Survival, loss and rescue during the Texas floods

It was after one in the morning and Lorena Guillen couldn’t sleep. Rain pelted the roof. A flood alert buzzed on her phone. Nothing unusual here along the Guadalupe River. It rarely amounted to much.

But this time she had a bad feeling.

Hours earlier, her riverfront honky-tonk, Howdy’s, had been packed for grilled catfish night. A fiddler played. Families danced.

Now, those same families slept by the water’s edge at her campground, Blue Oak RV Park, and a bigger park a hundred metres upriver.

She would later see some of their faces on missing posters.

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Around 2 a.m., she rolled out of bed and drove 100 metres through the rain to the riverbank. The Guadalupe looked calm. The nearest National Weather Service depth gauge measured less than a foot of water, about eight feet short of flood range.

She wasn’t new to flood risks. Four years of owning the park had made her a student of them. Out here in Flash Flood Alley, locals recited past disasters like scripture: ’32, ’78, ’87.

Just to be sure, she called the sheriff’s office. They had nothing to report.

She went back to bed.

By the time she woke up, about two hours later, she would no longer recognize her riverfront haven. Before sunrise, the lives of everyone staying in her park that night – along with thousands of people living and camping along the river – would be forever changed.

The numbers fluctuate by the hour, but the July 4 Hill Country flash flood is already the deadliest in Texas in more than a century – a grim distinction for a state that far outpaces all others in flood-related deaths.

Despite unfolding in a place long known by that ominous moniker – Flash Flood Alley – the storm’s severity caught nearly everyone off guard. A relatively routine weather system stalled over a narrow stretch of Hill Country that acts like a sieve feeding into the river’s headwaters – a slight shift in direction, and the entire system might have passed without notice.

The path of the deluge that dark morning led to stories of human tragedy – a serene river basin full of young campers and Fourth of July revellers swept away in their sleep – but there’s a political tale playing out here, too.

Flash floods are America’s top storm-related killer, and climate change is making them more powerful. In an area with flood deaths going back generations, improvements to the warning system had been put off, even nixed.

As the death toll climbs, many are asking whether more could have been done to prevent such loss of life and limit the damage – a difficult conversation in a region where climate change, though increasingly impossible to ignore, is often denied and remains politically untouchable.

What Ms. Guillen couldn’t know from her eyeball test of the water was something taking place about 50 kilometres upriver.

Meteorologists had been watching it build for days: a dying lightning storm in West Texas had left behind a spinning gyre – a mesoscale convective vortex, or MCV. It met the moisture-laden remnants of Tropical Storm Barry and birthed something volatile: more lightning, more downpour, all of it parked directly over the headwaters of the Guadalupe’s south fork.

“That’s what made this particularly devastating,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas State Climatologist. “If it had been a few miles in either direction, nobody would be talking about this.”

Steep limestone hills and shallow soil turned every ridge into a gutter, channelling rain into the river like a storm drain. The Guadalupe began to rise. A pulse of water surged down the south fork about 14 kilometres, where it hit the River Inn Resort & Conference Center.

JD Fry was staying there with 32 family members, a Fourth of July tradition. He didn’t receive any flood alerts on his phone before waking up around 2:45 a.m., when his father banged on his door. “He said the water level was rising, but not a full-on flood yet,” said Mr. Fry in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

The calm didn’t last. Within five minutes, staff told them to evacuate. They tried to drive to the highway but rushing water blocked their path. The current swirled around their tires. They abandoned the cars and returned to the hotel on foot.

“When I got out of the car, the water was ankle level and by the time I got to the Inn it was up to my waist,” said Mr. Fry.

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Mr. Fry and others clambered onto the roof of a one-storey staff quarters. Using towels as makeshift ropes, they pulled others out of the rising waters. The entire family survived.

Just three kilometres downriver, at Camp Mystic, hundreds of girls aged seven to 17 were trying to sleep through lightning and thunder. At least 27 campers and counsellors are now confirmed dead. Satellite images show only bare ground where the bustling camp once stood.

From there the water swelled through the small town of Hunt, where the north and south forks of the Guadalupe meet. From 3:45 a.m. until 6:10 a.m., a river gauge in town shot up from nine feet to 37.5 feet, shattering a record 1932 inundation that wiped the town flat.

At 4:03 a.m., the National Weather Service issued a sharper warning: seek higher ground now.

For many, it came too late.

Nicholas Panagiotou was struggling to sleep in his RV parked at Ms. Guillen’s campground when the alert lit up his phone. He grabbed a flashlight and popped his head out the door to check the water levels.

“That’s when I saw the people in the water,” he said.

The campground had 28 spaces on the riverfront and another five on an island reachable by a concrete bridge. A family of five, the Burgesses, had rented an island spot earlier in the week.

Now the bridge was under water. Julia Burgess was screaming. Her husband, John, held their two boys – five-year-old Jack and one-year-old James – clutched against his chest.

Mr. Panagiotou tried to guide them, shouting over the roar, pointing to where the submerged bridge had been. Ms. Guillen’s husband, Bob Canales, and another full-time camper, Justin Brown, did the same.

Mr. Brown – a former kayak instructor who normally sought out whitewater – looked upriver and froze. He saw a staircase of waves, each one taller than the last, charging downstream.

The torrent hit fast.

Mr. Burgess staggered. Someone yelled for him to toss the boys.

“I had my hand out with the flashlight, and we had eye contact,” said Mr. Panagiotou. “And then he went under, and I looked down and I saw the baby’s face under the water.”

The couple’s bodies have been recovered. The sons remain missing. Their daughter was attending a summer camp and survived.

As he lost sight of the family, Mr. Panagiotou felt his own stance wobble as the water rose around his ankles. “I got taken under,” he says.

He was being swept downriver, feet first. After about 25 feet – he can’t precisely recall the distance – the soles of his feet touched a metal sign planted firmly in the ground, stopping him from washing away. With his feet braced against the sign, water blasted over the top of his head, tore off his clothes and separated his shoulder.

Was he there for 30 seconds or three minutes? He doesn’t know. He didn’t think of living or dying. Just hanging on.

On the shore, a man in baggy pants appeared with his arm extended. They locked eyes, but didn’t recognize each other.

“Get away,” Mr. Panagiotou recalls yelling. “If I reach for you, we’re both going under.”

The man in the baggy pants didn’t listen. Mr. Panagiotou decided if he was going to live, he had to roll towards shore. As he did so, the man on the shore waded in to haul him out of the rapids.

Mr. Panagiotou scrambled up the bank, grabbed a bag from his RV and called once for his three cats. They didn’t appear. There was no time to go inside.

He made his way up some stairs and looked back at the scene before him.

“I see that RVs are passing by, trucks, buildings – now it’s becoming clear,” he said.

The neighbouring campground a few hundred metres upriver had been swallowed, its more than 50 RVs and cabins hurled downriver and dashed against Cypress trees. Ms. Guillen filmed the wreckage – trees, vehicles, screams, all riding the black river past her bar.

Eight kilometres downriver, the river gauge in Kerrville shot up around 5 a.m., rising from 1.5 feet to 34.29 feet over the next three hours. The flood tore through the 25,000-person county seat, ripping homes from their foundations, bending two-tonne pickups like toys.

At 6 a.m., David Chambers got a call from his business partner, who was staying at the riverside RV park they owned in Center Point, about 16 kilometres downriver from Kerrville. The water was rising, fast. Mr. Chambers sped to the property in time to see a violent boil of water rolling toward them, carrying trees, roofing and busted lumber. He banged on RV doors until all 15 of his customers had escaped safely. Within 20 more minutes, everything was gone.

“A few minutes either way and we could’ve lost some people,” he said. “We needed more warning.”

The same has been said after every deadly flood in these parts. Those discussions ramped up in 2016, when Tom Moser, then a Kerr County Commissioner and former NASA engineer, proposed purchasing a series of autonomous river gauges that would ping emergency officials’ when they detected dangerous conditions. The system would also have sirens audible for three miles. The units cost $40,000 each, with $2,000 in annual maintenance.

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The county’s Emergency Management Director, W.B. “Dub” Thomas, was on board, saying an audible system would give people in RV parks the “needed information when they need to know to get out,” according to a March, 2016, meeting transcript.

Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer agreed. He’d pulled kids from the 1987 flood that killed 10 campers. Phone alerts didn’t reach remote areas, and many people opted out, he said. A siren could cut through all that.

But another commissioner, Buster Baldwin, balked.

“A little extravagant in Kerr County,” he said.

Funding never came. The idea died.

Their debate centred on the last mile conundrum: precise forecasts and warnings don’t matter if they don’t reach the people who need them.

“It’s one of the biggest problems in disaster communications,” said Erik Nielsen, assistant professor at Texas A&M University specializing in extreme weather and warning systems. Even if you can get warnings to people efficiently, not everyone will interpret it the same way. Some people will flee immediately, others will waste precious time trying to tow their RVs out of harm’s way.

Dr. Nielsen said the late hour, spotty phone coverage, the optional nature of phone alerts and the number of visitors unfamiliar with flash-flood dynamics all played a role in the high death toll.

Then there was alert fatigue. The National Weather Service has issued 185 flash flood alerts for Kerr County over the past decade – an average of one every three weeks, according to a Globe analysis of federal data. Warnings become noise. People turn them off.

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Sirens had, however, long played a useful role another 16 kilometres downriver, in the town of Comfort. The flood waters arrived just after 9 a.m. The sun was up. Word had spread. People had ample time to evacuate.

Danny Morales, assistant chief of the town’s volunteer fire department, learned decades ago not to take chances with the river. After the 1978 flood, he had to identify his grandfather’s body. The 1987 flood, meanwhile, killed 10 teens at a nearby camp.

For as long as Mr. Morales can remember, the town has had a giant yellow siren next to the firehall that blares in case of high water. Last year, they installed a new siren and moved the old one to one of the town’s low spots. The cost was negligible – $20,000 or so, he says – and the department didn’t worry about interference from other levels of government. “We take care of our own here,” he said. “We’re unincorporated.”

Both sirens blared on Friday morning. He can’t say whether they saved lives. Most people in town had heard of the devastation upriver before the high water reached Comfort.

“We had no loss of life here,” he said. “Basically from here on down, there was advance notice.”

Though the river’s tragic path stopped at Comfort, tough work remains. By week’s end, 161 people were still missing. Searchers walked the banks. Boats nosed through wreckage. Helicopters scanned the valleys. Buzzards, circling overhead, led them to the dead.

“I hate to say it, but the buzzards are showing us where to go right now,” said Mr. Morales. “If they’re circling, that’s where we know to investigate.”

Meanwhile, local officials face difficult questions during daily press conferences. Why didn’t people have more warning? Why were the lessons of previous floods not heeded?

On Wednesday, Governor Greg Abbott announced a special legislative session to discuss improvements to state-wide flood warning systems.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, meanwhile, said she wants to upgrade “neglected” and “ancient” systems at the National Weather Service.

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David Maurstad, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s former deputy associate administrator for insurance and mitigation, worries new investments will go into disaster response rather than disaster prevention, a pattern he saw regularly as a high-ranking bureaucrat.

“All we want to talk about is equipping to respond to the next disaster – that’s not good enough anymore,” he said. “The whole idea of mitigation and resilience needs to be a bigger part of the conversation.”

That conversation is difficult here. For every degree of increase in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 7 per cent more water vapour. That means heavier rainfalls.

But talk of climate change is a political non-starter. This county gave nearly 80 per cent of its vote to Donald Trump. When I asked one flood victim about the scientific phenomenon, he went on a tangent that touched on Pizzagate, the mass harvesting of children’s’ organs and other conspiracy theories. A woman who launched a petition for flood sirens on the river told me climate change was a liberal theory and equated it with cloud seeding.

“It’s a political issue in Texas,” said Ramalingam Saravanan, head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M. “It does make our life difficult. People are aware the climate is changing. But the moment you associate it with a cause and actions to mitigate, that becomes challenging.”

There was a chance meeting at Howdy’s on Tuesday. The Eagles played on the stereo –Take It Easy. Mr. Panagiotou was there, telling his story for a cluster of print reporters. His outlook was grim. He was an outsider in Kerrville and lived a hermitic existence. Despite the thousands of volunteers thronging the town, handing out food and clothes and bibles, he expected he would end up living on the streets.

He’d been there before. He said that his only two arrests came after stealing food from the local Wal-Mart.

What he missed most, aside from his cats – Sammy, Dodie, and Wicca – was an electric scooter that whisked him into town so he could fetch food and medication for his bipolar disorder. His daughter had started a GoFundMe.

As he was talking on the Howdy’s patio, he looked at a man with wraparound shades and a red beard at a nearby table and snapped upright.

“Is that–?” he muttered as he stood and walked over to the man.

They locked eyes. This time they recognized each other.

“Was that you down there?” said Mr. Panagiotou.

“Yeah,” said the man, Mr. Brown, the former kayak instructor.

Someone asked if Mr. Brown was the man with the baggy pants.

“Yes!” said Mr. Panagiotou.

“They weren’t baggy, I just didn’t have my belt on.”

They embraced and talked like old friends. How you doing? Where you staying? Mr. Brown had a line on donated hotel rooms.

Afterwards, Mr. Panagiotou’s spirits were buoyed. Maybe everything would be okay. Maybe Texas would come through for people like him. “Something lifted me out of the water,” he said. “Something will lift me off the streets.”

With a report from Mahima Singh