Texan who lost family in 2015 flood joins search for victims

A widower who lost his wife and two children in a Texas flood 10 years ago has joined the harrowing search for those still missing in the latest disaster that has killed more than 100 people.

Jonathan McComb, 45, lost his wife, Laura, and their two children — son Andrew, 6, and daughter Leighton, 4 — when a vacation home they were staying in for Memorial Day weekend in 2015 was swept into the raging Blanco River in a flood that killed 13 people.

He arrived Friday in Kerrville — about 80 miles from where he lost his own family — as one of hundreds of Texas Search and Rescue [TEXSAR] volunteers scouring for current victims near the Guadalupe River, just as the group had searched for his 10 years earlier.

“This one hits a little bit more at home,” McComb told USA TODAY while helping in the area where more than a hundred are confirmed dead and many others remain missing.

“I can see the hurt and the pain in the families. I know what they’re going through and what they’re feeling and what they’re going to feel,” he said of overwhelmed relatives there.

McComb arrived hours after flash floods caused the Guadalupe River to rise more than 26 feet in less than an hour early Friday morning, devastating the region. The dead include at least 27 campers and counselors from all-girls Christian summer camp Camp Mystic Hunt, where 10 girls remain missing.

McComb had been the only survivor out of nine people staying in a vacation home in Wimberley in 2015 when floods destroyed more than 400 homes.

The home they were in crumbled when it smashed into a bridge, sending the family into the waters — with the dad only able to watch helplessly as his wife and kids were swept to their deaths. His daughter’s body was never found.

Giving up hope, McComb had allowed himself to be taken away by the current, before he came to after bumping his head some 11 miles downriver, he said.

He described this weekend’s emotional toll as an internal “tug of war” — but knows the effort is worth it.

“I’m here to help. But knowing we weren’t able to recover my daughter 10 years ago and I know what that feels like. I want to do what I can to help,” he told USA Today.

McComb — who has since remarried and has a 5-year-old daughter, Scarlett — joined TEXSAR at the end of 2015 after learning how volunteers searched for his own family. He has since been on six search operations with the group.