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Amid chaos from the flood, campers huddled with young counselors—many unaware of the devastation just yards away
By Joshua Chaffin, Patience Haggin and Peter Champelli
The power died around 3 a.m.
Amelia Moore, 14, had been awakened about an hour earlier by a clap of thunder so near that it shook her cabin at Camp Mystic. There were screams in the night. She and her friends in “Angel’s Attic” were growing anxious.
Go back to sleep, a counselor urged them.
Violent summer storms—and even floods and power outages—were hardly unusual at the camp along the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country.
“A lot of counselors had been here for so long they thought it was, like, nothing. So they were like ‘Just stay in the cabin,’ ” Amelia recalled.
Amelia was among more than 650 campers and staffers at Camp Mystic, where the summer’s second session had started.
At 1:14 a.m. on July 4, the National Weather Service issued a flash-flood warning for Kerr County with “catastrophic” potential for loss of life.
“By 4 a.m. I was on a roof with the water right up to me,” program director Elizabeth Sweet said in a since-deleted Instagram post.
At its highest, floodwaters reached the top of the windows of many of the low-lying cabins, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of flood data, videos and images from the camp.
But soon, other girls on Mystic’s Senior Hill began to crowd into Angel’s Attic and another cabin, Cloud 9, where another 14-year-old, Eliza Miller, was staying. Theirs were filling with water, they said. Two of those other cabins, Hangover and Look Out, were lower down the hill and would be submerged. Car alarms were erupting from the counselors’ parking lot.
Amelia heard more screaming, too. It was coming from an area just across the river known as the Flats, where Mystic’s youngest campers were clustered—including Eliza’s two younger sisters. In the logic of Mystic’s design, the idea was to keep them close to the camp’s office, dining hall and Rec Hall, a two-story building for campwide gatherings.
But much of the Flats sits in a Federal Emergency Management Agency-designated flood zone.
Escaping from ‘Giggle Box’
For campers in Giggle Box, one cabin in the Flats, water rose so quickly girls couldn’t open the door, according to one camper’s account. Girls climbed out the windows instead—escaping floodwaters that would ultimately reach the cabin’s windows.
Eliza’s youngest sister, Birdie, 9, waited on the porch for her cabinmates to climb out. Water rose to her shoulders before a counselor hoisted her up and they made their way uphill to wait out the flood, Birdie’s father, Nicholas Miller, told the Journal.
Other campers were led by staff through almost knee-deep water to Rec Hall, according to a televised account by U.S. Rep. August Pfluger, whose daughters were at the camp.
Campers held hands, prayed and sang while they waited, he said.
Girls from several cabins, including Birdie’s other sister Genevieve, gathered on Rec Hall’s interior balcony where water lapped against the railings, according to their father.
Genevieve watched yoga mats float past and wondered if she and others would need them as makeshift rafts. Luckily, the water stopped before it reached the balcony.
Back on Senior Hill, Amelia and her friends tried to remain calm. The sounds didn’t feel all that strange for a summer camp. “I thought it was just people laughing and screaming in the rain because that happens too whenever it rains here,” Amelia recalled. “No one wants to believe the worst.”
Eventually, Amelia fell back asleep. When she awoke around 7 a.m., she and the other girls discovered they were stranded. The bridge that links Senior Hill to the Flats was made impassable by rushing water and downed trees.
“We were so hungry. We were starving,” she recalled. They searched for food but Mystic’s strict policy forbidding girls from keeping snacks in the cabins was working against them. “As the day goes on,” Amelia recounted, “we were like, ‘Does anyone have food that they smuggled in? You won’t get in trouble. We just need food.’ ”
They joked about the storm, believing that they had borne the worst of it while the younger girls on the Flats had been spared. (Despite its name, Senior Hill isn’t much higher than the Flats). This notion was reinforced when counselors—either misinformed or trying to prevent panic—told them that the younger campers were all fine, and had ridden out the storm in Rec Hall.
As they awaited rescue, the girls were unsure whether they would be swimming or hiking to safety. They were also fearful that another storm might come. One of Amelia’s friends, Harper Lawrence, was particularly worried: her twin eight-year-old sisters, Hanna and Rebecca, had been in adjoining cabins, Twins I and II, on the Flats. Other girls had younger sisters there, too. Some tried shouting to them across the divide.
Don’t worry, they were told, the younger campers were happy and fed, and had evacuated to Mystic’s newer campus, Cypress Lake, just up the road. “We should have been a lot more panicked in the situation but we genuinely didn’t know that anything was wrong,” Amelia said.
As they bided their time, Amelia and some of the girls wondered aloud about what kind of training their counselors had received. The girls believed their counselors had been trained to deal with a mass shooting but it appeared to these campers that they didn’t know how to cope with a flood. That seemed odd. After all, Camp Mystic had suffered catastrophic floods in 1932 and 1935, soon after its founding, that washed away most of its cabins. A major flood hit again in 1987. Smaller ones were commonplace in the years in between.
Just two days before the floods, the camp passed its annual inspection by the Texas Department of State Health Services, which also signed off that it had a required emergency plan for disasters or other serious medical threats. A written plan of the emergency procedures was posted on-site, and all staffers and volunteers had been made aware of the plan during staff training or briefings, according to the report.
State rules also require that “campers shall be instructed as to their actions in the event of fire, disaster, or the need to evacuate.”
Amelia recalled no particular preparation for the campers—as to how they should react or where they should seek shelter. Some were as young as seven years old. “Everybody thought flooding was a possibility but we never got training,” Amelia said. A member of the family that runs Camp Mystic referred queries to a family spokesman, who said he didn’t have immediate information to provide.
‘Wiggle Inn’: Floating on mattresses
All the campers at Wiggle Inn, a cabin in the Flats, survived. “Each of those sweet girls was cold, wet, and frightened—but they were also incredibly brave,” Glenn Juenke, a retired policeman who is Mystic’s night watchman and was at the cabin, wrote to parents.
Campers used mattresses as flotation devices and rose all the way to the ceiling, according to one parent, before the water receded.
Bug House, the cabin closest to the river, was one of the first to be evacuated. Sometime around 2 a.m. that night, a counselor noticed water coming into the cabin and ran to the camp’s main office to tell the staff.
Mystic’s co-owner and longtime director, Dick Eastland, took some Bug House girls, including 12-year-old Genevieve Miller, in his car and drove them to the Rec Hall.
The first helicopter touched down around 3 p.m., on July 4, and evacuations commenced. It was slow going, Amelia recalled. The aircraft could only accommodate a few people at a time.
Among the first to go was a grandmother who had served as a gatekeeper for Mystic. Amelia understood that the woman’s nearby house had been washed away and that she had been clinging to a tree for hours with a broken leg and ribs. Then came a diabetic camper who seemed to be on the verge of passing out.
The order of evacuation was supposed to be youngest to oldest. But it did not always work that way and tempers flared when new girls arrived and jumped the line. “It was hectic,” Amelia said. “There were counselors but no one on that hill was over 21 years old.”
Eventually, larger Black Hawk helicopters would join the effort. When Amelia’s turn finally came around 4 or 5 p.m., she climbed aboard and was handed a pen and paper and told to write down her name, age and her parents’ phone number. A cabinmate beside her seemed to be hyperventilating. She refused Amelia’s hand but then seized it as the helicopter lifted off.
They were whisked to the field of a nearby high school, which was now a landing zone. The girls were photographed and had their personal details entered into a database. Then they passed through a medical station, where Amelia and Harper bumped into a counselor in the cabin where Hanna, one of Harper’s sisters, was staying.
“I asked her: ‘Do you know where Hanna is?’ ” Amelia recalled. “She responded with: ‘I don’t know where any of my girls are.’ And that’s the first time I heard of counselors not knowing where campers were.”
Amelia reassured Harper that her sisters were fine—they were probably just in another part of the building. But in the recovery center grim stories were circulating. Much of the talk centered on the cabin known as Bubble Inn, and Eastland, Mystic’s beloved longtime director.
Inside Bubble Inn
Bubble Inn housed 13 of Mystic’s youngest girls and ended up being the worst-hit cabin, with its young campers and both of its counselors dead or missing. An obituary of one camper, 9 years old, said: “She lived her best life at camp, filled with singing songs, extra special friendships, and dance parties.”
The cabin had doors on two sides of the building, which allowed for water to rush in from two directions, according to two people familiar with the camp. That may have made it more difficult to escape, they said.
Amelia heard about the girls from Chatterbox, one of the youngest cabins, who were passed through a window and then clambered—some barefoot—up a rocky hill in the dark. Amelia was now beginning to understand the screams she had heard the previous night.
“This is the part that makes me sick,” she said. “Because the whole time we were told that the Flats were safe and accounted for in Rec Hall. Like, we were told they were playing games in Rec Hall and that they were perfectly fine.”
A camp photographer who lent Amelia her phone to call her parents told her about her own narrow escape: She had been in Kozy, a staff space abutting the office, when she was swept away by the waters and forced, with others, to cling onto the poles at the nearby volleyball court. They removed their shirts and tied them together to form a rope so that they could climb back onto the building, the photographer said.
All around Amelia, girls were crying; many hysterically. Some petted the emergency responders’ service dogs.
Amelia sat beside a first-year camper, Lucy Claire, whom she recognized from the dining hall. The girl, clutching a teddy bear and sobbing, had been in the same bunk as Hanna Lawrence.
“She’s freaking out,” Amelia recalled. “She’s like, ‘I don’t know if my parents are going to come.’ I’m like: ‘Lucy Claire, you know I love you. You know your parents love you. They want you—they’re probably on their way right here.’ ”
She braided Lucy Claire’s hair trying to distract her.
Then she asked: “Have you seen Hanna?”
Around 8 p.m. that evening, Amelia was finally reunited with her father. On Friday, she was to have her first grief counseling session. Next week she will travel to Dallas for the Lawrence twins’ funeral. As a tribute to them, she has painted a cross with their names—Hanna and Rebecca—a heart and a sun shining over Mystic-like hills.
Much still remains unknown about that night, when at least 27 Mystic campers and counselors were swept from the earth by a rush of water seemingly beyond their imagination. Many families have remained quiet. They were still too shaken, some said. Others seemed reluctant to say anything that might mar the reputation of a cherished Texas institution—one that unites generations of adoring mothers, daughters, aunts and nieces.
Why did Amelia speak?
“I think it’s really important,” she said, “that people understand what actually happened.”
By Dan Frosch
Photos by Salgu Wissmath
HUNT, Texas—It was July 3rd and Penny Deupree’s house near the Guadalupe River was crowded, just the way she preferred it.
Her son Tad and his wife had driven down from Dallas. Two of her granddaughters had joined, too, a husband and boyfriend in tow, along with two great-grandchildren, ages 1 and 3. There were nine of them in all, laughing, grilling and swapping stories on Penny’s 1.2-acre grassy patch of paradise in the Hill Country, far from the North Texas sprawl where she had raised her kids.
At 82, this is how Penny imagined living out the rest of her life: in this house filled with family and totems, like the portrait of her great grandmother, Frances Hodgson Burnett, who wrote the famed children’s novel “The Secret Garden.”
Around 3 a.m., Penny got up to use the bathroom. When she flushed, the toilet water gurgled up at her. That was strange, she thought.
She tried to go back to sleep but the rain kept pelting the pitched metal roof outside. Something told her to get up again and check the front door of the one-story house. She squinted through the darkness, still half-asleep, and couldn’t believe it.
“It looked like the ocean was coming into the house,” Penny recalled.
She glanced toward the kitchen and the back door. There was water pouring in from that direction, too. Penny rushed to a bedroom where Tad was sleeping.
“Tad! Get up! The house is flooding!”
Within moments, the entire family was awake. Tad, 60, barked at them to get up a ladder to a small, 12-foot-high loft where the younger kids sometimes slept, but nobody was that night.
With water rising behind them, the adults carried Penny’s great-grandchildren up. At some point during the commotion, Penny slipped, and Tad caught her before she fell backward. By the time she reached the loft, swinging her body around so she could fit, her feet dangled in water.
Penny looked across what had once been the living room, and could make out her two terrier mixes, Cisco and Tucker. One was perched on a couch now floating around the house, while the other paddled toward her. Somewhere underneath all that water was a bookshelf filled with first editions of “The Secret Garden,” as well as “A Little Princess” and “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” also written by her great grandmother.
Penny and her husband Tom, who worked in the Dallas area selling oil field equipment, had bought the home in 2007. Even before that, they had taken their kids to Hunt every year to the summer camps that dotted the river. The kids loved those camps, and from their house they could sometimes hear the morning bugles and children singing camp songs rippling across the river.
Penny wished Tom were there right now. They’d been married for 60 years. He would make sure that she survived, that the family survived. But Tom had died of heart failure a few years ago.
“I’m not going to die. I have God and I have my family, and we’re just going to move forward,” Penny thought.
There was just a few feet between where the family huddled and the ceiling. Only one phone, belonging to the boyfriend of Penny’s granddaughter, still had reception. He called 911. Emergency responders told him they were trying to get as many people out as they could, she said.
The water was almost to the loft. Tad cut a hole in the drywall with his pocketknife and started punching it with his hands. When he got through to the insulation, he and the others started clawing it out until they reached wood.
Right next to the loft, the shelf of first editions jutted out of the water. Sitting atop the shelf were several wooden lobster buoys that Penny’s mother had used to decorate her house in Nantucket years ago.
They grabbed them and began frantically banging at the wood, but it wouldn’t break. They took turns kicking it with their feet, Tad’s daughter’s boyfriend, a former Division I college baseball player, pounding at the wood over and over.
“We’re going to die up here,” Tad thought.
Finally, a piece of wood broke, giving way to a mesh covering. Tad reached his hand through and began cutting a hole.
Penny says she can’t be sure how much time passed, but they managed to fashion a small hole through the wall, about 18 inches in diameter. Tad shimmied through and dropped a foot down into the water. He steadied himself against the side of the house and swam a few feet to where he could hoist himself up onto the roof of a newly built extension to the home.
Tad shouted that he’d made it.
One by one, they squeezed through the hole head first, dropping into the water and swimming the short distance to the roof, before raising themselves on top of the house. The adults hoisted the two children above them as they swam. When Penny’s turn came, she curled her knees. Two of them pushed her through feet-first, while Tad helped guide her through the water to the roof.
They sat there shivering in the rain, shouting for someone to help. The lightning flashed so bright across the river, Penny had to close her eyes. When the babies started crying, they all hummed and sang Bible hymns.
Jesus Loves Me. The Lord’s Prayer.
Somehow, the children fell asleep.
Tad could hear the house starting to crumble into the flood water. They would need to swim somewhere else soon. After over an hour, a flashlight off in the darkness grew closer. It was a neighbor. The water had receded but he needed a ladder to reach them.
“There’s one in the garage!” Penny remembered Tad shouting down to him.
“I’m sorry to tell you this, but the garage is gone,” the neighbor yelled back.
Soon, he returned with a ladder, and they were down. The dogs were all right, too.
Before them was a landscape hard to comprehend. Where a neighbor’s house once stood, there was nothing. Felled, giant cypress trees littered the land that stretched the quarter mile down to the river. A red car was wrapped around a branch. The guts of Penny’s own home spilled out in the form of soiled photo albums, mangled furniture and her great grandmother’s first editions, now ruined.
“I’m alive,” Penny kept thinking. “My children are alive. My babies are alive.”
Later that day, the family was able to cross a washed out bridge to where Penny’s daughter Keri lived. They hugged and wept and prayed some more. And they tried to process bad news: the girls from Camp Mystic about 3 miles up the river who didn’t make it; a neighbor who had died; and 161 others were still out there somewhere.
Their family had been spared.
“I’m alive,” Penny said to herself.
RJ Harber evacuated other families but lost his young daughters in Texas flash flood
By Patience Haggin
The search for survivors continues two days after a flash flood killed dozens of people across central Texas, but some of the stories of the families caught in the July Fourth weekend storms are starting to be told.
The Harber family was spending the holiday at a cabin they owned in the Casa Bonita cabin community near Hunt, Texas. Around 3:30 a.m. on Friday, RJ Harber was awakened by pounding rain, thunder and lightning. Hours earlier, he had received flash-flood warnings for other areas but not where he was staying.
RJ, a 45-year-old father and Dallas lawyer who had been vacationing and going to summer camp in the area his whole life, thought the river might rise a little. He wanted to check on his two young daughters: 11-year-old Brooke and 13-year-old Blair.
The girls were staying in a borrowed cabin closer to the river with their grandparents, Mike and Charlene Harber. RJ said he thought he would also clear away a kayak and some fishing gear he was keeping by the river.
He put his foot down on the floor of his cabin—and felt about 4 inches of water. RJ turned to his wife, who was lying in bed beside him, also awake. He told her, “Annie, the cabin’s flooding.”
RJ could see water rushing in through the front door. He tried to open the door, but couldn’t. He looked out the window and saw the water level was about two feet below the window.
“We need to get out right now,” RJ told Annie. They grabbed a few items—their cellphones and a bag they hadn’t unpacked. By the time they jumped out the window about two minutes later, the water had reached up to Annie’s neck.
The Harbers hurried to another cabin nearby, on slightly higher ground. They knocked on the door and woke the family. By the time the family came to the door, the water was almost at their door. They went to another cabin and woke a third family as well.
RJ borrowed a kayak, life vest and flashlight. He started to kayak to the cabin where the couple’s daughters and RJ’s parents were staying. It was about 100 feet below and he reached about halfway when, RJ said, a swell knocked him into a post.
“I shined a flashlight out there, and I could see it was white water, and I’ve kayaked enough to know that that was gonna be impossible,“ RJ said.
He could see an entire cabin had been detached from its foundation and was stuck against the side of the cabin where his daughters and parents were staying. “There were cars floating at me and trees floating at me. I knew if I took even one stroke further, it was gonna be a death sentence.”
RJ turned around to get his wife and the remaining families. They went to a home nearby on higher ground across Highway 39, where a family let them in around 3:45 a.m.
That was when he checked his cellphone and saw a text sent at 3:30 a.m. from his daughter Brooke. Receiving the text alone was a miracle in the area, where he usually couldn’t get cell service. It said, “I love you.”
Annie, 43, who worked at St. Rita Catholic School, which both girls attended, received texts from both Brooke and Blair timestamped at 3:30 a.m. that said, “I love you.”
Their other grandfather, who lives in Michigan, received a text with “Love you” and a photo of the girls with him.
The Harbers and other families waited without power all night, hearing horrible sounds. The next morning they realized they had been hearing the cabins being ripped off their foundations and crashing apart.
At sunrise the water had finally receded enough for RJ to go back to the site. Only a half-dozen of the community’s 20-some cabins were still standing. The others had been ripped from their foundations, leaving only their tile floors. The cabin where Blair, Brooke and their grandparents had been staying was completely washed away.
Blair and Brooke’s bodies were found and identified about a dozen miles from the cabin. Their grandfather’s body was recovered on Monday. Their grandmother was unaccounted for as of Monday afternoon.
The Harbers have owned the cabin in Casa Bonita since 2020. The family often went there to kayak, fish and let their kids play. “Unfortunately,” RJ said, “all those great memories are now a bad memory.”
Camp staff went to bed following what seemed like routine flood warnings. Within hours, they were fighting for survival.
By Joshua Chaffin, Scott Calvert, Jim Carlton and Patience Haggin
It was a Monday afternoon, June 30, and Dick and Tweety Eastland were in their customary place at this time of year: welcoming another crop of girls to the summer camp in Hunt, Texas, that their family has presided over for most of its 99 years.
The previous day, girls had reached Camp Mystic’s main campus for the start of the summer’s second term. Now it was opening day at its sister campus just down the road, Camp Mystic Cypress Lake.
The excitement swelled as the four-hour bus ride from Houston progressed, Christy Colby Heno, a chaperone, recalled, until the girls would scan the Hill Country brush in search of the familiar “M-Y-S-T-I-C” letters standing atop Sky High mountain.
A tunnel of counselors greeted the new campers when the bus at last arrived, with Dick and Tweety in the thick of it all. “Oh, my God,” Heno said. “Their faces when they get off the bus!”
Heno ate lunch in the dining hall with a couple who have been a part of her life ever since she was a homesick 12-year-old in her first summer at Mystic in 1979. She would return for 15 summers—including as a staffer—before sending her own daughters to Mystic. They chitchatted about life as they snacked on the same fare as the campers: turkey wraps, fruit salad and tater tots.
“It was just like every other camp drop-off,” she said.
But a few days later, Mystic would send an extraordinary note to “Camp Mystic Families.”
“If your daughter is not accounted for you have been notified,” it read in part. “If you have not been personally contacted then your daughter is accounted for.”
“Please continue to pray.”
‘The river is beautiful, but you have to respect it’
For the past century, summer camps have spread along the winding Guadalupe River, offering a respite from the heat among groves of pecan, cypress and live oak trees.
The typically placid Guadalupe has always posed a threat at times of heavy rainfall. The Hill Country’s rocky ground absorbs little water, and its narrow canyons act as funnels. As early as 1932, flooding forced Camp Mystic to close temporarily and destroyed cottages at other camps, according to one newspaper account.
In a 1987 flood, 10 teenagers attending a church camp in a neighboring county died during an attempted evacuation. A year later, Mystic delayed the arrival of four buses bringing campers from Dallas and Houston after flooding left a bridge impassable. By 1990, Dick Eastland was praising the safety benefits of the county’s then-new flood-warning system, which sent alerts to beepers.
“With this new system, we should gain more time,” he told the Austin American-Statesman. “The river is beautiful, but you have to respect it.”
Amy Hudson, who spent 14 years at Mystic, beginning in 1980, and who then sent her four daughters, recalled that flooding was part of the pre-camp training she and other counselors received at the beginning of each camp season. She also remembered occasions when J.C. Mattox, the longtime maintenance man, would stand watch during a storm to monitor the river.
Yet for generations of campers, flooding was an inconvenience at most, or part of inside jokes from past Mystic days. When the camp posted photos on Instagram of “a little flooding” in 2018, a Mystic alum chimed in: “I’ll never forget when we got stuck on senior hill one year due to flooding and Criders had to bring all of senior hill hamburgers for lunch.”
Wrote another: “Memories of ‘X-treme Closing’ 1st Term 2010!!!”
Storm warnings
As the holiday weekend approached last week, the specter of flooding hung over the Guadalupe, where cabins, RV parks and summer camps buzzed with festive groups.
Using National Weather Service data, the Texas Division of Emergency Management was looking at a forecast of 3 to 6 inches of rain, Nim Kidd, chief of the agency, recalled in a news conference.
“However, some of those models showed numbers that were higher than that,” he said, “which caused us to activate additional resources and have them in the area just in case.”
On Wednesday, July 2, TDEM said in a press release that it had activated state emergency-response resources. Its notice warned, “Heavy rainfall with the potential to cause flash flooding is anticipated across West Texas and the Hill Country.”
By the next day, Thursday, the agency said it had raised the readiness level of the state emergency-operations center to “escalated response.” Officials had pre-positioned assets including swiftwater rescue boat squads, helicopters with hoisting capabilities, a tactical marine unit, and high-profile vehicles to aid stranded motorists.
Emergency-response teams were in Kerr County at noon that day, Kidd said.
The night everything changed
On July 3, the water was clear and the river was a playground. But the forecast was growing darker. At 1:18 p.m., the National Weather Service office for Austin and San Antonio issued a flood watch for portions of south-central Texas through Friday morning, with forecast amounts of 1 to 3 inches, and up to 7 inches possible in isolated pockets.
But by 6:10 p.m., the weather service said flash flooding was likely across central Texas overnight.
At 1:14 a.m., July 4, when most people were asleep, it issued a flash-flood warning for Kerr County with “catastrophic” potential for loss of life. The weather service said such alerts automatically trigger wireless emergency alerts on enabled mobile devices.
At the Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly, a conference center and summer camp, 7 miles from Camp Mystic, a worker who lives close to the river noticed rising water levels. The staff decided to act. Sometime between 2:30 and 4 a.m., a group of 70 children and their chaperones attending a conference were moved to higher ground, said Tim Huchton, Mo-Ranch’s chief executive.
“Just to make sure that we were going to stay safe with them,” Huchton said.
Lorena Guillen, owner of the Blue Oak RV Park and Howdy’s Restaurant, on the banks of the Guadalupe, drove her truck down to check the river.
“It was just raining, you know, like nothing,” she said. “We did have a warning, a flash flood warning, but this…is very, very normal for the Hill Country.”
Guillen said she called the Kerr County Sheriff’s department at 2:08 a.m. to ask if she needed to evacuate and was told they had no information.
“And I said, ‘OK, well, if they don’t have any information,’ I went to bed.” An hour later, she awoke to rescue lights. “And at that point, the water was already 10 feet up.”
She went door-to-door, knocking on RVs, trying to wake people. All 33 of them would be washed away.
Cars were floating past with people inside yelling for help. “It was pitch black, so all you could see was the lights floating and people screaming and banging against the window and honking,” she said.
At 3:32 a.m., the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office posted on social media: “DANGEROUS FLOODING NOW on the Guadalupe River in Hunt, in western Kerr County. This flood wave will continue downstream. If you are near the water, move to higher ground immediately. Stay clear of low water crossings—turn around, don’t drown!”
Sirens had gone off in a neighboring county, but Kerr County didn’t have an outdoor warning system.
Chaos in the cabins
At Mystic, girls bonded in cabins with names like the Giggle Box and Bubble Inn. There were nighttime devotionals and bedtime by 10:15 p.m., according to a schedule posted online.
Now, in the predawn darkness, program director Elizabeth Sweet awoke and helped evacuate campers, she said in a since-deleted Instagram post. “By 4 a.m. I was on a roof with the water right up to me,” she wrote.
Paloma Puente, 19, was working her first summer as a counselor at Camp Mystic when the flash flood hit and “chaos struck almost instantaneously,” her friend, Neybia Hernandez, said in a GoFundMe she set up to help replace lost belongings. Puente and some other counselors, Hernandez wrote, guided 17 young girls—many screaming in fear—to safety as the cabin filled with water.
They went “through windows, through the chest high water,” she wrote. “Paloma didn’t stop until she knew every single one of her girls was okay.”
Callie McAlary, 16, who had gone to bed unfazed by what seemed like a typical thunderstorm, recalled in a televised interview that, “water’s coming up, and you have kids running just trying to get to other cabins, trying to get to safety.”
Though her cabin on Senior Hill didn’t flood, she feared it soon would. So she put on her nametag. “In my head, I was saying if something does happen and I do get swept away,” she said, “at least I’ll have my name on my body.”
Devastation at dawn
As the sun rose on the Fourth of July, Mystic families began getting word of the catastrophic floods. Social media soon lighted up with photos of missing Mystic campers, some 8 or 9 years old.
On Instagram, one woman pleaded to her missing daughter: “Please call Mom.”
Parents received an email from Camp Mystic about the catastrophic floods.
“We are working with search and rescue currently. The highway has washed away so we are struggling to get more help. Please continue to pray and send any help if you have contacts to do so.”
Family members gathered at a local elementary school in an agonizing wait for updates. The names of children who were found were announced over a speaker in the school’s gymnasium.
Two members of Congress posted that their daughters or granddaughters were there and had survived.
A camper named Harper, 14, survived, but her sisters, twins Hanna and Rebecca, both 8 years old, perished in the flood. They had just finished second grade at University Park Elementary School in Dallas.
“We are devastated that the bond we shared with them, and that they shared with each other, is now frozen in time,” said their father, Dallas lawyer John Lawrence. Their grandfather described it as “an unimaginable time for all of us.”
On Sunday morning, talk began to spread that Dick Eastland had also perished. It was later confirmed he died trying to drive several girls to safety when his vehicle was carried away by the floodwaters. It was, to many, tragically fitting.
“For decades he and his wife Tweety poured his life into loving and developing girls and women of character. Thank you,” Rep. August Pfluger (R., Texas) posted on X.
The news has devastated generations of Mystic women, who came to the camp as children and then became bonded for life to the Eastlands. The couple would attend their weddings, turn up for the births of their children, and in Hudson’s case, the death of her husband. “They’re the people who showed up for everything,” she said, adding: “Lots of conversations were probably had with Tweety that weren’t even broached with our mothers.”
As they sorted through grief and shock, there was also a search for explanations—meteorological, bureaucratic, even biblical—as to how such a catastrophe had laid waste to such a cherished place and so many young lives.
There were also hints of recrimination.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) called for an investigation into whether “staffing shortages at key local National Weather Service” stations had played a role.
Hudson, who owns a condominium near the river, was more philosophical. “There have been floods down there forever,” she said. “But this was nothing anyone has ever seen.”
So, too, was Gay Donnell Willis, a Mystic alum who is now a member of the Dallas city council—a job in which she has confronted the challenge of trying to augment sewer drains and other infrastructure to cope with more intense weather. “You just can’t keep up with the way it seems to rain differently these days,” she said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas)—who had picked up his own daughter from a nearby summer camp last week—said he hopes new procedures will be put in place to evacuate people in the event of disastrous flash flooding.
“Everyone would agree, in hindsight,” Cruz said, “if we could go back and do it again, we would evacuate.”
By Joshua Chaffin
Each summer, the daughters of senators, governors, oil barons and other Texas royalty would pass through the gates of Camp Mystic on the banks of the Guadalupe River in the state’s Hill Country.
Once on the other side, they would leave behind their prominent last names and become Mystic girls, devoted to kindness, self-improvement and fair play while living in a realm with its own traditions and rituals conjured by generations of the same family.
Camp Mystic was devastated on Friday—the Fourth of July—by floods that have left at least 51 dead including 15 children. Rescuers were still trying to find as many as 27 people, many of them girls, from the camp. Mystic’s longtime director, Dick Eastland, also was feared perished.
“He never had daughters but he had 400 girls of summer,” Larkin McReynolds, a self-described “lifer” who spent her first summer at Mystic at age 6 and went on to become a counselor and work in its office, said of Eastland. “My nieces knew the same Dick I knew.”
McReynolds, a Houston native who is now a public-health professor at Columbia University, was alerted to the tragedy before dawn on Friday, she said, via a text chain comprising a half-dozen of her lifelong Mystic friends. Soon, generations of Mystic women were springing into action, offering prayers, tears and whatever help they could to their sisters. “The network—it just amazed me when it spread like wildfire,” she said.
Mystic was founded in 1926, but it truly came to life after Agnes Doran Stacy, a Dallas socialite, and her husband, “Pop,” bought it in 1939. Ag, as she was widely known, had a mission to imbue girls with confidence and leadership skills.
For a brief respite during World War II, Mystic served as a rehabilitation center for U.S. soldiers. Otherwise, it was a world created by Ag and then sustained for decades by her grandson, Dick, his wife, Tweety Eastland, and a handful of devoted staffers who stayed for decades.
It is a place of traditions. Mystic girls wear white on Sundays, which is the day fried chicken is served. They sing the same songs their mothers and aunts did. They learn horseback riding—both English and Western styles—and how to write thank-you notes. The summer culminates in a war-canoe race on the Guadalupe between the competing Kiowa and Tonkawa “tribes.” There are also Tweety’s famous cookies and the Mystic motto: “Be ye kind, one to another.”
Even as adults, many Mystic women still wear their camp bracelets, dangling with silver charms that represent their cabin, their tribe and their favorite activities.
“You get a feeling when you drive up to the Hill Country and you’d see the Mystic sign, and you’d feel the weight of the world had been lifted off you,” Nicole Nugent Covert, Lady Bird Johnson’s granddaughter, told the Austin American-Statesman in 2010. “There were no worries. I still feel that way. When I drop my daughter off, I’m jealous.”
Other prominent Texans who sent their daughters there include former Texas Govs. Price Daniel and John Connally, former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and the Basses. Laura Bush spent a summer during college as a Mystic counselor. Several Texas debutantes list Mystic on their résumés.
In a 2011 profile of the camp, Mimi Swartz, the Texas Monthly writer, called it “a near flawless training ground for archetypal Texas women.”
In a similar vein, D Magazine, in its summer camp guide, pegged Mystic as “a vital social chit for young women on the fast track to UT sororities.”
Mystic is a Christian camp. A timber cross stands atop Chapel Hill, where campers gather on Sunday for a service that includes prayer, reflection and singing.
“It’s a Christian Texas girls camp but it wasn’t shoved down your throat,” said McReynolds, recalling that there were a variety of denominations, including Catholic and Jewish campers, in her day.
Mystic, with its reputation as an oasis of serenity, was rattled in 2011 when some Eastland siblings got into a messy legal battle over the trust that controls the 725-acre parcel where the camp is located.
The camp has previously flooded, including in 1997, when the Guadalupe overran its banks and hundreds of people in the area had to be evacuated from their homes. But it had never proved as dangerous or deadly as it did on Friday.
Like McReynolds, fellow alums were stunned by the news, searching for ways to help and uncertain how Mystic would revive itself.
“I have no makeup on because I’ve been crying it off for the last 12 hours,” Ashley Anderson, a Mystic alum who spent a dozen years at the camp, said in a Facebook video she recorded from her vacation in Paris with her daughter and other girls who had attended the camp. This was, Anderson said, one of the saddest days of her life: “Camp Mystic is really home for a lot of us.”
A government board, whose members included Camp Mystic’s co-owner, contracted with a company to better spot danger on the Guadalupe River
By Jim Carlton
A local agency that helps manage the Guadalupe River was in the process of setting up a software program to help Kerr County officials better assess flood threats three months before flash floods killed more than 110 people and left dozens missing, according to public records.
The Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which oversees the river winding through Kerr County in the Texas Hill Country, in April contracted with a company to create a “dashboard” to aggregate disparate rainfall and other weather data so emergency managers could more readily spot a flood threat. The status of the contract, for $73,000, was unclear, and officials of the authority, a government agency, referred questions to the county, which declined to respond.
Members of the authority board that approved the contract included Dick Eastland, the co-owner of Camp Mystic, who died in the floods. Leaders from two other prominent summer camps, Camp La Junta and Camp Waldemar, also sat on the board. They declined to comment.
“Our UGRA Family is heartbroken for our community and the devastation caused by the July 4th Flood,” the authority said in a statement on its website.
The proceedings at the Upper Guadalupe River Authority further show how the area’s history of floods was on the mind of local officials well before July 4, when a predawn wall of water swept away cabins, RVs and people. At least 27 girls and staff died at the century-old Camp Mystic alone.
Separately, Kerr County had for a decade debated installing outdoor warning sirens along the river but hadn’t done so, even as other Texas cities and counties adopted them to sound loud alerts ahead of floods and other natural disasters. Minutes of Kerr County commission meetings showed the officials struggled to secure grants to pay for the sirens and were reluctant to spend money themselves.
Now, after last week’s deadly floods, county officials are facing questions about why people didn’t get more notice before floodwaters hit the camps around 4 a.m. as preteens slept. The National Weather Service had issued a 1:14 a.m., July 4, flash-flood warning for Kerr County with “catastrophic” potential for loss of life. Some public figures and disaster veterans have questioned why summer camps weren’t evacuated.
“It is a huge tragedy, many heads will roll and many lawsuits will be filed,” predicted Clint Dawson, chair of the aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics department at the University of Texas at Austin.
State and county officials have said the time for reviewing their emergency response will come after they finish the difficult job of trying to find still-missing flood victims. Local officials have declined to give a timeline for their response to the flood. In a statement on its website, Camp Mystic said, “We have been in communication with local and state authorities who are tirelessly deploying extensive resources to search for our missing girls.”
The Upper Guadalupe River Authority directors raised the idea of developing a flood-warning system for Kerr County in January of last year, according to meeting minutes. The authority noted in a 2024 report that the county, situated on a plateau with steep canyons that funnel rainwater like a hose, alternates between drought and flood with nine major floods going back to 1932.
Later that year, an executive from a weather-data company called Kisters North America appeared at a meeting to present options. Officials of the Dutch company, whose North American division is based in Boerne, Texas, weren’t immediately available for comment.
A video on its website shows rainfall, temperature and other weather data overlaid on points of a map to give a visual picture of what’s going on. A 2018 report by Kisters and others said it had developed a demonstration project using National Weather Service forecasts for flood impacts at stream and street level.
“Emergency management professionals can easily view approximate flood levels and address inundation using…(NWS) forecasts,” the report said.
In February, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority’s board president, William Rector, said priorities for 2025 and 2026 would include implementing the flood-warning dashboard.
The board awarded the contract to Kisters in April. “Information from this dashboard will be used by UGRA staff and local emergency coordinators and decision makers,” the authority wrote in its 2025 Strategic Plan.
Disaster experts say such a flood-warning dashboard could serve as an important tool in helping prevent future tragedies, but would need to be used as part of a larger plan. “It’s very straightforward to build a model that shows you what is going to flood and when,” said James Doss-Gollin, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. “The hard part is you need to have a plan to reach people to get out of the way.”