Texans Offer a Hand and Open Their Hearts as Flood Death Toll Grows

Chloe Childress, an 18-year-old counselor at Camp Mystic who died in the Central Texas floods last weekend, was a force of spontaneity who embraced every moment, family and friends said on Saturday at a memorial service in Houston. Whether it was goofing off in a locker room, going all out to win a school award, or concocting ideas to try to meet Taylor Swift, she was, her friend Bennett Bowman said, “a girl who was 100 percent heart.”

In Kerrville, Texas, Sally Sample Graves, who was 91 when she died in the flood in Ingram, received praise for how she looked out for her 10 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren.

“She wouldn’t buy dryer sheets for herself because they cost too much, but she helped every one of us grandchildren pay for college,” her granddaughter Laura Scott said at a funeral.

Across Texas this weekend, as the death toll from the flooding grew to 129 and a legion of workers kept up their search for the missing, the loved ones of victims paid tribute at services while wrestling with the emptiness left behind.

“This is as terrible as you think it is,” Ms. Childress’s father, Matthew, said.

Officials on Saturday said the number of deaths from the flooding in Kerr County had risen to 103 — 67 adults and 36 children — and that 161 people were still missing. The number of fatalities in nearby counties remained unchanged on Saturday.

The outpouring of grief and sympathy only grew. At a funeral in Kerrville for an 8-year-old girl who was at Camp Mystic, hundreds of people wore green and pink in honor of the child’s favorite colors. (Green was also the color of Camp Mystic.)