In the first three hours after the National Weather Service sent out an alert at 1:14 a.m. on July 4, warning of “life-threatening flash flooding” near Kerrville, Texas, the Guadalupe River would rise 20 feet. Yet local leaders would remain largely unheard from, raising questions about both local preparedness and whether the state of Texas should be doing more to notify flood-prone rural counties when they are in danger.
Camp Mystic, a girls’ camp along the river where at least 27 people lost their lives, experienced severe flooding sometime between 2 and 3 a.m., according to accounts from parents whose children were at the camp. Counselors in one cabin had to force open windows to help young girls get out. “The girls were saying it was a rushing river,” said Lisa Miller, whose 9-year-old daughter, Birdie, had to climb onto a counselor’s back to escape.
At the nearby Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly camp, a facilities manager was awake around 1 a.m. when he saw the rising waters and alerted his boss, which prompted a quick effort to move people to higher ground, camp officials said. No lives were lost.
Yet even as these dramas were unfolding, many of the key local leaders in Kerr County were still asleep or had not been alerted to the danger. The survival of people in local camps and low-lying areas in many cases depended not on official evacuations, but on whether they were paying attention, on their own, to weather alerts in the middle of the night.
After the flood alert shortly after 1 a.m., the National Weather Service went on to put out a series of warnings of mounting intensity, with one at 4:03 a.m. warning of “catastrophic” flooding.
“This came at night when people were asleep, in bed,” Kerrville’s mayor, Joe Herring Jr., said at a news conference. He later told CNN that he had not received the weather alert and was not awakened until 5:30 a.m.
Sheriff Larry Leitha of Kerr County said he had first been notified around 4 or 5 a.m., when “one of my sergeants was in dispatch when the first calls started coming in.”
Dalton Rice, the Kerrville city manager, said he had gone jogging around 3:30 or 4 a.m., but where he was, on the city’s walking trail along the Guadalupe, “there was very light rain” and “we did not see any signs of the river rising.”
But that would very quickly change. Emergency workers struggled to get into position as roads across the Texas Hill Country became inundated, with one emergency vehicle being swept off the road. Mr. Rice said that by 5:20 a.m. he was in a truck on his way to provide help but had trouble getting out of a park.
The county does have access to a private system known as CodeRED that sends out alerts to residents’ phones, but it is not clear to what extent it was used. At 4:22 a.m., a firefighter asked on an emergency channel if there was “any way we can send a CodeRED out” to residents in the town of Hunt, where Camp Mystic and the Presbyterian camp are located, “asking them to find higher ground or stay home,” according to a report by Texas Public Radio.
But it appears that the first CodeRED did not go out for about an hour. Louis Kocurek, a resident of the town of Center Point, told The Times that the CodeRED text message he received had come in at 10:07 a.m.
Sheriff Leitha said he could not say why the alerts had not been issued earlier.
“That’s going to be checked into at a later time,” he said.
Local officials said the chief problem was the river’s stunningly swift rise, in the middle of the night.
The Guadalupe “rose over 20 feet, 30 feet in less than a two-hour time span, on a holiday, in the morning,” said Mr. Rice, the city manager. “There wasn’t a lot of time.”
In the aftermath, they promised there would eventually be a full examination of the disaster, which had claimed 119 lives as of Wednesday, and the response. “This incident will be reviewed, you have my word,” Sheriff Leitha said. “If improvements need to be made, improvements will be made.”
All over the area, floodwaters were rising and in many cases, little help was at hand.
A Kerrville police sergeant who was driving to work found himself trapped in Hunt, outside Kerrville, which had essentially become an island, according to Jonathan Lamb, the community services officer for the Kerrville Police Department.
The sergeant, seeing people trapped on roofs and in rushing water, woke up a detective who lived in Hunt and, for the next 13 hours, the two of them worked with volunteer firefighters and an emergency room doctor to rescue and treat flood victims.
“They were by themselves, on that island that was Hunt, Texas, doing what they do,” Officer Lamb said.
Those who were at Camp Mystic described a night of heavy rain, sudden terror, and a heroic night of evacuations to higher ground with little or no help from the authorities.
The Christian girls’ camp hosts a series of monthlong terms each summer, and the second term had started a week before the floods. The Guadalupe River was a defining feature for campers: It was mentioned in one of their camp songs, there was a canoe competition at the end of each term, and the river’s edge was a refuge for weekly prayer and devotion.
Only two days before the flood, officials from the Texas Department of Health and Human Services had signed off on the camp’s annual inspection, which includes a review of its emergency plans. As the July term began and counselors and staff members gathered for orientation, they walked through where things were and were told to head to a hall on higher ground if there was a flood, said Nancy Clement, 18, who worked as a counselor and photographer at the camp.
Ms. Clement and another counselor, Holly Kate Hurley, along with Ms. Miller, whose daughter Birdie and two others had escaped, provided an account of what transpired on the night of the storm.
Loud thunder began cracking around 1:30 a.m., waking up some people. Later, the power went out. Ms. Hurley, who was working in a part of the camp located on higher ground, recalled waking up her girls and telling them to shut the windows, to avoid the water.
Ms. Miller said Birdie, who had to climb on her counselor’s back, had told her that she and her camp mates were mostly barefoot when they abandoned their cabin, known as Giggle Box, and moved uphill toward higher ground. As they retreated, clutching hands, they saw the area below them covered by fast-moving floodwaters. For hours, the campers waited in pouring rain, singing camp songs to stay calm.
Meanwhile, Ms. Miller’s middle daughter, Genevieve, 12, was being rescued from another cabin, called Bug House. Sometime around 2 a.m., Ms. Miller said, a counselor in Genevieve’s cabin went to the office and said that their cabin was taking on water.
Many of the counselors and campers didn’t have phones on them: Campers were not allowed access to technology, while counselors could have them only during select nights and moments during the day, and Ms. Clement said she had always thought of that as a benefit, part of the atmosphere that went with being along the river.
“You don’t know how much of a joy it was to be unplugged,” she said.
There was a retired police officer on site to help provide security, and girls from one cabin ran to his office as the water started to rise. One of the camp staff members hoped to use the camp’s public address system to make an announcement, but the rising water had already taken out the power.
That meant the camp had lost internet service as well.
The owners of the camp began driving from cabin to cabin to wake everyone up, gathering many of the girls in the camp’s recreation hall. A counselor stood on the porch of a cabin and flashed her flashlight on and off, screaming for help.
Inside a staff cabin, Ms. Clement related, about a half dozen people began piling belongings on top of their mattresses. They saw water rising outside the window, right before it cracked a door in half and began rushing in. Those inside began holding onto the cabin’s porch columns; some women climbed on a windowsill and pulled themselves up onto the roof, pulling a few others up with them.
When one of the staff directors was seen struggling in the water, hanging onto a volleyball net, some of those on the roof took off their shirts and knotted them together to form a makeshift rope in order to throw it to her. She was able to swim against the current to reach them.
Across the way, Ms. Clement said, she could hear the girls on the second floor of a nearby building singing some of their camp songs about God’s love — “beautiful,” she said. She prayed with her fellow counselors on the roof. Shivering with cold, she clung to her phone, keys and the worn stuffed dog she had kept with her since childhood. Hours went by until the water receded.
The parts of the camp located at a higher elevation had not been touched by the floods, but many of those who were there spent the night worrying about those further down.
“That was the hardest part — knowing there were girls out there fighting for their lives and there was nothing we could do,” Ms. Hurley said. It wasn’t until hours after the flooding began that it became safe to walk to one of the halls for some of the girls, Ms. Clement said.
By early afternoon, a group of Army trucks and helicopters had arrived, loading them aboard, taking them to safety.
Jesus Jiménez and Mike Baker contributed reporting. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice. He is from upstate New York.
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