After historic floods ravaged their RV park a year ago this weekend, Lorena Guillén and her husband had a difficult choice to make. Should they reopen the camp site, which they had once thought would fund their retirement?
But that was before a family from Houston with two young boys who had been camping at Blue Oak RV park were swept away and killed. It was even worse at a nearby RV park where 37 people died in the rising waters, the largest loss of life in one place during the flood.
In the end, Guillén and her husband decided to stay closed.
“I don’t think I can survive knowing I have people sleeping there,” Guillén said, who plans to convert the riverfront into a flea market and amphitheater. “I can’t deal with losing one more person.”
A year ago this weekend, flash floods swept through Texas Hill Country and claimed the lives of at least 137 people. The roiling, muddy deluge scoured countless buildings from the river banks, and dealt a harsh blow to a regional economy that leaned heavily on vacationers and summer camps.
Twenty-eight of the dead were at Camp Mystic, a Christian girls camp on the Guadalupe River that would become almost synonymous with the disaster over the past year of state investigations, family lawsuits and national media attention. For many others scarred by the ordeal — who lost homes, loved ones and livelihoods — it has sometimes been a challenge to capture public attention for what they endured and their ongoing struggle to recover.
“I got to make people consider that there’s more to the story than Mystic. I didn’t want to diminish what those families are going through, but what about the rest of us?” said Mike Little, who lives down the Guadalupe River from Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas.
Camp Mystic failed to reopen this year and perhaps never will. Last month, the family that owns the camp declared bankruptcy amid state investigations, complaints and lawsuits from families of the late campers, one of whom is still missing.
But locals have rebuilt roads, bridges, farms and homes across the region — from Hunt north to Sandy Creek and Burnet. Some camps reopened, enabling campers and families to reconnect with summer rituals.
Concrete slabs still line the banks of the Guadalupe where family cabins once stood, passed down through generations. Groves of ancient bald cypress have vanished, a riverside canopy washed away forever. The Hunt Store, a local landmark gutted by floodwaters, has yet to reopen.
The statistical picture of the region’s recovery is equally dire. Of Texas flood survivors, nearly half faced a prolonged loss of electricity and clean water, 60 percent experienced financial hardship, and 20 percent are still displaced a year later, according to a survey released this week by nonprofit Extreme Weather Survivors.
Summer used to be their busiest season, but with many local camps still closed, Guillén said business has been reduced by half: “It’s been tough to survive because we are losing money.”
“We’re a small town. We depend on the tourists. Not having them is making a big difference,” she said.
On July 4, she plans to open the island on her stretch of river to the public for the first time since the flood. They’re adding a bench and a cross “for people to come in to pay their respects” to those who died.
“We’re going to have white roses in case people want to throw them downstream and say a prayer,” she said. “We call it a celebration of life, how lucky we are to have met the people we lost.”
When state lawmakers came to visit Camp Mystic as part of their investigation in April, Little placed a sign on his panel truck parked near his home overlooking the river along their route through Hunt, just west of Kerrville. The sign read: “26 people died here none of their families are blaming Camp Mystic.”
“Mystic had been the sole focus of the media. That was the only thing the world was being fed and that was being dealt with at the hearings. They wanted somebody to blame,” said Little, 71, a retired handyman. “Nobody in our neighborhood felt that way. It was a natural event.”
Little stood beside his sign and waved as lawmakers passed, then turned the truck around and parked it on the other side of the road so they would see it when they left.
Little still remembers waking at 4:15 a.m. with his wife, Alana Little, 70, an administrator at a law firm, and heading outside to check the river — normally far downhill from his house — only to see the Guadalupe had overwhelmed its banks and climbed the hill to lap at his porch.
“When we turned on a flashlight and looked at the water, we started hearing screaming,” he said. “I would go out in the water, and she would provide them with towels and clothing and shoes.”
Little rescued seven people from trees surrounding his home, all shoeless, some naked, including an 8-year-old boy.
“We put on coffee and just tried to stop the horror those people were going through,” he recalled, adding: “All up and down the river are people with stories like that. I’m pleased and proud of what we were able to do.”
He paused, then added: “Going into that water … it was hard.”
Now Little steps out on his porch and sees a changed river.
“Below our house where we used to have fine properties, wonderful homes that were in families for generations, there’s nothing there now but concrete foundations. They were swept away,” he said. “Every night where there used to be lights, it’s dark. We don’t have to just fix the houses, we have to get over it.”
Alana said she’s “kind of anxious about the Fourth.”
“I’m looking forward to having a year behind us,” she said, “but some days it’s just overwhelmingly sad. … It’s never going to be the same.”
Ryan Logue has spent much of the past year searching the Guadalupe and its banks for human remains, trying to speed the recovery. This week, residents near Lake Ingram, which lies along the river, contacted him online and asked him to search the area.
“I’m diving [in] Lake Ingram right now,” he said Monday. “It’s pretty clean, but then you come across something like this rebar just sticking out of the water where boaters pass.”
Logue saw barges parked in the lake this week, dredging for flood debris. He planned to post about what he found online to alert those likely to boat or fish on the lake this holiday weekend.
Logue, 42, has lived in Kerrville for a decade, has an 8-year-old daughter and first volunteered to search because he hoped to find Cecilia “Cile” Steward, the 8-year-old Mystic camper whose body has not been recovered. Months ago he stopped counting how many human bones he found “for my psyche.”
“Maybe one day, once I’ve searched all the way from Mystic to Canyon Lake, I’ll say I’ve done all I could,” he said. “But I live here, I swim in that river. I will always be searching for that little girl.”
Mike Malcolm, 69, of Sandy Creek — about 60 miles northeast of Kerrville — traveled to Washington last month Extreme Weather Survivors, the national nonprofit, to meet with members of the Texas congressional delegation and urge them to speed disaster recovery assistance.
Malcolm, a retired construction worker, refused to flee the flood, even after his electricity went out, and muddy water erupted from floor vents in his trailer. He wrote his Social Security number on his arm in permanent marker so that his body would be more easily identified if he drowned.
“Maybe I’m fixing to meet Jesus Christ,” he thought. “Hope it ain’t too rough on the way out.”
Ten people in Sandy Creek and the surrounding county died. Nearby houses washed away. Malcolm’s trailer survived but sustained major damage.
He told lawmakers he met in Washington how he and other seniors don’t have computers and are “technologically challenged,” making it difficult to file claims for assistance. He feels lucky to have met a local social worker, who helped him apply for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance. But he said the process was still tough.
“They treat you almost like a criminal. You have to justify every expense,” he said. “The flood took everything but our dignity, and now [they] all are after that.”
Amy McDaniel and her husband, Wayne, both 50, lost 347 chickens in the flood, three pens of quail and a donkey named Diane that had just had a baby, Sassy Annie.
“I still struggle with every rainfall,” she said. “Growing up around animals, it’s always been pray for rain. Now I’m terrified of it.”
The flood pushed their trailer in Burnet — about 80 miles northeast of Kerrville — off its foundation, knocked out its air conditioning and half its electricity, and contaminated their well.
As she wrangled at first unsuccessfully with FEMA for assistance, McDaniel wished more of the focus was on flood survivors in her community, not just Camp Mystic.
“It was hard, to the point of anger and frustration,” she said. FEMA assisted with about a quarter of their $85,000 recovery, she said, but the process entailed repeated appeals: “The hell FEMA puts you through to try to get the money out of them.”
McDaniel asked members of the Texas delegation to pass proposed FEMA and Reforming Disaster Recovery Acts that would provide more assistance to communities and make the federal system “easier for people to deal with.”
“I know people that are still living in tents. There’s people still living eight people in a travel trailer,” she said. “I understand it’s not meant to replace everything you lost. But it should be easier.”
Her relatives plan to watch waterfront fireworks, but she doesn’t want to join them. She thinks of those still missing, of bodies in the water.
“I want no part of being on a river,” McDaniel said.
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