It was his first rescue operation.
Scott Ruskan, a 26-year-old Coast Guard rescue swimmer based in Corpus Christi, Texas, woke up to banging on his door in the early hours of July 4. There was flooding around San Antonio and he was being deployed, he was told. Did he have a chain saw?
Mr. Ruskan was part of a crew that was tasked with evacuating hundreds of people at Camp Mystic, an all-girls’ Christian summer camp along the Guadalupe River that has become a hub of loss in the catastrophic floods that killed more than 80 people across Central Texas. About 750 girls were at the camp this session, officials said.
Mr. Ruskan and his team took off on a helicopter around 7 a.m. Central time on Friday to the camp, near Hunt, Texas. It took them nearly six hours to reach San Antonio because of poor visibility and challenging weather conditions. “A white knuckle experience,” he said.
By the end of their operations, Mr. Ruskan was credited with saving 165 people from Camp Mystic.
Mr. Ruskan was part of the more than 1,700 emergency responders, bystanders, family members and others who used helicopters and drones, arrived on horseback and in trucks, and searched from boats and golf carts
for those who remained unaccounted as search-and-rescue operations entered into a fourth day.
Many rescue stories over the past 48 hours have been harrowing. A 22-year-old woman was rescued after clinging to a tree overnight. A young girl was found after floating on a mattress for hours. A mother and her 19-year-old son survived by clinging onto each other and a tree. A counselor at Camp Mystic helped evacuate her 14 young campers to safety.
Mr. Ruskan and his crew had a particularly onerous task.
After their treacherous journey from Corpus Christi, Mr. Ruskan and his crew eventually landed at Camp Mystic, where they began working with 12 rescue helicopters, including those from the Army National Guard. Close to 200 people — mostly campers and some camp staff members — needed to be evacuated. Two main landing zones were set up: one on an archery field and one on a soccer field.
Mr. Ruskan realized that staying on scene would free up two extra spots on his helicopter for the evacuees, he said, so he told his unit, “I’d love to stay, I could do a lot more good on the ground.”
He became the main person on scene to both triage and provide emotional support to the survivors.
“Kids were in pajamas,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times, noting some were wearing just one shoe on their feet. They were cold and tired, many soaking wet. And they were desperate for answers about their friends.
“I had a job to do,” Mr. Ruskan added. “All these people are looking at you terrified with a 1,000-yard stare. They want some sort of comfort, someone to save them.”
Across the state, at least 81 people have died from the floods, 28 of them being children. More than 40 are still missing, officials said — 10 of those are campers from Camp Mystic, and one is a counselor. As of Saturday night, more than 850 people have been rescued in the search operations. Texas officials have assured residents that they will continue searching for the missing until every person is found — while at the same time acknowledging that the hope of finding more people alive was diminishing by the hour.
“We will remain 100 percent dedicated, searching for every single one of the children who were at Camp Mystic, as well as anybody else, and the entire riverbed to make sure that they’re going to be recovered,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said at a Sunday news conference.
Earlier on Sunday, President Trump granted Mr. Abbott’s request for a federal disaster declaration, directing federal assistance to the affected areas. State and local officials have urged people not to go out to conduct search-and-rescue operations and have asked people not to use personal drones over affected areas.
At Camp Mystic on Friday, Mr. Ruskan shuttled campers to the helicopters that would lift them to safety — sometimes carrying two girls in one arm. As he took some evacuees away, he assured the others that he would come back for them.
Some asked if they could bring their stuffed animal with them. “Of course,” he told them.
Talya Minsberg is a Times reporter covering breaking and developing news.
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