Latest news with #warning system
The Guardian
6 days ago
- The Guardian
The long road to tragedy at the Texas girls camp where floods claimed 27 lives
Investigators of the catastrophic Hill Country flooding in Texas may never be able to pinpoint a precise moment that sealed the fate of 27 young girls, teenage counselors and staff who perished after a wall of water surged through Camp Mystic on the banks of the Guadalupe River. But perhaps no bigger clue can be found than the account of an otherwise unremarkable and sparsely attended meeting of Kerr county commissioners in March 2018. Members waited with anticipation for news of an application they submitted the previous year for a grant from the state of Texas to help pay for a comprehensive new flood warning system along the Guadalupe. The county's unreliable old network of gauges and sensors, installed following flooding in 1987 that killed 10 children trying to flee a waterside church camp, had been inactive since 1999. Commissioners were chasing a $1m slice of federal funding made newly available to the state after a succession of flood disasters, including Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. Now-retired commissioner Tom Moser brought bad news, noting 'about eight different counties' were selected, but 'they didn't select us,' according to minutes of the meeting still viewable online. Tom Pollard, the county judge at the time, was incredulous. 'They prioritized us lower?' he asked, the county's many low-lying and therefore vulnerable youth summer camps immediately adjacent to the Guadalupe uppermost in his mind. 'They did,' Moser replied solemnly. Without that funding from the state, the project foundered. No widespread gauge system was ever set up that would have given early warning of a life-threatening torrent of water further up the river; no sirens ever installed that would have warned Camp Mystic residents that their lives were in peril and they needed to get out immediately. The investigation will look at other missteps and lost opportunities along the way that might have brought a different outcome at the 99-year-old Christian-themed, all-girls camp that served as a joyous rite of passage for generations of young Texans. Prominent among them will be this week's revelation that the camp owner and director Dick Eastland, who lost his own life trying to ferry a group of his youngest campers to safety as the river rose towards a peak height of 37.5ft, waited more than an hour to issue an evacuation order after receiving a severe flood warning on his phone at 1.14am on 4 July. Yet it is to the eternal regret of Moser, a former senior Nasa engineer who had studied flood monitoring and alert systems installed in other nearby counties, that money was never found or spent, either then or later, to replace or upgrade a broken mechanism born from a near-identical tragedy for the sole purpose of saving lives in the future. 'Not having the funds to accomplish it was not very satisfying to me but we tried,' Moser told NPR. 'That's all we could do. We didn't have the resources in the county operating budget to do that.' Moser, who did not return a message from the Guardian seeking further comment, had advocated for sirens, a proposal dropped from the state grant application when it became clear some residents and commissioners opposed them. 'If sirens were there, clearly people would have known about it. Would it have saved everybody? I don't think so. This was an event that's probably one chance in a million,' he told the radio network. At Camp Mystic, like elsewhere in the county, residents were reliant on an outdated and patchwork early warning system of alerts. Some were from the National Weather Service (NWS), which Eastland's family concedes he did receive. Other messages came from local authorities, some sent only after an inexplicable delay, which others along the Guadalupe's banks say they did not see in any case. Inside the camp, with water rising fast, especially around dormitories closest to the river where the youngest campers, mostly aged eight and nine, were sleeping, there was chaos. Many of the teenage counselors left in charge of the dormitories were left to make instant life-or-death decisions on their own, having lost contact with adult supervisors. According to two counselors interviewed in the days following the disaster, campers were not allowed to bring mobile phones, and the counselors were made to surrender theirs, leaving them cut off from any emergency alerts. Eastland, who had run the camp with his family since the 1980s and was a past director of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority that pressed for the original warning and alert system, was familiar with the danger of flash flooding from heavy rain. 'I'm sure there will be other drownings,' Eastland told the Austin American-Statesman in 1990, reported by CNN. 'People don't heed the warnings.' In a Washington Post report that contained harrowing first-hand testimony from girls who were there, parents of some who were rescued from Camp Mystic said it was Eastland and his staff who ignored warnings on the morning of the disaster. Also under scrutiny will be why Eastland made, and was granted, repeated applications to remove dozens of Camp Mystic buildings from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's 100-year flood map, which allowed the camp to operate and expand in a known risk area. A review by the Associated Press found that 15 of at least 30 exempted buildings were at the Camp Mystic Guadalupe site where most, if not all of the campers and counselors lost their lives. Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street, a climate risk assessment and modelling company, said the dormitories were in a known flood zone, which records show had been swamped numerous times in the camp's near century of existence. 'People that ran the camp had the ability to understand that the risk was close by, the risk was in the area, and maybe adapt the buildings. And there was no action there,' he said. 'In fact there were letters of map amendments that were submitted instead.' But Porter said it was hard to place blame on any single person or entity: 'A lot of that is just our overall risk psyche and understanding of what risk looks like, our expectation that these really rare events aren't going to affect us and they're not going to be as bad as we think they're going to be. 'The way we treat climate risk and flood risk in the country is really that, you know, if it happens, it'll be something we'll be able to rebuild, recover, and then it won't happen again for 100 years.' The Guardian was unable to reach anybody at Camp Mystic for comment. Donna Gable Hatch, a writer and former staff editor at the Kerrville Daily Times, said she believed lives would have been saved at Camp Mystic with an early warning system, but city and county officials were not responsible for its absence. 'If the funds had been made available in a timely and adequate manner, this catastrophe might have unfolded differently. But too often, those at the helm of small towns must wait for permission, wait for funding, wait for bureaucracy to catch up to reality,' she wrote in a guest editorial for her former employer. 'To accuse local leaders of negligence is to completely misunderstand who they are and what this place means. In Kerr county, heartbreak isn't abstract. It has a name. A face. It's a neighbor, a classmate, a church member or a childhood friend. 'The truth will come out. In time, we'll trace the chain of failure back to where it truly began – not in Kerrville, but in the halls of distant agencies who failed to act with the urgency that rural lives deserved.'
The Guardian
6 days ago
- The Guardian
The long road to tragedy at the Texas girls camp where floods claimed 27 lives
Investigators of the catastrophic Hill Country flooding in Texas may never be able to pinpoint a precise moment that sealed the fate of 27 young girls, teenage counselors and staff who perished after a wall of water surged through Camp Mystic on the banks of the Guadalupe River. But perhaps no bigger clue can be found than the account of an otherwise unremarkable and sparsely attended meeting of Kerr county commissioners in March 2018. Members waited with anticipation for news of an application they submitted the previous year for a grant from the state of Texas to help pay for a comprehensive new flood warning system along the Guadalupe. The county's unreliable old network of gauges and sensors, installed following flooding in 1987 that killed 10 children trying to flee a waterside church camp, had been inactive since 1999. Commissioners were chasing a $1m slice of federal funding made newly available to the state after a succession of flood disasters, including Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. Now-retired commissioner Tom Moser brought bad news, noting 'about eight different counties' were selected, but 'they didn't select us,' according to minutes of the meeting still viewable online. Tom Pollard, the county judge at the time, was incredulous. 'They prioritized us lower?' he asked, the county's many low-lying and therefore vulnerable youth summer camps immediately adjacent to the Guadalupe uppermost in his mind. 'They did,' Moser replied solemnly. Without that funding from the state, the project foundered. No widespread gauge system was ever set up that would have given early warning of a life-threatening torrent of water further up the river; no sirens ever installed that would have warned Camp Mystic residents that their lives were in peril and they needed to get out immediately. The investigation will look at other missteps and lost opportunities along the way that might have brought a different outcome at the 99-year-old Christian-themed, all-girls camp that served as a joyous rite of passage for generations of young Texans. Prominent among them will be this week's revelation that the camp owner and director Dick Eastland, who lost his own life trying to ferry a group of his youngest campers to safety as the river rose towards a peak height of 37.5ft, waited more than an hour to issue an evacuation order after receiving a severe flood warning on his phone at 1.14am on 4 July. Yet it is to the eternal regret of Moser, a former senior Nasa engineer who had studied flood monitoring and alert systems installed in other nearby counties, that money was never found or spent, either then or later, to replace or upgrade a broken mechanism born from a near-identical tragedy for the sole purpose of saving lives in the future. 'Not having the funds to accomplish it was not very satisfying to me but we tried,' Moser told NPR. 'That's all we could do. We didn't have the resources in the county operating budget to do that.' Moser, who did not return a message from the Guardian seeking further comment, had advocated for sirens, a proposal dropped from the state grant application when it became clear some residents and commissioners opposed them. 'If sirens were there, clearly people would have known about it. Would it have saved everybody? I don't think so. This was an event that's probably one chance in a million,' he told the radio network. At Camp Mystic, like elsewhere in the county, residents were reliant on an outdated and patchwork early warning system of alerts. Some were from the National Weather Service (NWS), which Eastland's family concedes he did receive. Other messages came from local authorities, some sent only after an inexplicable delay, which others along the Guadalupe's banks say they did not see in any case. Inside the camp, with water rising fast, especially around dormitories closest to the river where the youngest campers, mostly aged eight and nine, were sleeping, there was chaos. Many of the teenage counselors left in charge of the dormitories were left to make instant life-or-death decisions on their own, having lost contact with adult supervisors. According to two counselors interviewed in the days following the disaster, campers were not allowed to bring mobile phones, and the counselors were made to surrender theirs, leaving them cut off from any emergency alerts. Eastland, who had run the camp with his family since the 1980s and was a past director of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority that pressed for the original warning and alert system, was familiar with the danger of flash flooding from heavy rain. 'I'm sure there will be other drownings,' Eastland told the Austin American-Statesman in 1990, reported by CNN. 'People don't heed the warnings.' In a Washington Post report that contained harrowing first-hand testimony from girls who were there, parents of some who were rescued from Camp Mystic said it was Eastland and his staff who ignored warnings on the morning of the disaster. Also under scrutiny will be why Eastland made, and was granted, repeated applications to remove dozens of Camp Mystic buildings from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's 100-year flood map, which allowed the camp to operate and expand in a known risk area. A review by the Associated Press found that 15 of at least 30 exempted buildings were at the Camp Mystic Guadalupe site where most, if not all of the campers and counselors lost their lives. Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street, a climate risk assessment and modelling company, said the dormitories were in a known flood zone, which records show had been swamped numerous times in the camp's near century of existence. 'People that ran the camp had the ability to understand that the risk was close by, the risk was in the area, and maybe adapt the buildings. And there was no action there,' he said. 'In fact there were letters of map amendments that were submitted instead.' But Porter said it was hard to place blame on any single person or entity: 'A lot of that is just our overall risk psyche and understanding of what risk looks like, our expectation that these really rare events aren't going to affect us and they're not going to be as bad as we think they're going to be. 'The way we treat climate risk and flood risk in the country is really that, you know, if it happens, it'll be something we'll be able to rebuild, recover, and then it won't happen again for 100 years.' The Guardian was unable to reach anybody at Camp Mystic for comment. Donna Gable Hatch, a writer and former staff editor at the Kerrville Daily Times, said she believed lives would have been saved at Camp Mystic with an early warning system, but city and county officials were not responsible for its absence. 'If the funds had been made available in a timely and adequate manner, this catastrophe might have unfolded differently. But too often, those at the helm of small towns must wait for permission, wait for funding, wait for bureaucracy to catch up to reality,' she wrote in a guest editorial for her former employer. 'To accuse local leaders of negligence is to completely misunderstand who they are and what this place means. In Kerr county, heartbreak isn't abstract. It has a name. A face. It's a neighbor, a classmate, a church member or a childhood friend. 'The truth will come out. In time, we'll trace the chain of failure back to where it truly began – not in Kerrville, but in the halls of distant agencies who failed to act with the urgency that rural lives deserved.'
CNN
11-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Live updates: Texas flooding death toll, Trump visit and latest on Camp Mystic
Update: Date: Title: Kerr County officials warned of flood risk and need for alarm system months before tragedy struck Content: Kerr County officials warned 'it is likely' that the county 'will experience a flood event in the next year' in a hazard mitigation report submitted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) last October. The 220-page report, which addressed a range of natural threats, emphasized that such a flood event could be especially dangerous for residents living in 'substandard structures' and may result in 'increased damage, injuries, or loss of life.' One of the solutions outlined was to have a local flood warning system that could alert residents to rising waters. The report estimates a cost of less than $1 million for a system that would include precipitation sensors, automatic crossing barriers and a web-based alert platform. Implementing the plan would take three to five years, according to the report, which also identifies FEMA programs for possible funding. The plan also listed a goal in the next two to five years of expanding warning systems with possible sirens. Other recommendations include possible new restrictions on development in areas at high risk of flooding and educating the public about floods and other hazards. Last week's catastrophic flooding has put fresh scrutiny on the systems in place to keep Kerr County residents safe in the event of flooding. In recent years, multiple efforts in Kerr County to build a more substantial flood warning system have failed or been abandoned due to budget concerns or noise complaints. Update: Date: Title: Start here: The latest in Central Texas as Trump is expected to visit flood-damaged areas Content: As the urgent search of at least 160 missing people continues in the aftermath of the devastating flooding in Central Texas, concerns are growing over the systems meant to notify residents in emergency situations. It comes as President Donald Trump will visit the region today. Here's what we learned yesterday: CNN's Ollie Leltsov, Danya Gainor, Casey Tolan, Curt Devine, Andrew Freedman, Melanie Hicken, Pamela Brown, Shoshana Dubnow, Karina Tsui, Tristen Rouse, Christine Server, Kathleen Magramo, Leigh Waldman and Joel Williams contributed reporting. Update: Date: Title: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott requests federal disaster assistance for more counties Content: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to request additional counties be added to President Donald Trump's major disaster declaration following the flooding in central Texas. 'Five counties – Burnet, San Saba, Tom Green, Travis, and Williamson – are requested to be eligible for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Individual Assistance programs, and four counties – Kendall, Kimble, Menard, and San Saba – are requested to be eligible for FEMA's Public Assistance Program,' the governor's office said in a statement yesterday. On Sunday, Trump approved the governor's request for a major disaster declaration for Kerr County. The approval allows qualifying Texans who sustained damage to apply for grant funding to assist with repair and recovery expenses.
CNN
11-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Live updates: Texas flooding death toll, Trump visit and latest on Camp Mystic
Update: Date: 9 min ago Title: Kerr County officials warned of flood risk and need for alarm system months before tragedy struck Content: Kerr County officials warned 'it is likely' that the county 'will experience a flood event in the next year' in a hazard mitigation report submitted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) last October. The 220-page report, which addressed a range of natural threats, emphasized that such a flood event could be especially dangerous for residents living in 'substandard structures' and may result in 'increased damage, injuries, or loss of life.' One of the solutions outlined was to have a local flood warning system that could alert residents to rising waters. The report estimates a cost of less than $1 million for a system that would include precipitation sensors, automatic crossing barriers and a web-based alert platform. Implementing the plan would take three to five years, according to the report, which also identifies FEMA programs for possible funding. The plan also listed a goal in the next two to five years of expanding warning systems with possible sirens. Other recommendations include possible new restrictions on development in areas at high risk of flooding and educating the public about floods and other hazards. Last week's catastrophic flooding has put fresh scrutiny on the systems in place to keep Kerr County residents safe in the event of flooding. In recent years, multiple efforts in Kerr County to build a more substantial flood warning system have failed or been abandoned due to budget concerns or noise complaints. Update: Date: 10 min ago Title: Start here: The latest in Central Texas as Trump is expected to visit flood-damaged areas Content: As the urgent search of at least 160 missing people continues in the aftermath of the devastating flooding in Central Texas, concerns are growing over the systems meant to notify residents in emergency situations. It comes as President Donald Trump will visit the region today. Here's what we learned yesterday: CNN's Ollie Leltsov, Danya Gainor, Casey Tolan, Curt Devine, Andrew Freedman, Melanie Hicken, Pamela Brown, Shoshana Dubnow, Karina Tsui, Tristen Rouse, Christine Server, Kathleen Magramo, Leigh Waldman and Joel Williams contributed reporting. Update: Date: 10 min ago Title: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott requests federal disaster assistance for more counties Content: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to request additional counties be added to President Donald Trump's major disaster declaration following the flooding in central Texas. 'Five counties – Burnet, San Saba, Tom Green, Travis, and Williamson – are requested to be eligible for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Individual Assistance programs, and four counties – Kendall, Kimble, Menard, and San Saba – are requested to be eligible for FEMA's Public Assistance Program,' the governor's office said in a statement yesterday. On Sunday, Trump approved the governor's request for a major disaster declaration for Kerr County. The approval allows qualifying Texans who sustained damage to apply for grant funding to assist with repair and recovery expenses.
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Camp Mystic's owner warned of floods for decades. Then the river killed him
Dick Eastland warned for decades about the hidden dangers of the beautiful but volatile Guadalupe River, a peril he saw firsthand while running his family's youth camp alongside its banks. Eastland saw floods damage Camp Mystic again and again – and his pregnant wife was even airlifted to a hospital while the camp in central Texas was cut off by floodwaters. He successfully pushed for a new flood warning system after 10 children at a nearby camp were swept to their deaths in 1987, and in recent years served on the board of the local river authority as it supported renewed efforts to improve warnings on the Guadalupe. 'The river is beautiful,' Eastland told the Austin American-Statesman in 1990. 'But you have to respect it.' But after 27 people were killed at Camp Mystic in last week's cataclysmic flooding – along with Eastland himself, who died while trying to rescue his young campers – the scale of the tragedy highlights potential missed opportunities by Camp Mystic's owners and government officials to better mitigate those risks. About a decade after it was installed, the warning system Eastland had championed in the late '80s became antiquated and broken. The river authority ultimately shut it down in 1999, saying it was 'unreliable with some of the system's stations not reporting information,' according to an article in the Kerrville Daily Times. Yet periodic attempts to adopt a more modern flood-monitoring system, including one with warning sirens that might have alerted campers last week, repeatedly failed to gain traction – stalled by low budgets, some local opposition and a lack of state support. At Camp Mystic, meanwhile, several of the cabins that were hit hardest in the flooding were in an area identified by the federal government as the highest-risk location for inundations from the Guadalupe. Even as the camp built new cabins in a less-risky flood zone elsewhere on its property, nothing was done to relocate the buildings in the most danger. 'Camp officials might have not been aware of flood risk when they first built the cabins,' before the county even had flood maps, said Anna Serra-Llobet, a University of California-Berkeley researcher who studies flood risk. But after the recent construction, she said, officials should have realized they were in an area of 'severe hazard.' Eastland has been praised as a hero for his efforts to save campers on Friday and remembered as a beloved figure by generations who spent their summers in the idyllic riverside refuge. His legacy is less clear as a public steward of the sometimes deadly river that ultimately took his life. 'If he wasn't going to die of natural causes, this was the only other way—saving the girls that he so loved and cared for,' his grandson George Eastland wrote in an Instagram tribute. 'Although he no longer walks this earth, his impact will never fade in the lives he touched.' Camp Mystic did not respond to a request for comment. Camp Mystic has a long history with flooding, going back to just a few years after it was established 99 years ago. In 1932, flood waters 'swept away' several cabins at the camp and led campers to evacuate across the river by canoe, according to an article in the Abilene Daily Reporter. A counselor told the Austin American-Statesman at the time that campers might 'have drowned if we had gone out the front door and walked face-into a sheet of water!' In 1978, an article in the Kerrville Mountain Sun reported that Camp Mystic was 'the most severely damaged' of local summer camps affected by a flood that year. A separate article reported that five Camp Mystic counselors 'had their automobiles swept into the Guadalupe River' by flood waters that year. And in 1985, Eastland's wife Tweety, then pregnant with their fourth child, had to be airlifted from Camp Mystic to a hospital due to floodwaters, local news reported. One of the region's most devastating floods – until last week's Fourth of July disaster – came in 1987, when 10 children attending a different camp in the area were killed by floodwaters during a rushed evacuation. Eastland, who at the time was serving on the board of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which manages the river, pushed for a new flood warning system. In newspaper articles, he described a computer-powered system that would lead to automatic alerts if water levels on the Guadalupe rose beyond a set limit. The proposal was delayed, but officials eventually created a system of 21 gauges up and down the Guadalupe and its tributaries. Even as Eastland voiced pride in the new system, he was quick to remind the public of the Guadalupe's deadly power. 'I'm sure there will be other drownings,' Eastland said in a 1990 interview with the Austin American-Statesman. 'People don't heed the warnings.' In the following years, the early flood warning system that Eastland advocated for – and was once considered state-of-the-art – started to suffer problems. In April 1998, the company that maintained the system 'closed its doors without notice,' and the gauge system soon stopped functioning because of lack of maintenance, the Kerrville Daily Times reported. In February 1999, the river authority shut the system down because it had become 'unreliable with some of the system's stations not reporting information,' and board members worried about 'liability concerns that the system would send 'false signals,'' according to an article in the Times. A handful of river gauges remain in service on the Guadalupe today, but the county lacks a full-scale warning system to broadcast public alerts when floodwaters rise. Kerr County officials, along with the river authority that Eastland periodically served on, worked to change that over the last decade, searching for funding for a flood warning system that included more river gauges and a network of sirens. But they found themselves struggling to overcome funding deficits and opposition from some skeptical residents. Grant applications for the system were denied by the state in 2016 and 2017, and the authority later decided not to pursue a separate grant after realizing that it would only cover five percent of the system's cost. Around the same time, Camp Mystic was embarking on an expansion project. As the number of girls attending the camp grew over the years – leading to waitlists to get in each summer – the camp built more than a dozen new cabins farther south of the Guadalupe River alongside the smaller Cypress Creek. Some of those cabins were located in an area that the federal government has determined has a 1% chance of flooding each year, which would have required officials to get special approval from the county government to build there. But the risk was even higher at some of Camp Mystic's cabins closest to the Guadalupe, several of which are located inside the river's 'regulatory floodways' – the areas that flood first and are most dangerous – according to federal flood maps. Those cabins have been around for decades, historical aerial photos show, apparently before the Federal Emergency Management Agency's first floodzone maps were developed. Dealing with preexisting structures like these inside risky floodzones is especially challenging, said Serra-Llobet, the UC Berkeley flood expert. 'When they did the construction of the recent buildings, they should have seen the FEMA maps,' Serra-Llobet said. That, she said, was a 'window of opportunity' where camp officials could have realized their decades-old dorms were in a high-hazard zone and acted to address it. Camp Mystic could have relocated the buildings to higher ground, or just turned them into structures for recreational activities and made sure that campers were sleeping in safer areas, she said. Still, Serra-Llobet argued that Kerr County should move past the 'blame game' that comes after any disaster and focus on the lessons that could be learned for protecting people from floods going forward. It's not clear whether Eastland personally grappled with the high-risk flood zone running through his own campground. But in recent years, he was part of continued efforts for an improved flood warning system for the region. Eastland returned to the river authority's board in 2022 after being appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. After the previous setbacks, the board this year moved forward with a proposal to create a new 'centralized dashboard' of rainfall, river depth and other data sources 'to support local flood monitoring and emergency response,' according to the county government. In April, the river authority voted to hire a firm to develop the data system and had planned to begin work this month. That was postponed after last week's disastrous flooding. After Eastland was found dead, tributes have rolled in from his colleagues, community members and former campers whose lives he touched over the decades at Camp Mystic. 'Although I am devastated, I can't say I'm surprised that you sacrificed your life with the hopes of someone else's being saved,' Eastland's grandson wrote in his Instagram post. April Ancira spent summers from the age of 8 to 14 at Camp Mystic. In an interview, she remembered Eastland helping her catch a big fish – and being just as thrilled as she was when she successfully reeled it in. 'My memories of him wrapping his arms around so many campers and being so excited to see them excel is incredible,' she said. Austin Dickson, who served on the river authority board along with Eastland and sat next to him at board meetings, remembered him as a 'pillar in our county and our community' who had championed a recent effort to create a new park along the river. 'So many people say, 'Mystic is my heaven,' or 'Mystic is a dreamland,' and I think that's true,' he said. 'That's Dick and Tweety's life's work to make that true.' CNN's Allison Gordon and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed reporting.
