Associated Press file photo / Search and rescue teams comb the banks of the Guadalupe River after a flash flood swept through the area on July 12 in Kerrville, Texas.

DALLAS — Texas officials labored to account for more than 160 people originally reported missing along the Guadalupe River after the deadly July Fourth floods before ultimately concluding that most were safe and only three individuals still haven’t been found, the top executive in the hardest-hit county said Monday.

“Most of them were tourists that came into town and left and went back home and didn’t report that they were there,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said at a special meeting of the county commissioner court. He called the process a “Herculean effort.”

The flash floods killed at least 135 people in Texas, and most of the deaths were in Kerr County, where destructive, fast-moving water rose 26 feet on the Guadalupe River, washing away buildings and vehicles in the area about

60 miles northwest of San Antonio.

The sharp revision in the number of missing by Kerr County officials on Saturday followed a familiar pattern in the often chaotic aftermath of large-scale disasters. Hundreds of people were reported missing in the initial days after the floods through a phone hotline and email address, which launched investigators on an “exhaustive effort” to verify the status of each of those individuals, Kerrville police spokesperson Jonathan Lamb said.

“We understand how critical it is to report this information accurately — not only for the families affected but for the integrity of our emergency response as a whole,” Lamb said.

Sharp swings follow disasters

Drastic changes in the missing count after a disaster aren’t unusual.

For instance, the death count from the 2023 Maui fire was eventually found to be just over 100 — far below the 1,100 initially feared missing.

In 2017, a wildfire in Northern California’s wine country killed more than 20 people, but most of the 100 people initially reported missing were located safe.

The 2018 wildfire that largely destroyed the California town of Paradise ended up killing nearly 100 people, though Butte County investigators at one point had the names of more than 3,000 people who were not accounted for in the early days of the disaster. The names were whittled down when the list was published in the local paper, and many people realized for the first time that officials were looking for them.