Dozens of little girls swept away in their beds from summer camp in Texas Flooding

Parent Cafe
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Let me know if I’m not allowed to quote this Facebook post in its entirety. This is from a local meteorologist (News 4 San Antonio, an NBC affiliate):

[Chris Suchan Meteorologist]

Time has come for me to say a few things on this nightmare we’ve all been living through. I have purposely waited to say anything to let the search, rescue, recovery, grieving process have time and space.

This lengthy post will also be very therapeutic for me. Just get things off my chest… I have cried on multiple occasions. Early this week in a conversation with my wife in the kitchen, I just suddenly broke down. I can tell you Amber is my rock and was everything I needed to calm down.

At times, I’ve been overwhelmed with forecaster regret I could have done more the night before in my weather report. I now fully understand it. I attended an AMS chapter meeting where Springfield, MO National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologists gave a presentation on their experience with the Joplin Tornado of 2011 that killed 158 people. I listened to them describe feeling scarred by the disaster. They asked themselves if their warnings were early enough, strong enough. The room was very silent through that presentation. It left a mark on me but you can’t fully understand that feeling until you experience it for yourself.

Our local NWS office was absolutely fantastic before and during this event. I couldn’t be more proud of this office for their watches and warnings. They did their part. But I’m more than sure they too are feeling the weight of this disaster like the meteorologists in Springfield, MO. God bless each one of you.

As for me, being on-air the night before in my 5pm, 6pm, 10pm weather saying “risk of an epic rainfall, flash flooding” apparently wasn’t enough to cause alarm and have word spread through communities impacted. You only need a couple people to hear what you’re saying then it spreads like crazy on social media, etc.. Maybe in my forecast, a portion of it dedicated to 4th of July firework show rain chances muddied the flooding messaging? These are things bouncing around in my head.

And today, I’m doing a little better but some of that I believe is a numbing effect of being beat down daily with updated casualty numbers. It’s like my heart bottomed out and can’t sink any lower. I’m just grinding along…

We live in Flash Flood Alley, a nickname given to our part of Texas. It stretches from the basically the Rio Grande, up the I-35 corridor from San Antonio to DFW. A devastating combination of elevation change from the gulf to Hill Country, more rocky limestone than mud, terrain with narrow valleys and tropical systems, mere remnants of tropical systems or just non-tropical related thunderstorms sitting over one spot or training over one spot for a lengthy period of time with high rainfall rates.

Tucked in Flash Flood Alley is arguably the most dangerous valley in the country for flash flooding, the Guadalupe River watershed. Prime flash flooding setup with outdoor enthusiasts and population along its beautiful riverbanks.

There’s the old saying, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink the water”. Well, Mother Nature has led us to water (full of deadly consequences) time & time again and we have yet to fully arm ourselves with layers of protection to warn those along the river. We put a system up for vote to taxpayers which was rejected.

IT IS DAMN WELL PAST TIME we have a loud siren system especially in rural portions of the river valley. Had a system been in place to be activated with a push of a button and a deafening ear piercing alarm had gone off deep in the night when many are asleep. Even more so when phone signals are weak to nonexistent and some won’t have a NOAA weather radio which should be mandatory when other forms of communication are lacking for vital severe weather information.

This was a perfect storm for all the wrong reasons. Going into a holiday weekend with campers, RVers and families gathered along the river with an occurrence deep in the night when most have shut it down for a night’s rest. An obnoxiously loud siren system could have been a game changer!

Some will say, it was a 100yr flood or even greater. We won’t have to endure it for a long time. But damn it, history has shown us this river and our surrounding rivers in our region will come calling at some point. German immigrants in New Braunfels faced the wrath of the river in the 1840s. Eventually, we built a flood control lake known as Canyon Lake to protect downstream towns. Lets fully protect upriver to the headwaters now.

San Antonio River took many lives in the early 1900s. Dams were built and the River Walk was developed to control raging floods.

This is not new. You can go back centuries or further into the paleoclimatological records to see these rivers can rage. And there was no “cloud seeding” all those epic floods either for that crowd pushing a false narrative.

Lets not let the tragic loss of so many precious lives be wasted on in-action. GET IT DONE!! We should never speak of a nightmare like this ever again especially in 2025.

May God be with all the families devastated by this flood including our community wrapping our collective arms around these families and region impacted 🙏🙏

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No determinations can be made with definitive proof 7 days after an event. It is easy to spout off opinions but not helpful. Weather happens on the gulf coast and has been happening for hundreds/thousands of years. If you look at a timeline roughly every 10-20 years a flooding catastrophe happens. Unfortunately this particular tragedy has many factors that contributed to it.

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I don’t know if blame lies in “100 year” flooding from climate change, or NWS cuts, or a NWS failure to warn, or the dam, or the camp not being aware of the late night alerts.

What does seem apparent is Camp Mystic had cabins in the river floodway, and in other flood prone low areas. Absolutely reckless to allow children to sleep in cabins situated in a floodway (the most dangerous part of the flood plain). Kerr County has floodway restrictions, and yet the Camp was allowed to operate many cabins in the most dangerous low lying areas (the floodway) of the flood plain.

May God Bless the victims, their families, and those still missing.

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Definitive proof of climate change? I don’t care what you call it, but we’ve had 100-year floods several times in the past 100 years. Does it REALLY matter what is causing this?

Having said that, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck … But I hope that duck stays away from the Guadalupe.

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And I just read that Camp Mystic is a for-profit camp. The church camps I went to in Texas were all nonprofit. I don’t know why, but that piece of info really ticks me off.

I think I have moved from despondent to extremely pissed off. These girls depended on the rest of us to be the adults in the room, because we ARE the adults in the room. As I said way upthread, IMO, this is largely on county officials that night/morning and whoever else over the years has been responsible for not getting sirens out there earlier.

Interesting thing I learned: A friend’s BIL and SIL were evacuated from their new home by firefighters in Ingram, which is about six miles upriver from Kerrville. They last year moved into a new 55+ community near the river. I had no idea the scale of growth going on out there. County governments have to get a handle on the growth and ensuing risks and dangers.

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I feel that you want to find blame, find someone responsible for this. Find a way for this to have not happened if just this one thing changed.

In the end it was probably a lot of things went wrong. A lot of things should have been different.

Hopefully this helps create change. It’s very very sad.

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Several things occurred, yes. But one thing is an immutable fact - the camp was housing children in a state-designated, dangerous floodway. I hope it was merely ignorance (this is a for-profit camp) that caused the owners of the camp to decide against spending the money necessary to relocate those cabins to higher ground when the camp’s $5 million expansion occurred several years ago.

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My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that it’s too early to be throwing blame around. I understand that people are hurting, people are upset, people are angry.

Just last year, there were devastating floods in NC and nearby areas thanks to the remnants of a hurricane. Hundreds of people missing, never to be seen again. Lots of anger and frustration then, too. Lots of people throwing blame around at that time, also.

Both situations were/are devastating for the people affected. Like the ABC News video I saw just this morning, where they interviewed a guy whose dad had called him and each of his siblings when flood waters were rising. The dad (now missing, his family assumes he’s dead) left each of his kids a voicemail saying he loved them…before he was swept away. Horrible situation. Yet at the same time, you know what? What an amazing gift that that man’s kids received early in the morning of 7/4…the last thing their dad told each of them before his time here on planet Earth ended was that he loved them.

Not everyone gets that opportunity.

So treat every day as a gift. You never know what can happen. People die every day of random, freak accidents. Or a sudden heart attack that nobody expected. Tell the people you care about that you love them. Treasure the moments you have with them.

As for the rest of the “who caused this to happen?” discussion, I think that should be relegated to the Politics board and everybody can argue about it there.

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I don’t understand why any questioning of what has happened gets deemed political and people want that discussion relegated to another section of the forum where some of us don’t participate. If reading this discussion is upsetting, not opening the topic also is an option.

ETA: If people only want to talk about the politics of the matter, maybe a separate thread in that forum is an option.

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Camp Mystic has been in existence since 1926 and was a family owned business that happened to be Christian based. There is nothing wrong with owning a for profit business. This is the first time they have lost campers in a flood… There are more than 20 camps also established in the area of the Guadalupe River ( catering to campers) that flooded, but the kids got out.
Additionally, there are RV parks, camp grounds, parks, and all sorts of gathering places mere steps from the river. Homes that had never flooded were swept off their foundations. All to say, this was a tragic and sad event.
It is devastating. We know many families impacted by the floods with unimaginable loss.
There really are no words.

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Children housed in a floodway (not just a flood-zone,which is not unusual, but an actual floodway). Reckless.

From the NYT:

Serra-Llobet, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in flood risk management.
She said it was particularly problematic to build a camp that houses children in an area so susceptible to flooding, and that efforts should have been made to relocate the cabins.
“It’s like pitching a tent in the highway,” Ms. Serra-Llobet said. “It’s going to happen, sooner or later — a car is going to come, or a big flood is going to come.”

———

Many of those cabins were built in designated flood zones, records show, and some were so close to the river’s edge that they were considered part of the river’s “floodway” — a corridor of such extreme hazard that many states and counties ban or severely restrict construction there.

Texas’ Kerr County, where Camp Mystic is located, adopted its own stringent floodway rules, which required that construction in such areas be limited in order to better
“protect human life.”

But six years ago, when Camp Mystic pursued a $5 million construction project to overhaul and expand its private, for-profit Christian camp, no effort was made to relocate the most at-risk cabins away from the river. Instead, local officials authorized the construction of new cabins in another part of the camp - including some that also lie in a designated flood-risk area. The older ones along the river remained in use.
Buildings in floodway

Serra-Llobet, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in flood risk management.
She said it was particularly problematic to build a camp that houses children in an area so susceptible to flooding, and that efforts should have been made to relocate the cabins.
“It’s like pitching a tent in the highway,” Ms. Serra-Llobet said. “It’s going to happen, sooner or later — a car is going to come, or a big flood is going to come.”

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But there is something wrong with having cabins built in a hazardous flood zone.

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I agree that just because this is controversial does not make it political.

I think it is (unfortunately) human nature to play the blame game after something terrible happens. For some, that’s a stage of grief almost- for others the opposite.

And it’s hard to say that there is a dividing line day when it becomes ok to discuss/hypothesize/get angry.

But I think we can all agree what happened is a terrible, terrible nightmare. And we all wish it didn’t happen to have to decide when it’s ok to talk about it. :pensive_face:

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I understand but the camp was built 100 years ago and up until last week no loss of life. That standard would necessarily need to be applied to homes in California built on fault lines, other rivers/lakes across the US who have homes and businesses in flood zones. Or the city of Houston, Corpus Christi, or other towns that sit on the coastline in potential path of hurricanes. Houston, for instance, is built on a swamp. The reality is water and water ways are the life blood of many communities. The amount of water pushed down the river was unprecedented.

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I’m not sure I should answer a question based on the hidden post, but here’s a summary: there were IRA infrastructure funds and FEMA funds related to climate change challenges, sent to many states and communities in 2021-2024. Before that, the region had requested funds for updating alert systems and been turned down, once for paperwork errors, a second time they’d secured the grant but it had to be reallocated due to another disaster. Finally the State offered 1 million, with $50,000 in grants and the rest as a loan, so the small community turned down the very bad deal.
There are various news sources but All things considered and AP both had good reporting today.

Climate change doesn’t create new disasters but rather amplifies common disasters and makes them more common - a centennial flood that happens every decade, a once in a decade mega fire that occurs every other year. The damage (//speed, strength, height…) is greater - think “mudslide”->village entirely covered by literal-mountain-sized slide. These extreme events happen earlier or later than the 1971-2000 season would let us plan for, and move to cover a greater surface of the territory.
Crash course Climate change&energy has a pretty good video about it.

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Video of how fast the river rose in just 40 mins

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I do not making light of the tragedy that happened on 7/4 last week by stating this…

Children (and adults) are housed in flood zones all over the US. By their parents. Because the families’ homes are in flood zones. Like, take New Orleans, for example. Or heck, even my deceased MIL’s old house in Arizona…that house is in a flood zone, as are literally hundreds of other houses in that same large mega-development.

Is one going to put all of those people in jail or something for living in a flood zone? No.

In the Big Bear, CA area is a Christian summer camp called Forest Home. They’ve been there for >75 years. 11 yr ago, there was a freak summer monsoon thunderstorm (the sort of storm that normally just hits Arizona, but this one dropped precipitation on that part of southern CA, too). There was a freak flash flood that went through that area and flooded out many of the large cabins and buildings at the camp. Some local residents’ homes were wiped out, too. It happened in 1938 and 1965, too, in that same location. Cell reception isn’t great in that spot all the time. People still go to that family camp every summer. Just like people still spend time camping all along that river in Texas.

Any which way you look at it, the situation just really really sucks, to put it mildly. Hopefully the families affected will all find a way to heal at some point from all of this. It’s going to take awhile.

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Of course, life is dangerous. People make unwise decisions all the time. However, there are definitely different degrees, and not all dangerous situations have similar chances of occurring. For one thing, chance changes over time, as we have seen with the global increase of the rate of catastrophic weather events as the climate changes (as predicted), so a place that might be a hundred year flood area now is likely much more often than that.

Building in flood zones is problematic and will be more so. Pretty sure we need to mitigate that systemically. But the camp wasn’t just in a flood zone; the most vulnerable campers were sleeping in a floodway–a place flooding was expected. That seems like an egregious error.

But overall, these are systemic issues that need to be addressed systemically, by the authorities in charge. This is a good analysis of how that failed to happen (gift link):

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https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/the-greatest-experience-of-your-life/

Hope this isn’t paywalled.

This is a 50-year-old article that really paints the picture of the significance some of these camps have in Texas culture. The devotion endures for generations.

N.B. It is a very long article.

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