Ever since dawn on the Fourth of July, a broken hearts club bigger than Texas has been forced to imagine the speed of water and the screams of children.
While the flood took souls of all ages, including babies from their homes, the plight of the little girls at Camp Mystic has become the emblem of this disaster. Their ordeal tugs at every family that ever dropped a kiddo off with bug spray, stamped envelopes and hope.
If camp isn’t the safest place to connect with nature, new people and themselves, then where?
Flying into Austin, I flashed back to my own core memories at the church camp on a Wisconsin lake and that YMCA retreat in the New Mexican mountains, and all the hazards unconsidered. I was a kid, sure, while somewhere a camp director worried about broken arms and lightning. But that was a different time and Earth.
And driving through a shattered Texas Hill Country, I thought of my little boy and our plans to make him a Canadian camper by age 6.
“He’ll be fine,” I tell myself, but arriving on the bank of the calmed Guadalupe and looking across at a shattered Camp Mystic brings new appreciation for our collective lack of deadly imagination.
When the water is lazing by, one cannot fathom the monster heights it can reach, and the lives that it destroyed just days before. I study the ridgeline above the bunkhouses of the youngest campers — a spot known as God Hill — imagine their panic in stormy dark and wonder how many understood that high ground was salvation.
It brings me back to Japan in 2011 when a massive undersea earthquake sent a tsunami up the Kitakami River toward the students and staff of Okawa Elementary School. As staff debated whether to evacuate by bus or hike uphill, 74 kids and 10 teachers were swept to their deaths. Standing in that schoolyard, I got a tiny taste of the frustrated grief that led to disaster management reform across Japan and now I wonder if tsunami-sized flash floods will shock similar change deep in the heart of Texas.
Kerr County’s long debate over the cost and wisdom of flash flood warning sirens must now consider water levels and body counts no one thought possible. Meanwhile, countless souls in hundreds of watersheds and coastlines around the nation may have no idea they are at similar risk.
In pictures: Deadly flooding in Texas
While flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are supposed to be updated every five years, some date back to the 1970s and none of them account for the modern rain bomb, fueled by record-shattering temperatures in the Gulf. Eight Camp Mystic structures fall within the most dangerous flood zone on FEMA maps, but that number jumps to 17 on maps from the First Street foundation — a nonprofit which takes current climate events into account and shares their models with the public.
If the Trump administration does dismantle FEMA and offload disaster prep onto individual states, places like Kerr County will have to crawl out of the pain and mud AND figure out a way to map and monitor their changing hydrology. Maybe a billionaire will move to Hill Country, hire a team of recently fired Earth scientists and donate lifesaving adaptation tools for the new neighborhood, but that’s hardly a resiliency plan.
What will state leadership do? How long can they deny the effects of our overheating Earth?
We drive downriver to Ingram where a firehouse serves a base for search and rescuers and as I wander into a cute coffee shop between live shots, my eye catches a stack of books for sale. “Outdoor Skills for Kids” is the kind of title that gets my attention on good days, so I buy it for my boy and find solid advice on how to deal with everything from mountain lions to cactus spines, frostbite to heat exhaustion, poison ivy to avalanche.
But nothing on surviving the kind of flash flood that hit Camp Mystic.
The girls probably knew that if you fall out of a raft, you must try to float with your feet downstream and don’t stand up until you can touch the bank. But a Navy SEAL in body armor could not have survived a float down the Guadalupe that night, so swimming tips are moot.
Elevation is the only salvation, even if it takes a generational shift in mindset and new survival guides and building codes to get there.
May their memories be a blessing.
And a lifesaving warning.