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killed at least 95 people over the Fourth of July holiday weekend and left others still missing, including girls attending a summer camp. On Monday, at least 27 campers and counselors had died in the flooding.

The devastation along the Guadalupe River, , has drawn a massive search effort as officials face questions over their preparedness and the speed of their initial actions.

Here's what to know about the deadly flooding, the colossal weather system that drove it in and around Kerr County, Texas, and ongoing efforts to identify victims.

The floods grew to their worst at the midpoint of a long holiday weekend when many people were asleep.

The Texas Hill Country in the central part of the state is naturally prone to flash flooding due to the dry dirt-packed areas where the soil lets rain skid along the surface of the landscape instead of soaking it up. An area of cliffs and steep hills called the the Balcones Escarpment is also a factor.

"When warm air from the Gulf rushes up the escarpment, it condenses and can dump a lot of moisture. That water flows down the hills quickly, from many different directions, filling streams and rivers below," Hatim Sharif, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at The University of Texas at San Antonio, wrote in . 

In addition to the geography, multiple weather factors contributed to Friday's heavy rainfall, meteorologists say. 

"First and foremost, you had Barry," a tropical system that had made landfall in eastern Mexico early last week and was weakening, Autos News Philadelphia meteorologist Kate Bilo said Monday. 

Moisture from that system was lifted northward "right on up into Texas," Bilo said. There were also other weather systems — a low-level jet stream and an upper level disturbance — adding more moisture.

"Nothing was really moving so you just had all of this rain coming down over the same areas and heavy, heavy rainfall rates because of all of that deep, deep moisture in the atmosphere," Bilo explained.

After a flood watch notice midday Thursday, the National Weather Service office issued an urgent warning around 4 a.m. that raised the potential of catastrophic damage and a severe threat to human life. By at least 5:20 a.m., some in the Kerrville City area say water levels were getting alarmingly high. The massive rain flowing down hills sent rushing water into the Guadalupe River, causing it to rise 26 feet in just 45 minutes.

Gov. Greg Abbott said that there were dozens of people unaccounted for across the state and more could be missing.

In Kerr County, home to youth camps in the Texas Hill Country, at least 75 people, including 27 children, died, officials said Monday morning. Fatalities in nearby counties brought the total number of deaths to at least 95 as of Monday afternoon.

Ten girls and a counselor were still unaccounted for at , a Christian summer camp along the river.

The campers who died include 8-year-old Linnie McCown of Austin, 8-year-old Eloise Peck of Dallas and 9-year-old Lila Bonner of Dallas, their families said. Chloe Childress, an 18-year-old counselor from the Houston area, also died in the floods, according to the Kinkaid School, where she had recently graduated.

Camp Mystic's owner and director Dick Eastland died while trying to save girls at the camp, . The obituary section of the Kerrville community news site was dotted with tributes to victims, including Eastland.

For past campers, the tragedy turned happy memories into grief.

Beyond the Camp Mystic campers unaccounted for, the number of missing from other nearby campgrounds and across the region had not been released.

"We don't even want to begin to estimate at this time," Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said Saturday, citing the likely influx of visitors during the July Fourth holiday.

Survivors have described the floods as a "pitch black wall of death" and said they received no emergency warnings.

Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, who lives along the Guadalupe River, said Saturday that "nobody saw this coming." Various officials have referred to it as a "100-year-flood," meaning that the water levels were highly unlikely based on the historical record.

And records behind those statistics don't always account for human-caused climate change. Though it's hard to connect specific storms to a warming planet so soon after they occur, meteorologists say that a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and allow severe storms to dump even more rain.

Additionally, about why residents and youth summer camps along the river were not alerted sooner than 4 a.m. or told to evacuate.

Officials noted that the public can grow weary from too many flooding alerts or forecasts that turn out to be minor.

Kelly said authorities were shocked by the ferocity of the floods. "We had no reason to believe that this was gonna be any, anything like what's happened here. None whatsoever," Kelly told "CBS Evening News."

Kerr county officials said they had presented a proposal for a more robust flood warning system, similar to a tornado warning system, but that members of the public reeled at the cost.

On Sunday, officials walked out of a news briefing after reporters asked them again about delays in alerts and evacuations.

With more rain on the way, the risk of life-threatening flooding was still high in central Texas on Monday even as crews search urgently for the missing. have joined the effort — with some rescuers maneuvering through challenging terrain filled with snakes. 

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem  that the U.S. Coast Guard was responsible for saving more than 200 people, as dramatic  showed Guard members conducting aerial rescues near Kerrville, while dark water covered the ground.  

The flash floods have erased campgrounds and torn homes from their foundations.

"It's going to be a long time before we're ever able to clean it up, much less rebuild it," Kelly said Saturday after surveying the destruction from a helicopter.

Other massive flooding events have driven residents and business owners to give up, including in areas struck last year by Hurricane Helene.

President Donald Trump signed a major disaster declaration Sunday for Kerr County and said he would likely visit Friday: "I would have done it today, but we'd just be in their way."

"It's a horrible thing that took place, absolutely horrible," he told reporters.

At the Vatican, Pope Leo extended a prayer to the flooding victims during Sunday mass, saying, "I express my sincere condolences to all the families who have lost loved ones, in particular their daughters who were at summer camp, in the disaster caused by the flooding of the Guadalupe river in Texas in the United States."