Two top leaders in a rural Texas county were asleep and a third was out of town in the initial hours of a catastrophic flood that caused widespread destruction and killed more than 130 people.

For the first time since catastrophic flooding killed more than 100 people in Kerr County, Texas, the county emergency management director conceded that he was sick and asleep as the water rose to historic levels on the Guadalupe River.

At a hearing in hard-hit Kerr County, an emergency management coordinator for the first time explained his whereabouts when the Guadalupe River burst its banks.