*

Town of Kerrville, on flooded river, accounts for most

fatalities

*

Death toll likely to rise with dozens still listed as

missing

*

Fatalities include 27 campers and counselors from girls'

retreat

*

Search helicopter collides with unauthorized drone over

flood

area

(Updates with latest casualty figures throughout; search

helicopter collides with drone; debate over lack of evacuations)

By Sergio Flores and Evan Garcia

KERRVILLE, Texas, July 7 (Reuters) - Search teams

plodded through muddy riverbanks and flew aircraft over a

flood-ravaged central Texas landscape on Monday as hopes dimmed

for finding more survivors among dozens still missing from a

disaster that has claimed at least 96 lives, many of them

children.

Three days after a torrential predawn downpour transformed

the Guadalupe River into a raging, killer torrent, a Christian

girls' summer camp devastated by the flash flood confirmed that

27 campers and counselors were among those who had perished.

Ten girls and a camp counselor were still unaccounted for,

officials said on Monday, as search-and-rescue personnel faced

the potential of more heavy rains and thunderstorms while

clawing through tons of muck-laden debris.

The bulk of the death toll from Friday's flooding was

concentrated in and around the riverfront Hill Country town of

Kerrville, including the ill-fated grounds of Camp Mystic.

By Monday afternoon, the bodies of 84 flood victims - 56

adults and 28 children - were recovered in Kerr County, most of

them in the county seat of Kerrville, according to the local

sheriff.

As of midday Sunday, state and local officials said 12 other

flood-related fatalities had been confirmed across five

neighboring south-central Texas counties, and that 41 other

people were still listed as missing outside Kerr County.

The New York Times, one of numerous news media outlets

publishing varying death tolls on Monday, reported that at least

104 people had been killed across the entire flood zone.

'ROUGH WEEK' AHEAD

While authorities continued to hold out hope that some of

the missing would turn up alive, the likelihood of finding more

survivors diminished as time passed.

"This will be a rough week," Mayor Joe Herring Jr said at a

briefing on Monday morning.

Camp Mystic, a nearly century-old Christian girls' retreat

on the banks of the Guadalupe was at the epicenter of the

disaster.

"Our hearts are broken alongside our families that are

enduring this unimaginable tragedy," the camp said in a

statement on Monday.

Richard "Dick" Eastland, 70, Mystic's co-owner and director,

died trying to save children at his camp from the flood,

multiple media, including the Austin American-Statesman

reported. He and his wife, Tweety Eastland, have owned the camp

since 1974, according to its website.

"If he wasn't going to die of natural causes, this was the

only other way, saving the girls that he so loved and cared

for," Eastland's grandson, George Eastland, wrote on Instagram.

MISHAP IN THE SKY

Authorities lost one of their aviation assets on Monday when

a privately operated drone collided in restricted airspace over

the Kerr County flood zone with a search helicopter, forcing the

chopper to make an emergency landing. No injuries were reported,

but the aircraft was put out of commission, according to the

Kerr County Sheriff's Office.

National Weather Service forecasts on Monday predicted that

up to 4 more inches of rain could douse Texas Hill Country, with

isolated areas possibly receiving as much as 10 inches (25 cm).

Allison Santorelli, a meteorologist with the NWS Weather

Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said the potential

for renewed flooding was particularly heightened by the

saturated condition of the soil and mounds of debris already

strewn around the river channel. A flood watch was posted until

7 p.m.

State emergency management officials had warned on Thursday,

ahead of the July Fourth holiday, that parts of central Texas

faced the possibility of flash floods based on National Weather

Service forecasts.

But twice as much rain as was predicted ended up falling

over two branches of the Guadalupe just upstream of the fork

where they converge, sending all of that water racing into the

single river channel where it slices through Kerrville, City

Manager Dalton Rice said.

Rice said the outcome, the result of an unpredictable

combination of circumstances, was unforeseen and unfolded in a

matter of two hours.

"Why didn't we evacuate? Well, evacuation is a delicate

balance," he said in response to reporters' questions on Monday.

"If you evacuate too late, you then risk putting buses, or cars,

or vehicles or campers on roads into low-water areas, trying to

get them out, which then can make it even more challenging."

"It's very tough to make those calls, because what we also

don't want to do is cry wolf."

The chief meteorologist for commercial forecaster

AccuWeather, Jonathan Porter, said authorities had ample time to

move people to higher ground before the flood struck.

Rice and other public officials, including Governor Greg

Abbott, said the circumstances of the flooding, and the adequacy

of weather forecasts and warning systems, would be scrutinized

once the immediate situation was brought under control.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday asked a

government watchdog to investigate whether budget cuts imposed

by the Trump administration contributed to any delays or

inaccuracy in forecasting the floods.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, said there would

be time to examine whether more could have been done to prevent

the loss of life but that now was not the time for "partisan

finger-pointing."

(Additional reporting by Marco Bello and Sandra Stojanovic in

Comfort, Texas; Rich McKay in Atlanta; Alexandra Alper, Tim Reid

and Deborah Gembara in Washington; Nathan Howard in Morristown,

New Jersey; Ryan Jones and Bhargav Acharya in Toronto; Brendan

O'Brien in Chicago; and Nathan Layne in New York; Writing by

Steve Gorman and Joseph Ax; Editing by Timothy Heritage, Mark

Porter and Stephen Coates)