Camp Mystic survivors have described hearing the terrifying screams of their fellow campers in the dark as they were swept up in the devastating July 4 Texas floods.
The flooding struck around 3 a.m. — much earlier than previously reported, according to the Wall Street Journal.
One survivor recounted how counselors told the girls that all of the younger children had been moved to safety beforehand. In reality they were fighting for their lives — and at least 27 were swept away to their deaths.
Many of the 650 campers and staffers at Camp Mystic were asleep when, at 1:14 a.m., a flash-flood warning for Kerr County, Texas, with “catastrophic” potential for loss of life was issued by the National Weather Service.
Amelia Moore, 14, one of the older girls at the century-old Christian girls’ summer camp, was awakened at around 2 a.m. by a clap of thunder, an hour before the power went out.
She could hear screaming coming from the girls in some of the cabins further downhill, directly in the floodway of the Guadalupe River in an area known as the Flats, but was told to ignore it and stay in her cabin, she claimed.
“A lot of counselors had been here for so long they thought it was nothing. So they were like, ‘Just stay in the cabin,’” Amelia told the WSJ.
But as other girls began to crowd into their cabin, describing how theirs were filling with water, she realized this was not a normal summer storm.
Eventually, she fell back to sleep, but then awoke at 7 a.m. to find that Senior Hill, where many of the older campers were located, had been cut off by floodwaters and downed trees.
They were stuck for hours without food or any way of contacting the outside world, due to Camp Mystic’s strict rules on not allowing campers to keep snacks or their cellphones in their cabins.
“We were so hungry. We were starving. As the day goes on, we were like, ‘Does anyone have food that they smuggled in? You won’t get in trouble. We just need food,’” Amelia recalled.
The girls were wrongly told that the younger campers had all been safely taken to another campsite and were fine, although whether this was due to the counselors trying to prevent panic or whether they didn’t know the truth is unclear.
Campers staying in Chatterbox, one of the cabins in the flatlands housing the youngest campers, were forced to climb through a window and up a rocky hill in the dark, some of them barefoot and still in pajamas, Amelia said.
“This is the part that makes me sick. Because the whole time we were told that the flats were safe and accounted for in Rec Hall. We were told they were playing games in Rec Hall and that they were perfectly fine,” Amelia said.
“We should have been a lot more panicked in the situation but we genuinely didn’t know that anything was wrong,” she added.
Amelia described chaotic scenes in the hours that followed, with the first rescue helicopter not touching down until around 3 p.m., more than 12 hours after the flooding began.
As the aircraft could only accommodate a few people at a time, the evacuation was painfully slow, and it wasn’t clear who was in charge, according to Amelia.
“It was hectic. There were counselors but no one on that hill was over 21 years old,” Amelia said.
Tempers flared as new girls arrived and jumped the line, while counselors tried to arrange the order of evacuation from youngest to oldest, Amelia said.
Organizers of the camp did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
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