Trump tours Texas flood damage

KERRVILLE, Texas (AP) — President Donald Trump arrived Friday in Texas for a firsthand look at the devastation from the state's catastrophic flooding.

“It's a horrible thing,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House. He approved Texas's request to extend the major disaster declaration beyond Kerr County to eight additional counties, making them eligible for direct financial assistance to recover and rebuild.

Air Force One landed in San Antonio with Trump deplaning in a suit and first lady Melania Trump wearing more casual clothing, including a hat. The first couple will tour some of the hard-hit areas by air, then visit the state emergency operations center in Kerrville to meet with first responders and relatives of flood victims.

“This area is primarily pro-Trump,” said Harris Currie, a rancher from Utopia, Texas, near Kerrville, who said that having the president visiting boosts morale. “It’s the country, and that’s what got him elected. Do they expect it? No. Is it uplifting? Absolutely.”

Trump won Kerr County with 77% of the vote last year, and Currie said his visit is “something a president should do. It exhibits a level of leadership that a president should exhibit.” He also said the flood devastation can be fully understood only by seeing it first-hand.

“Pictures do not do it justice,” Currie said.

The president will get a briefing from officials in Kerrville, where he will be joined by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.

Kerr County Commissioner Jeff Holt, who also is a volunteer firefighter, said the focus of Trump's visit should be “how we responded and what we’re going to do in the future.”

“In the future, we’re going to figure out how we get a little better at what we do,” Holt said.

Asked what he might tell Trump officials needed, Holt stressed the need for repairs to nonworking phone towers and “maybe a little better early warning system.” Trump himself has suggested that a warning system should be established.

Local officials in Texas have come under mounting scrutiny over how much they were prepared and how quickly they acted.

Darrin Potter, a Kerr County, Texas, resident for 25 years who saw ankle-deep flooding in his home and knew people who were killed, said earlier this week, “As far as early warnings, I’m sure they can improve on that."

But he said all the talk about evacuating missed something important. The area where a wall of water ripped through was a two-lane road, he said.

“If you would have evacuated at 5 in the morning, all of those people would have been washed away on this road," he said.

During a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described traveling to Texas and seeing heartbreaking scenes, including around Camp Mystic, the century-old all-girls Christian summer camp where at least 27 people were killed.

“The parents that were looking for their children and picking up their daughter's stuffed animals out of the mud and finding their daughter’s shoe that might be laying in the cabin," she said.

But the secretary also co-chairs a Federal Emergency Management Agency review council charged with submitting suggestions for how to overhaul the agency in the coming months.

“We, as a federal government, don’t manage these disasters. The state does,” Noem told Trump on Tuesday.