President Donald Trump expressed support Thursday for flood alarms in Texas and said he thinks “everyone’s doing a great job” responding to a disaster that has left more than 100 people dead and 170 people missing.
“After having seen this horrible event, I would imagine you’d put alarms up in some form, where alarms would go up if they see any large amounts of water or whatever it is,” Trump told NBC News’ "Meet the Press" moderator Kristen Welker in a phone interview Thursday.
“But the local officials were hit by this just like everybody else,” he said.
Trump will visit Texas on Friday, a week after the deadly flooding in Kerr County and other parts of the region, when the Guadalupe River surged to almost 30 feet in Hunt on July 4. That was higher than a 1987 flood disaster on the same river.
Among those confirmed or feared dead are 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic in Hunt.
Kerr County did not have audible flood alarms to warn residents.
Gov. Greg Abbott bristled at a reporter’s question this week about who was to blame for the scope of the disaster and the deaths, saying "that's the word choice of losers."
Trump said Thursday that “nobody ever saw a thing like this coming” and that “this is a once-in-every-200-year deal.”
"It’d be easy to blame them. I wouldn’t blame them," Trump said. "I think from the standpoint of the future, you’d have to have some kind of an alarm and lighting system, maybe."
Trump also defended Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem and the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response.
Trump has talked about possibly "getting rid of" FEMA. NBC News reported this week that Noem now requires that all agency spending over $100,000 be personally approved by her.
On Monday, FEMA officials created a task force to speed up the process of getting Noem’s approval, according to the reporting, which cited two people familiar with that unit.
"I don’t know anything about it," Trump said when he was asked about the reporting and whether that delayed FEMA's response.
"We were right on time. We were there — in fact, she was the first one I saw on television," he said. "She was there right from the beginning, and she would not have needed anything. She had the right to do it, but she was literally the first person I saw on television."
Trump said Noem "was right on the ball" and has "done a great job."
In Texas on Thursday, the search for the missing continued. Search-and-rescue operations along the Guadalupe River have shifted to a recovery phase.
There were 120 people confirmed dead and 173 people missing Wednesday evening, officials said. Among the 120, 96 of the confirmed dead were in Kerr County, 36 of them children.
Trump said that during Friday's visit, he will express how much "I love those people."
"Those people were with me right from the beginning, and it’s just a message of warmth, and I feel so terribly for them," he said.
