But it was too late to leave. As the trailer was swept down rain-swollen Pecan Creek, the three and the girls’ grandmother tried to hang on, but the trailer hit a bridge, where it lodged and partially broke apart.
All four were swept away in the muddy, rushing water, and the bodies of a 5-year-old girl and her 60-year-old grandmother were recovered hours later, said Cooke County Judge Bill Freeman. They were among at least five killed Monday when floodwaters inundated several North Texas cities overnight.
The girls’ mother was rescued from a tree and taken to a hospital, said Cpl. Mike Linnell of the Department of Public Safety. But her 2-year-old remained missing later Monday.
The mother “got thrown out. And that’s the last thing she remembers,” said a tearful woman, who declined to give her name but was identified by Linnell and a family friend as the children’s other grandmother. “I just want to find my babies.”
DPS Trooper Rebecca Uresti said at least five people were missing in the Gainesville area, including the 2-year-old girl.
Gov. Rick Perry dispatched three helicopters and other Texas National Guard troops and equipment to help with searches around the state.
The creek was among several overflowing after torrential overnight rains left most of Gainesville under water. Hundreds were evacuated and others were stranded on rooftops awaiting rescue.
Up to 8 inches of rain fell in parts of North Texas since midnight, swamping Gainesville and nearby Sherman. A woman died in Sherman, and a 4-year-old girl was swept away and died in the Fort Worth suburb of Haltom City.
Gainesville, a city of about 16,500 located about 60 miles northwest of Dallas near the Oklahoma border, was almost entirely deluged, but the brown floodwaters started receding by midday.
At the trailer park where the girls lived, 30 or so homes were knocked from their foundations, their side panels ripped off and floating in the knee-deep water. The area was littered with twisted metal and broken glass, and a pink-and-white baby’s blanket was stuck in a tree. Authorities marked some trailers with a red “X” to indicate nobody was found inside.
Residents awoke to rapidly rising floodwaters early Monday.
“I heard people screaming,” said Angela Rodriguez, a 13-year-old who lives three houses down from the park. “I was really shocked. This hasn’t happened here before.”
Elsewhere in Gainesville, aerial videotape showed rescuers pulling adults, children and even pets off rooftops and helping them into boats. Dozens of people sought refuge from high water on a railroad crossing. Entire families awaited rescue on their roofs, some hacking their way through attics to the outside.
In Sherman, a city of about 37,000 about 60 miles northeast of Dallas, one woman died and at least 300 people in apartments and nursing homes evacuated after rising waters submerged cars, trapped residents on the second stories of their flooded homes and eroded chunks of asphalt.
Patricia Beshears, 48, of Denison, was killed when her sport utility vehicle flooded with water while driving to work, Sherman police Sgt. Bruce Dawsey said. No other injuries were immediately reported.
Dump trucks helped evacuate about 125 residents from a nursing home when authorities had no other vehicles that could plow through the flooded streets. Near downtown, residents in a flooded row of apartment complexes were told to flee to the second story while they waited the arrival of overwhelmed rescue workers.
A swamp boat rescued Tracie Polk and her two kids, who fled to the second story of their apartment when waters became waist-high. Daughter Jerin Dickson, 14, later helped Polk wring water from soaked couch cushions and curtains in their living room as their bare feet squished on the drenched carpet.
“People all around us were hanging out their second-story windows,” Polk said. “I thought we were going to have to climb onto the roof.”
Grayson County Judge Drue Bynum said the flooding is the worst the area has seen in more than 15 years. In the rural town of Gunter, authorities urged more than a dozen homes to evacuate after water crept over the spillways of flood control dams.
“Literally, we’ve had some miracles today,” Bynum said. “But we’ve been very fortunate in spite of what’s happened.”
In Haltom City, 4-year-old Alexanderia Collins died after she was swept away.
Television station KTVT reported that Alexanderia’s parents saw a small boat float by and got in with their two children and another child. The current flipped that boat.
“It capsized. My niece was holding three girls, and Ali was the smallest of the three. The water got real high and it swept them under, and when she came up she only had two girls and Ali was gone,” Tara Kirby told KTVT.
Natasha Collins told television station KXAS that she last saw her daughter “when the current took her out of my arms.”
The National Weather Service said the downpour at times fell at a rate of an inch every 15 minutes.
“We get heavy rains in North Texas, but the rate, the amount, the duration and the coverage of this are just amazing,” said Gary Woodall, the warning-coordination meteorologist for the Weather Service office in Fort Worth.
The Weather Service said most of the rainfall has moved on, but that there was a chance of isolated thunderstorms in the area Monday and Tuesday.
