Somebody should have been watching weather warnings 24/7: Meteorologist on Texas floods

As emergency teams searched for a fourth day for dozens of missing flood victims in central Texas, Accuweather's chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter defended the work done by the meteorologists at the National Weather Service, saying there were hours of advance notice that the area would be hit by heavy flooding. 

"There were several hours of advanced notice, ample time for people to move to higher ground, and for the local officials to take action in order to move people to safe areas. And so the question is, now that the warnings were there, the question now is, is what did local officials and the people that were responsible for safety at the camps, what action plans did they have for handling flash flooding, and what actions did they take?" Porter said. 

Kerrville city manager Dalton Rice has defended the work of local officials, saying that the area is very spread out, that communication in the area is challenging and that evacuations are a delicate balance, because of the risk of having numerous evacuees in vehicles as the flooding is taking place. 

Other local officials have said that while flood warnings were issued, the incredible speed at which the river grew in the middle of the night was unprecedented. 

The controversy comes as U.S. Senate's top Democrat, Senator Chuck Schumer, asked a government watchdog, the Department of Commerce's acting inspector general, to investigate whether cuts at the National Weather Service affected the forecasting agency's response to catastrophic and deadly flooding in Central Texas. He asked the watchdog to scrutinize the NWS's San Antonio office's communications with Kerr County officials.

The NWS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Schumer's letter. It defended its forecasting and emergency management in a statement Monday, adding that it assigned extra forecasters to the San Antonio and San Angelo offices over the holiday weekend.

Meanwhile, search teams plodded through mud-laden riverbanks and flew aircraft over the flood-stricken landscape, looking for dozens of people still missing from a disaster that has claimed at least 91 lives.

The bulk of the death toll from Friday's flash floods was concentrated in the riverfront Hill Country Texas town of Kerrville, according to Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha.

The Guadalupe River, transformed by predawn torrential downpours into a raging, killer torrent in less than an hour, runs directly through Kerrville.

The loss of life there included an unspecified number of fatalities at the Camp Mystic summer camp, a nearly century-old Christian girls' retreat on the banks of the Guadalupe, where authorities reported two dozen children unaccounted for in the immediate aftermath of the flooding on Friday.

(Production: Sandra Stojanovic, Evan Garcia, Aleksandra Michalska)