Xavier Ramirez's family had been at a campground in Kerr County when the waters of the Guadalupe River began to quickly rise.

Rescuers searched through the night early Sunday for 27 girls missing from a riverside summer camp in Texas, after torrential rains caused devastating floods that killed at least 50 people in the US state.

Rescuers scoured a devastated central Texas landscape of mangled trees, overturned cars and muck-filled debris Saturday in an increasingly bleak mission to locate survivors, including 27 girls who have not been seen since their camp was slammed with a wall of water in a historic flash flood.