The July 4 tragedy at Camp Mystic outside of Hunt, Texas, was concentrated at just two cabins where Mystic’s youngest campers bunked and where a confluence of rising water from the river and a normally quiet creek swallowed the buildings before the girls could escape.
Of the camp’s 28 deaths, 15, including two teenage counselors, were at a cabin known as Bubble Inn, where no one survived, according to a new accounting of the fatalities by the camp. Eleven of the other girls who died had been in the cabin called Twins, a pair of adjoining buildings, said Jeff Carr, a Camp Mystic spokesman.
Another fatality was the camp’s longtime director, Dick Eastland, who died trying to rescue campers from Bubble Inn. Only one death at the camp — a camper from a nearby cabin called Jumble House — was unconnected to Bubble Inn or Twins.
The new accounting underscores how focused the raging waters were at the nearly 100-year-old Christian retreat in the Texas Hill Country. The two beige stone cabins were enveloped by floodwaters that pushed in from opposite directions in the pre-dawn darkness, probably spawning eddies, trapping campers and confusing anyone who tried to save them from the swirling pools, experts say.
A dozen Twins campers and their four counselors survived, Mr. Carr said. But most of the 8- and 9-year-olds in the two cabins, nestled among pecan and live oak trees, did not.
“That’s the littlest girls,” said Hillary Minne, 39, who was nine when she was placed in Bubble Inn, and recalled fondly reading by the river and singing around a campfire. When she heard about the disaster, she said, “immediately my heart just broke, and it’s been hurting since.”
Unlike the hilltop cabins on the edge of Camp Mystic where teenagers bunk, the cabins for the youngest girls were only a short walk from the dining hall, the staff offices and the riverbank, where campers took part in daily classes in fishing, diving and canoeing. The central location in a low-lying area known as “the Flats” made it easier for the rising third and fourth graders — many of them away from their parents for the first time — to navigate the camp, especially in the scorching Texas summer heat.
It also put the cabins between the Guadalupe River and Cypress Creek, normally a minor tributary into the much larger river. When the rain was pouring in the early hours of July 4, both the river and the creek overflowed their banks, sending rushing waters into the Flats from two sides.
“There is water here rising in this direction, and over here rising in another direction,” said Hatim Sharif, professor of civil engineering who studies flood modeling and forecasting at the University of Texas in San Antonio. “It will affect your decision of which way you should go, and I think it complicates the rescue effort.”
The tragedy has devastated generations of Camp Mystic alumnae who cherished their carefree childhood summers there, waking up each morning to Reveille over the loudspeaker and guessing which flavor of Blue Bell ice cream would be served at lunch. That so many campers were killed in Bubble Inn and Twins, where thousands of girls have forged their earliest Camp Mystic memories and often lifelong friendships, has made the losses especially painful.
In the days since the flood killed more than 130 people across Texas, a row of white crosses has been planted in the marshy grass outside Bubble Inn, bearing the names of the girls who were lost. Inside the cabin, above the waterlogged stuffed animals, sleeping bags and sandals, the cream-colored walls have been darkened as high as eight feet above the floor, revealing the level to which the flood rose.
“The water blew out the windows in that cabin and swept all of the girls and the counselors out,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said on Friday at a round-table meeting after visiting the site. “I’ve never seen anything more horrible in my life. I just sat there crying. I saw a mom and dad come up to one of those crosses and drop to their knees, and kiss that cross.”
On June 29, five days before the flood, hundreds of girls arrived at Camp Mystic from across Texas for the beginning of a monthlong term. The camp offered a portal to a simpler time: Campers weren’t allowed cellphones, cabins lacked air-conditioning and days would be wiled away playing basketball, taking dance classes and writing letters home to parents from bunk beds.
“You go through those gates, and there’s just beautiful open fields and these hills, and there’s the Mystic sign that calls to you,” said Lauren Lindley, who worked as a counselor at Camp Mystic between 1999 and 2006, overseeing Bubble Inn and Twins. “And the rest of the world just disappears.”
Ms. Lindley said she was taught to closely monitor the “littles” as they adjusted to camp.
During the June-July session this year, several hundred girls were staying in more than 20 cabins, according to a recent handbook. Each cabin had a winking name, like Chatter Box, Nut Hut and Wiggle Inn.
Among those at Camp Mystic was Katherine Ferruzzo, who had just celebrated her 19th birthday and was returning after 10 summers to her “happy place” to be a first-time counselor. She was headed in the fall to the University of Texas at Austin, her parents’ alma mater, where she hoped to study special education.
Ms. Ferruzzo would be in Bubble Inn, with 13 girls and a co-counselor, Chloe Childress. Ms. Childress, 18, was looking forward to starting college as a pre-med student after working at the camp she had started attending when she was as young as her new charges.
On the evening of July 3, in the hours before the floods, the girls, dressed in white for vespers, climbed up the camp’s Chapel Hill overlooking the glittering Guadalupe River. After their prayers, they slipped into their beds, lullabied to sleep by “Taps” and a heartfelt “Goodnight, Camp Mystic. We love you!” over the loudspeaker.
Thunder began cracking around 1:30 a.m., and the power went out shortly afterward. Water began to seep inside some of the cabins in the Flats, where 195 girls and 48 counselors were sleeping.
A New York Times analysis found that Twins, along with four other cabins in the Flats, were considered years ago to be sitting in part of the Guadalupe River’s floodway, a corridor of such extreme flood hazard that many states and counties ban or severely restrict construction in floodways. Bubble Inn, a few steps farther from the river than Twins, was not in the floodway, but it was in a designated flood zone that was deemed to have a 1 percent chance of flooding each year. Camp Mystic challenged the flood maps and designations for many of the buildings on its campus, and succeeded in getting them removed from flood-zone designations.
Sometime around 2 a.m., a counselor from one of the cabins closest to the river, Bug House, ran to an office and said the cabin was taking on water, according to Lisa Miller, whose 12-year-old daughter was in the cabin. Mr. Eastland evacuated the girls from that building, Ms. Miller said.
The owners of the camp began driving from cabin to cabin to wake everyone up, and gathering many of the girls in the camp’s recreation hall. A counselor stood on the porch of one cabin and flashed her flashlight on and off, screaming for help, said Nancy Clement, who worked as counselor at the camp this summer.
The three cabins closest to the water — Bug House, Look Inn and Hangout — were evacuated first, according Mr. Carr, the camp spokesman.
Counselors tried to keep campers calm. Some helped their girls scramble up the hill rising behind the row of cabins that backed up to the woods. But Bubble Inn and Twins were more centrally located and did not have that option. The girls there were trapped by rising floodwaters.
“That was the hardest part — knowing there were girls out there fighting for their lives and there was nothing we could do,” Holly Kate Hurley, a 19-year-old counselor at a nearby Mystic campus, recalled about the hours after the flood struck.
Mr. Eastland loaded girls in the dark into his Chevy Tahoe SUV, and drove them to the camp’s large recreation hall. He was able to transfer girls from several of the cabins close to the river, Ms. Miller said, before the water overtook him with three Bubble Inn campers in the truck, according to Mr. Carr.
As the rain fell, both the Guadalupe River and Cypress Creek, which runs through the camp, swelled rapidly and thrust water onto the grounds. In that kind of flash flooding, the water rises quickly and spreads furiously, making it difficult for anyone to swim to safety, said Mr. Sharif, the civil engineering professor: “Too much water, too little time to react.”
In less than 90 minutes — between 2:50 a.m. and 4:10 a.m. — the level of the Guadalupe River at Hunt, five miles downstream from Camp Mystic, surged from roughly nine feet, which is not considered flooded, up to over 22 feet, a major flood. The river would ultimately crest that morning at 37 feet, the highest level ever recorded, according to federal weather data.
Around the Bubble Inn and Twins cabins, the churning water overflowing from the river and the creek made it harder for girls to escape or for people to rescue them, Mr. Sharif said. As two opposing currents hit each other, he said, the water can also appear to be still for a few minutes before beginning to flow rapidly, providing a false sense of safety for someone trying to flee. The fast-moving floodwaters probably also carried hazardous debris like tree limbs and canoes.
Jim Blackburn, a co-director of the Severe Storm Center at Rice University, called the confluence of Cypress Creek and the Guadalupe River at the camp a “worst-case scenario.”
Envision a confluence like a street intersection, he said. If there are no stoplights or road signs, all of the traffic rushes together. So did the two water sources.
Former campers and counselors said the Bubble Inn and Twins disaster came as a shock.
“Those cabins are nowhere near the river,” said Katherine Howe, 48, who evacuated from Bubble Inn as a 10-year-old during floods in 1987.
In later years at Camp Mystic, Ms. Howe camped out on a hill during another flood, and staff members brought them doughnuts by fishing boat.
“We all thought it was hilarious and fun, and we got to sleep late and not have to go to our classes,” Ms. Howe said. “This region is accustomed to flash floods. They come and then they go.”
Ms. Lindley, the former counselor, said “the grief alone is so constricting.”
“I couldn’t help but put myself in that situation and wonder what decisions I would have made in the dark, in the cold, in the water with young children,” she said. “It’s horrific, and it’s terrible, and its unpreventable, and it’s so frightening.”
The campers from the Bubble Inn and Twins cabins who were killed included Hadley Hanna, 8, known for her “sneak-attack hugs” and for teaching her classmates how to tie their shoes. And Mary Barrett Stevens, 8, who doted on her dog, Pete, and enjoyed playing cards and the tile game Rummikub with her family and friends. And Mary Grace Baker, who was cast as an angel in a production of the “Nutcracker” ballet and had dreams of one day performing as Clara.
Renee Smajstrla, 8, had a big brace-toothed smile, fierce dance moves and many pink outfits that matched her bold personality. Nine-year-old Janie Hunt’s attendance at Mystic was part of a family tradition; she was known for her math skills and for inventing new holiday rituals, like scavenger hunts.
Those little girls were “precious,” said Ms. Clement, the counselor. “Their love was overwhelming for everything and everyone around them.”
The family of Ms. Childress, one of the Bubble Inn counselors, said in a statement that the 18-year-old had “spent her final days doing what she loved most — caring for and mentoring young girls.” Her colleague Ms. Ferruzzo, “sacrificed her own life to try to save the lives of her Bubble Inn campers,” her family said in a statement.
Ms. Ferruzzo’s Bible was found in the wreckage at camp, among toppled trees, mud-covered children’s clothing and sodden photographs. She had highlighted Revelation 21:4, her family said: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.”
Mike Baker contributed reporting, Kitty Bennett and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Soumya Karlamangla is a Times reporter who covers California. She is based in the Bay Area.
Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
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