A reporter asks about the crews searching through the mud and debris.

Baker says responders are trying to find victims efficiently while also making sure rescue crews can continue to do their work. Authorities have deployed a crisis intervention team and other resources of support.

"First responder wellness is a key component to these operations," he says. "To see a child in that loss of life is extremely tragic."

He adds that more water has come down in the area in recent days, which have added to the difficulty, but responders are also searching from the air.

"It will alter our patrol patterns and alter our searches but it won't deter them," he says of the weather.

Baker says the emergency response has been "extremely challenging" due to large piles of debris.

"These large piles can be very obstructive, and to get deep into these piles is very hazardous," he says.

"Those specialised teams have to go in there, layer by layer," Baker says, also citing concerns for the safety of first responders.

"So it's extremely treacherous, time consuming. It's dirty work."

Image source, Reuters

Up next is Ben Baker, Lieutenant Colonel of the Texas Game Wardens, who says the department has made 444 rescues, 30 recoveries and searched about 26 river miles since the flooding began.

Teams are continuing to look for victims along the river banks, but authorities have not said how many people they estimate are still unaccounted for or have been reported missing.

Kerrville's mayor, Joe Herring, says there has been an "outpouring of generosity".

The mayor says the city is working on a new system to accept donations, which will soon be posted online on Kerrville's Facebook page.

"We need a new system to handle the generosity of the world," Herring says.

"Please pray for those who mourn, for those who wait and for those who help."

The briefing has begun with an update on the death toll from Larry Leitha, Kerr County's sheriff.

He says 87 people are dead in Kerr County alone, including 56 adults and 31 children. Five campers and one adult from Camp Mystic are still missing.

That means the death toll in the county has gone up by three people since we last heard from officials there last night.

Kerr County has been hit hardest, but other counties in Texas have also reported fatalities, bringing total deaths in the state to at least 107 people.

Image source, Reuters

Officials from Kerr County, Texas - the area hardest-hit in last week's floods - are due to hold a news conference shortly. We are expecting to hear from them at 11:00 EDT (16:00BST).

We will bring you the top lines from the briefing, which you will be able to watch live at the top of this page.

Search and rescue efforts have been battling through debris from last weekend's flooding even as it continued to rain heavily for days following the first storms.

But the National Weather Service (NWS) forecasts some respite from the elements today.

"Chances of rain will decrease gradually Tuesday," the NWS's Austin/San Antonio office, which covers flood-affected areas, says.

"Drier and warmer conditions are forecast Wednesday through the weekend."

Kerrville, the town worst hit by the flash flood, will be mostly sunny today with temperatures expected to peak at 30 degrees Celsius (87 degrees Fahrenheit).

Image source, EPA

Rescue and recovery efforts are continuing across flood-ravaged central Texas five days after waters rose in the Guadalupe River and beyond - here's where things stand at the moment:

• The death toll continues to climb, with authorities confirming there are at least 104 dead across the state, and dozens more missing
• In worst-hit Kerr County, at least 84 people have died, including 28 children. About 10 more children remain missing from the devastated all-girls' Camp Mystic
• Stories of rescues are coming to light, with US officials singling out Coast Guard rescue swimmer Scott Ruskan for his actions that saved 165 people
• White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says Donald Trump will likely travel to visit the flood-hit areas of Texas on Friday

• There is some respite from the storms today with the National Weather Service (NWS) predicting a reduction in the chance of rain

We're expecting to hear some more updates from officials soon, so stick with us.

It's just after 19:00 in central Texas (01:00 BST), where rescue teams are still sifting through the wreckage of the flash floods that hit the region over the US holiday weekend as they search for at least 11 people still missing.

Here's what we know now, nearly five days after the disaster first began:

• More than 100 people have been confirmed dead, with at least 84 in Kerr County alone
• A girls' summer camp Camp Mystic confirmed at least 27 girls and staff were among the dead, with 10 children and one counsellor still missing

• Questions have been raised about whether adequate flood warnings were provided by the National Weather Service - find BBC Verify's analysis of the claims here
• Some parts of central Texas, including Kerr County, experienced several months' worth of rain in a few hours on Friday - A fuller explanation of what happened can be found here

• President Donald Trump is planning to visit the devastated region later this week, according to the White House

We are ending our live coverage of floods shortly but you can stay up-to-date on this story here: Texas floods death toll climbs to more than 100

Did US government cuts contribute to flood tragedy?published at 00:52 British Summer Time 8 July

00:52 BST 8 July

Image source, Getty Images

By Ben Chu, Jake Horton, Kayla Epstein & Marco Silva

In the aftermath of the fatal Texas floods, some have hit out at the Trump administration's spending and staffing cuts may have impeded the ability of the National Weather Service (NWS) to adequately predict the floods and raise the alarm.

But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said: "These offices [of the NWS] were well staffed../ so any claims to the contrary are completely false."

BBC Verify has examined the impact of cuts under Trump, and while there has been a reduction in the workforce at the NWS, experts who we spoke to said the staffing on hand for the Texas floods appears to have been adequate.

The Trump administration has proposed a 25% cut, external to the $6.1bn (£4.4bn) budget at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA), the agency which oversees the NWS, though these cuts do not take effect until October.

Staffing levels at the NWS have already been separately reduced by the Trump administration's wider personnel cuts, which began in January.

In total, the NWS lost 600 of its 4,200 staff, says Tom Fahy, the director of the NWS union, causing several offices across the country to operate without the necessary staffing.

But Andy Hazelton, a climate scientist who modelled hurricane paths for the NOAA until he was fired during the layoffs in February, says of the Texas floods: "I don't think the staffing issues contributed directly to this event. They got the watches and the warnings out."

Among the current NWS job vacancies in Texas is a senior hydrologist, a scientist who specialises in flooding events, in the San Angelo office, NSW union director Fahy tells BBC Verify.

The San Antonio office also lacks a "warning coordinating meteorologist", who coordinates communications between local forecasting offices and emergency management services in communities, Fahy says.

However, he notes that both offices had temporarily upped their staffing in anticipation of a dangerous weather event, which is typical in these circumstances.

Read BBC Verify's investigation into whether spending cuts played a role in the flooding disaster: Did US government cuts contribute to the Texas tragedy?

Matt Taylor
BBC Weather

While it is difficult to directly attribute the influence of our warming planet on one particular weather event - indeed we have seen flooding similar to last weekend's event in the past - there are a few things to note when examining the role of climate change in flood disasters.

Sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, where some of the air that contributed to these storms originated from, continue to be warmer than normal.

Warmer waters mean more evaporation and so more available moisture in the atmosphere for storms to tap into.

2024 was a record-breaking year for the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, according to Copernicus climate data, meaning more "fuel" for extreme rainfall events.

Climate scientists continue to remind us that such rainfall events as we have seen in Texas will become more frequent and more extreme as the planet warms.

The weather team at the BBC's US partner CBS News are reporting that some of the flood-hit parts of Texas were experiencing "extreme" drought conditions a day before the floods.

Droughts and flash floods are closely linked. When dry, parched soil meets an excess of water, it does not have the capacity to absorb it - leading the water to remain on the surface, creating a flash flood.

Climate change intensifies both droughts and floods as warmer climate can extend dry spells and intensify precipitation.

Image source, CBS News

The World Tonight

Our colleagues at the BBC's The World Tonight have spoken with Dr Claudia Sullivan - who attended Camp Mystic as a child and is now a professor at the Theatre Department at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas.

Sullivan says she loved her time as a camper - starting at age 13 - so much that she then became a counsellor and programme director at Camp Mystic.

She says she was shocked to hear about the 27 people, including children and adults, who died in the flooding at the camp in recent days - "the people you know, love, grew up with"

"I've lived through some of the floods when I was living at Camp Mystic, and I have moved little girls in the middle of the night to higher ground," she says. "But I tell you what, this water (over the weekend) came to places that I have never seen it."

Sullivan has written about the Christian all-girls summer camp in a book called "Since We Were There: The Influence of Summer Camp on Adult Lives".

Local officials say that 10 campers and one counsellor remain missing from Camp Mystic.

In those early hours of Friday, the downpours were directed off the hills and straight into the surrounding rivers causing them to swell at a rapid rate.

A torrent of water surged downstream, sweeping the low-lying area next to the river exceptionally quickly.

Some of the girls killed or still missing from the camp were in low-lying cabins less than 500ft (152m) from the river bank, reports the New York Times.

Those who escaped - taken to safety in military trucks - said the camp was unrecognisable, with trees uprooted, kayaks in trees and girls being pulled out of the water.

The National Weather Service (NWS) reported a swathe of around 5-10in (125-250mm) of rainfall in just three to six hours across south-central Kerr County. Between Thursday and Monday there were nearly 21 inches of rain in some parts.

Average July rainfall over the last 25 years for the Kerrville area is just over two inches, which means around four months of rain fell in a matter of hours.

A flood watch had been issued on Thursday afternoon and after midnight local time it was upgraded to a flood warning, advising people to find higher ground.

Camp Mystic was in a spot with some of the highest rainfall levels during those calamitous few hours.

Experts say there was a number of factors that contributed to the tragedy over the weekend in Texas, including the extreme weather, the location of the holiday homes and timing.

There was a large supply of moisture in the atmosphere from a tropical storm that had caused flooding in Mexico and then tracked north as it died out.

Kerr County, where the camp was located and where at least 84 lives have been lost, is a hillier part of Texas than surrounding counties. This meant that the moisture-laden air was forced upwards, building huge storm clouds.

This system was slow-moving, adding to the rain totals, and creating further thunderstorms along the area around the Guadalupe River, which surged with unprecedented speed.

The torrential rain that brought destruction to a children’s summer camp and other holiday spots in rural Texas came with devastating speed.

Water came crashing through the stone cabins of Camp Mystic in the early hours of Friday with little warning as the girls and staff slept.

The Guadalupe River had burst its banks after months of rain fell in just a few hours, a freak weather event described by officials as a "100-year catastrophe".

In the area around Kerrville, approximately 10 inches (250mm) of rain fell in a matter of hours on Friday. This is close to four times the amount of rain that would usually be expected during the entire month of July.

King Charles has written to President Trump to express his "profound sadness" at the catastrophic floods in Texas.

He "offered his deepest sympathy" to those who lost loved ones on 4 July, the UK embassy in Washington DC says, as reported by the PA news agency.

The British monarch also paid tribute to the "courage and selflessness of the emergency service and volunteers."

Local officials in Kerr County have just released a statement to say that a total of 84 people have died in in their jurisdiction as a result of the floods.

That includes 56 adults and 28 children, the sheriff's office says.

That's a rise of nine people - eight adults and one child - since we last heard from officials a few hours ago.

We'd heard earlier that 10 children who had been attending Camp Mystic and one of the camp's counsellors were unaccounted for - the sheriff's office says this remains the case.

By our count, this update means 104 people have been confirmed dead, though authorities have warned this number is likely to change.

Kerr County is the worst affected flooded area.