New Orleans’s levees and ultimately caused 1,392 deaths, according to a Weather Service report. Many deaths were because of a lack of access to medical care in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, with roughly 500 directly caused by the storm, according to the report.

St. Francis Dam Disaster (1928)

In northern Los Angeles County, the St. Francis Dam was a symbol of California’s engineering might — until it collapsed and killed more than 400 people in a devastating wall of water just two years after its completion. This is the flood referenced in the 1974 movie “Chinatown.”

The service culminated in the recitation of more than 250 names submitted by parishioners and community members, including many of the girls drowned and still missing, their families, and others affected by the flooding. The names included the camp’s director, Dick Eastland, who is among the dead.

As the service concluded, the congregation sang the 19th-century hymn “Abide With Me,” a plea for God’s presence in times of anguish.

When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

In the foyer afterward, attendees hugged each other and chatted quietly, many with tears in their eyes. Some wrote prayers and messages of love for the Bonner family on colorful strips of paper. Others took a few small fuzzy pompoms from a jar, a nod to a Camp Mystic tradition.

Seemingly everyone in the room had a connection to the camp, often stretching back generations. The camp drew many attendees from the wealthy neighborhoods surrounding the church, and similar enclaves in Houston and Austin.

Holly Lacour, 30, broke down in tears after the service, talking about Mr. Eastland, the camp’s director.

“He cared about every single girl like we were his daughters,” she said. “I spent more Father’s Days with him than with my own dad.”

Ms. Lacour started attending Camp Mystic at age 9, and has missed only a few summers since then, including several for medical school. She is now a medical resident and worked at the camp’s infirmary last year. Like many young women in the packed pews on Sunday, she wore a Camp Mystic T-shirt.

The Bonner family are relatively new members of the church, Father Girata said in an interview after the service. Lila had attended the church’s vacation Bible school day camp just a few weeks ago.

“There’s a saying people like to attribute to Christian theology, which is ‘God will never give you more than you can handle,’” he reflected. “It’s terrible theology. Actually the entire point of Christ is that we cannot handle the pain of this world. Jesus carries the pain that is too much for us to bear.”

Mr. Pagard, 71, and his wife had been staying at a campground between Ingram and Kerrville, along the Guadalupe River. It had been a temporary spot as they looked for a new home, having sold their place in Athens, Texas, and moved to the Hill Country for cooler weather and its beautiful scenery.

Her father, she said, loved hunting, fishing and dogs. And as a former surfer, she said, she was confident that he was “doing anything he could to help others to safety.”

“He is a great guy and hope this isn’t the last chapter to his incredible life,” she wrote in a message to The Times.

Ms. Behrendt said someone had reached out to her after finding her father’s truck, identifiable thanks to a prescription bottle inside with his name on it. The camper was attached, but no bodies were found in the area.

Elsewhere near Kerrville, the Brake family has mounted a similar, agonizing search for Robert Brake Sr. and his wife, Joni, who have been missing since early Friday. Their stay at the campground had been their first visit to the area, as part of a trip to celebrate the Fourth of July with one of their sons. The holiday has long been one of the couple’s favorites, given the senior Mr. Brake’s military service and Ms. Brake’s tenure as a registered nurse on a military base.

Family members who live four hours away began frantically calling the pair at around 4:50 a.m. to wake them up and tell them to get away from the rising river. Robert Brake Jr., one of Mr. Brake’s sons, got in the car 10 minutes later to drive to Kerrville and begin the search.

“We have been to morgue after morgue, medical examiner after medical examiner,” said the elder Mr. Brake’s grandson Ryen Brake, 22. “We’re just kind of just praying and giving it to God, hoping for some kind of answer good or bad at this point.”

He added, “We’re strictly going off hope and prayer right now. How do you leave without your loved ones?”

“Jeff always knows what to do, and he’s asking me what to do: ‘Do I get out? Do I stay in? What do I do?’” Mr. Steele recounted, choking back tears. “They were begging me to save them, and I couldn’t do anything.”

He drove as far as he could toward their campsite, walked through thigh-high water until he couldn’t go farther. On the phone, his sister and brother-in-law were praying together and asked him to tell their children that they loved them.

“She screamed, and then the phone went dead,” he said. “That will be with me forever.”

Neither Mr. Ramsey or his wife, Tanya, have been found; Mr. Steele, 32, and the rest of his family have spent the last few days scouring through debris. There was a particularly heartbreaking moment, Mr. Steele said, when they thought Mr. Ramsey’s body had been found and identified in the morgue, until a second look the next day proved that it was not him.

“We still have hope, we’re still out there looking,” Mr. Steele said. They found Tanya’s phone, zippered safely in a windbreaker pocket. And they found the couple’s beloved whippet, Chloe, alive about four miles down the river.

“Anything I ever needed, they were always there for me — they were kind of a light in this world,” Mr. Steele added. Tanya had survived a bout with breast cancer about a year ago, while Mr. Ramsey spent many weekends working with disabled veterans and emergency medical workers adapting to the loss of a limb or other injuries. “They really have a huge connection to so many people.”

The Weather Service office for Austin, San Antonio and the surrounding areas warned that thunderstorms could increase through the afternoon.

“It’s just sort of beginning, so we’ll see what happens in the next couple of hours,” Bob Fogarty, a meteorologist with the Weather Service, said around 3 p.m.

At 4:15 p.m. local time, rain was falling over Kerr County. More than two inches of rain was possible on Sunday in the basin.

An inch or two of rain in three hours could cause the Guadalupe to flood again. “It’s just a question of where the rain falls,” Mr. Fogarty said.

Just before 4 p.m., the Weather Service issued several flash-flood warnings for portions of Hill Country, including for Hunt and Ingram.

“Move immediately to higher ground,” the agency said.

A large portion of Hill Country, including Kerr County, also remained under a flood watch through 7 p.m. on Sunday. The Weather Service said additional rainfall could range from two to four inches, with pockets of up to 10 inches.

A watch is a heads-up that conditions are favorable for flooding, while a warning is an order to take immediate action because flooding is expected to occur or is already happening.

Thunderstorms are notoriously difficult to forecast accurately. Meteorologists can identify a large area where storms are likely, but pinpointing the time and location of a storm is a challenge.

Mr. Fogarty compared predicting a thunderstorm to placing a pot of water on the stove and waiting for it to boil. “Now, try to pick out where the first bubble is going to form,” he said. “That’s what forecasting this is like.”

The thunderstorms in Central Texas are forming in an atmosphere with unusually high moisture that has flowed in from the Gulf. Mr. Fogarty said that there was little wind and that the storms were moving slowly and dumping rain over localized areas for long periods of time.

“We rely on weather models, and the models have not done a really good job with this whole event,” he said. “The atmosphere is unusually moist.”

Troy Kimmel, a meteorologist and retired University of Texas at Austin professor, said that short-range models, which use supercomputers to forecast weather, were “worthless” in the weather event that began July 4. “There’s something unique about this system that made it difficult to forecast,” he added.

The chance for heavy rain and flash flooding was expected to continue across portions of Hill Country on Monday, with drier weather likely on Tuesday, said David Roth, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center.

A large body of research indicates that the heavy rain that is causing the deadly flooding in Texas is becoming more frequent and extreme because of climate change. Warm air holds more moisture than cool air, and as temperatures rise, storms can produce bigger downpours. When they meet with outdated infrastructure or inadequate warning systems on the ground, the results can be catastrophic.

Raymond Zhong contributed reporting.

In one mangled tree that was still standing, a plastic kayak was lodged in the branches at least 15 feet above the ground.

Emergency workers pulled a red car filled with mud and debris from a bank of the river in Kerrville. They peeled the broken windshield out and shoveled dirt out of the car, looking for what could have been the latest potential victim in the flooding that has devastated central Texas.

More than a dozen curious onlookers stood around waiting to see if a body would be pulled out of the vehicle. One woman sat down along the river and wept.

In this case, the car appeared to have contained only dirt — no passengers. It took more than a dozen people to pull the car from the river with a tow truck and search through the debris, one example of the mammoth mission now being undertaken by rescuers here. At one point, a crew arrived with the Jaws of Life, a powerful hydraulic spreader tool, to pry open the mud-caked doors of the vehicle.

Near the red vehicle, a dead deer was on its back atop a pile of debris.

Across the area, crews were working to clear debris from along the bank of the Guadalupe; one crew arrived with a dog, prepared to search for people if warranted. There were vehicles, dozens of felled trees, and fencing that had been set up for a Fourth of July celebration along the river. Some trees were nearly horizontal, a sign of the strength of the current of the river at the height of the flooding.

Mr. Ruskan was part of a crew that was tasked with evacuating hundreds of people at Camp Mystic, an all-girls’ Christian summer camp along the Guadalupe River that has become a hub of loss in the catastrophic floods that killed more than 80 people across Central Texas. About 750 girls were at the camp this session, officials said.

Mr. Ruskan and his team took off on a helicopter around 7 a.m. Central on Friday to the camp, near Hunt, Texas. It took them nearly six hours to reach San Antonio because of poor visibility and challenging weather conditions. “A white-knuckle experience,” he said.

By the end of their operations, Mr. Ruskan was credited with saving 165 people from Camp Mystic.

Mr. Ruskan was part of the more than 1,700 emergency responders, bystanders, family members and others who used helicopters and drones, arrived on horseback and in trucks, and searched from boats and golf carts for those who remained unaccounted as search-and-rescue operations entered into a fourth day.

Many rescue stories over the past 48 hours have been harrowing. A 22-year-old woman was saved after clinging to a tree overnight. A young girl was found after floating on a mattress for hours. A mother and her 19-year-old son survived by clinging onto each other and a tree. A counselor at Camp Mystic helped evacuate her 14 young campers to safety.

Mr. Ruskan and his crew had a particularly onerous task.

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After their treacherous journey from Corpus Christi, Mr. Ruskan and his crew eventually landed at Camp Mystic, where they began working with 12 rescue helicopters, including those from the Army National Guard. Close to 200 people — mostly campers and some camp staff members — needed to be evacuated. Two main landing zones were set up: one on an archery field and one on a soccer field.

Mr. Ruskan realized that staying on scene would free up two extra spots on his helicopter for the evacuees, he said, so he told his unit, “I’d love to stay, I could do a lot more good on the ground.”

He became the main person on scene to both triage and provide emotional support to the survivors.

“Kids were in pajamas,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times, noting some were wearing just one shoe on their feet. They were cold and tired, many soaking wet. And they were desperate for answers about their friends.

“I had a job to do,” Mr. Ruskan added. “All these people are looking at you terrified with a 1,000-yard stare. They want some sort of comfort, someone to save them.”

Across the state, at least 81 people have died from the floods, 28 of them being children. More than 40 are still missing, officials said — 10 of those are campers from Camp Mystic, and one is a counselor. As of Saturday night, more than 850 people have been rescued in the search operations. Texas officials have assured residents that they will continue searching for the missing until every person is found — while at the same time acknowledging that the hope of finding more people alive was diminishing by the hour.

“We will remain 100 percent dedicated, searching for every single one of the children who were at Camp Mystic, as well as anybody else, and the entire riverbed to make sure that they’re going to be recovered,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said at a Sunday news conference.

Earlier on Sunday, President Trump granted Mr. Abbott’s request for a federal disaster declaration, directing federal assistance to the affected areas. State and local officials have urged people not to go out to conduct search-and-rescue operations and have asked people not to use personal drones over affected areas.

At Camp Mystic on Friday, Mr. Ruskan shuttled campers to the helicopters that would lift them to safety — sometimes carrying two girls in one arm. As he took some evacuees away, he assured the others that he would come back for them.

Some asked if they could bring stuffed animals with them. “Of course,” he told them.

When needed, the lake can handle water as high as 934 feet, he said, so there was significant room for additional inflow.

“This water will be stored,” Mr. Waller said. “There is still plenty of room for more water.”

Canyon Lake and other reservoirs in the region fell to extremely low levels earlier this year because of a prolonged drought. As recently as July 1, parts of the state remained in “exceptional drought,” the most severe category tracked by the U.S. Drought Monitor, Mr. Waller said.

“The area is so sensitive right now that any rainfall will generate runoff,” he said. “We’re monitoring conditions closely.”

When heavy rain falls after extended dry periods, Mr. Waller said, the initial rush of new water often carries debris and sediment into the lake, temporarily affecting water clarity. Lake operators may close access to public areas temporarily to allow the water to settle and debris to be removed.

“Most individuals who live around the lake understand that these bodies of water come with hazards, especially after major rain events,” Mr. Waller said. “While the increase in lake level was badly needed, there are always safety considerations that come with it.”

Canyon Lake is used to supply drinking water and produce electricity, as well as for recreation.

Though more rain and some heavy thunderstorms are expected through Tuesday, Mr. Waller said, the greatest risk for flash flooding now lies north of the Guadalupe River watershed, rather than in the area that drains into Canyon Lake.