Beaumont, Texas, is a good 360 miles down Interstate 10 from where the Guadalupe River charged over its banks on July 4 but not far enough to spare it from the pain of the flood. Crowds solemnly lined a street on Sunday, holding cutouts of hearts, as a hearse pulled off the highway carrying one of their own — a 22-year-old college student named Aidan Heartfield, one of four natives of the city who were killed.
In Houston, Keli Rabon worried about her 7-year-old son, Brock. He came home from a summer camp session that ended after just two days and pointed out a space in her kitchen between the top of the cabinets and ceiling. That’s where he would hide, he told her, if a flood swamped their house.
So much about the scale of the floods that tore through Central Texas has been staggering: the ferocity and speed of the water, harrowing stories of survival, and heroism that gave way to agonizing accounts of loss. The death toll from the floods stands at 135, making it one of the deadliest weather events in the state’s history. Nearly 100 remain missing.
The magnitude of the disaster has made Texas almost feel small: Roughly 270,000 square miles, and yet some aspect of the grief and the trauma seems within arm’s reach of its 31 million people.
“They say six degrees of separation, but it’s a lot smaller than that,” said Ms. Rabon, 40. “We can truly all see ourselves in this tragedy.”
In conversations across the state, those who did not directly feel the wrath of the floods said they could easily trace their ties to someone who did. As funeral directors sent home the remains of the dead, the destinations emanating from the Central Texas epicenter could shade a map of the Lonestar State: Austin, San Antonio, Lubbock, Amarillo, Liberty.
“We’ve got a lot of traumatized people who are all over the state,” said Amy Stewart, a licensed clinical social worker in Plano, just outside of Dallas.
The resonance of loss is a reflection of where the flooding happened — in the Hill Country, where the rugged allure of water and wide open space has drawn Texans for generations, to summer camps for children, vacation homes for the wealthy and inns, camp sites and R.V. parks for families of all kinds.
In Abilene, Robert and Joni Brake, a married couple in their 60s, were mourned by their children and grandchildren. In Bellville, west of Houston, 8-year-old Virginia Hollis’s grandfather walked her horse named Salt Valley behind the hearse in her funeral procession. In Highland Park, near Dallas, the parents of Hadley Hanna, one of the 27 who died at Camp Mystic, told a packed church about her “main character energy.”
And in Arlington, Pat Green, the Texas country singer whose music helped spread the lore of the Hill Country, talked about searching through despair for the “bright white light of love and charity.” The flood swept away his brother, sister-in-law and two nephews from their campsite along the Guadalupe. On Wednesday, Mr. Green’s benefit concert raised more than $1 million for flood relief.
“We all look after each other in this big place,” Mr. Green said.
That belief has been born out in the ribbons tied to tree trunks; lemonade stands, bake sales, yard signs and bracelet charms; and “meal trains” feeding victims’ families.
“Everyone feels a need to grieve together, to belong, to try to help in their way,” said Mayor Mattie Parker of Fort Worth after a vigil outside City Hall.
In the flood’s wake, the Hill Country continued to draw people from across the state to search for the missing and take on the mess — physical and emotional — left behind.
A ministry called Restoration of Hope, which supports men who have experienced homelessness, mental health issues or incarceration, came from Texarkana, on the East Texas border with Arkansas, to help clean up. Fire fighters from El Paso, abutting New Mexico at Texas’ westernmost point, assisted with rescues and tended to those displaced by floods on the Frio River near San Antonio.
Katie Bywaters, a 29-year-old public school art teacher in Dallas, has a tattoo on her arm with a sun setting over rolling hills and a sliver of creek, a reminder of her Hill Country reveries: family trips to a ranch in Hunt, a community ravaged this month by flooding, and years at an all-girl camp. She swam, rode horses, practiced archery — “things that you don’t learn in Dallas,” as she put it.
Those experiences had been “a rocking chair for my mental health,” she said. “I could say it saved my life, honestly.”
But that bubble of security and comfort burst with the devastation she saw from the floods in a potentially irreparable way. “That safe place for other girls is not a safe place anymore,” Ms. Bywaters said, who had been visiting a friend in Kerr County, the area hit hardest by the floods, on July 4.
To be sure, Texas has a fluency with heartache, built up after recent tragedies, including the mass shooting in 2022 at an elementary school in Uvalde; a deadly winter storm in 2021 that derailed the state’s electrical grid; another mass shooting in 2019 in El Paso; devastation after Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast in 2017; and blackouts stemming from Hurricane Beryl last year.
Further back in time, the sea wall in Galveston was erected after the 1900 hurricane that was the deadliest disaster in the country’s history, killing well over 6,000 people. And in 1937, pungent smell was added to odorless natural gas after a leak caused an explosion at a school in the tiny East Texas town of New London that killed 295 students and teachers.
The widely expressed hope now is that this latest disaster could bring change, such as more protections against flash floods and awareness of the danger they pose. State lawmakers are returning next week for a special session with flood warning systems, emergency communications and relief funds on the agenda.
The urgency feels personal: Ms. Rabon’s son Brock had clung to the rafters of his cabin at Camp La Junta in Hunt as water broke through windows and picked up furniture. The experience compounded a wariness he developed after Hurricane Beryl knocked out power in Houston for days and a derecho in June 2024 unleashed furious winds.
“Now, he has this whole other awareness that I never would have anticipated,” said Ms. Rabon, a full-time social media content creator who joined a support and advocacy group called Extreme Weather Survivors after the flood.
Ms. Rabon has an awareness of her own. She remembered her fear as she raced toward Hunt to pick up Brock and his older brother, Braeden, and her relief when she learned they were safe.
“I don’t know the right words. It’s this juxtaposition between gratitude and grief or guilt,” she said. “It’s so hard to just wrap your head around.”
Those complicated emotions have cascaded across Texas. Texans spared from the direct impacts of the floods still described powerful feelings of sadness and distress. Some have wrestled with an uncertainty about how much anguish they are entitled to when others had lost so much more.
“It’s OK to be sad,” said J.B. Hayes, who lives in Dallas, as she choked back tears. “It hits people differently. You don’t have to be directly affected to be affected, and I think that’s what people need to hear.”
The pull to find some way to pitch in has had to coexist with a sense of helplessness. Fund-raisers, ribbons and vigils could only do so much. The right words to console those who had endured the worst could seem impossible to find.
But Ms. Hayes, 55, said she believed that perhaps those words are not all that complicated, and are as meaningful now as they would be in the weeks, months, even years ahead: “What can I do?”
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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