A hot air balloon carrying at least 16 people has crashed and burned in Texas

(Image credit: Guillame Souvant/Getty Images)

last updated 1 August 2016

A hot air balloon carrying at least 16 people caught fire and crashed into a pasture in Texas Saturday morning, federal officials told The Associated Press. The crash happened near a small city called Lockhart in Caldwell County south of Austin around 7:40 a.m. Central time. There were no survivors.

The Texas Department of Public Safety initially announced multiple fatalities, and Caldwell County later confirmed all the passengers were killed. "Investigators are determining the number and the identities of victims at this time," said the local sheriff, Daniel Law. Agents of the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are headed to the site of the incident.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.