An RV in Guadalupe Keys Resort, an RV park in Center Point, Tex., was on its side after an early-morning flood devastated the area on Friday.Ashley Landis/The Associated Press
The logo of the Guadalupe Keys RV Resort features a cartoon turtle playing a guitar, with a piña colada and a palm tree nearby – a real Margaritaville vibe.
“We’re all about good times here,” said David Chambers, who bought the land in 2006, enchanted by its 250 feet of Guadalupe River beachfront in Center Point, Tex.
On Thursday of last week, all his pads were occupied, the rental trailers filled with people anticipating a steamy Fourth of July weekend along the river. There were kids on the beach, he said, and barbecuers taking shade under a canopy of cypress trees, waving at the occasional reveller floating by on an inner tube.
In a matter of minutes on Friday morning, Mr. Chambers lost his little patch of paradise as flash floods barrelled through Hill Country with little warning.
“This is a war zone now, buddy,” said Mr. Chambers, a Vietnam War veteran. “It’s like Agent Orange out here. That’s all I can compare it to.”
By late Monday, officials here said at least 104 people were dead and countless missing. Joe Herring, the mayor of Kerrville, the city of 24,000 that has become a hub for emergency workers from all over the country, warned of a “rough week” ahead as search efforts head into a recovery phase.
The catastrophic flash floods overtook river beds in the span of a few minutes.
The Associated Press
Mr. Chambers got word of an incoming flood at 6 a.m. on Friday. He rushed to the resort from his home about 25 minutes away. By the time he arrived, water was lapping at the RVs. His business partner, Drew Yancey, who lived on-site, was frantically trying to get people to safety.
“At one point I ran to my trailer to get my wallet, and by the time I got out, the water was past my knees,” Mr. Yancey said.
Officials said the river rose 26 feet in 45 minutes. It looked faster, both men said. By 7 a.m., all the campers were safe, but the river had wiped their property of everything but a few jagged stumps. Two hundred feet from the resort, the warped remnants of seven RVs could be seen wrapped around a stand of cypresses.
“That’s mine down there,” Mr. Yancey said, pointing to a tangle of metal floating at the river’s edge. “All I got left are the clothes on my back.”
Along a 120-kilometre stretch of the Guadalupe, such scenes had become tragically routine by Monday afternoon. A chorus of chainsaws whined and helicopters thumped up and down the river. Everywhere along the shoreline, search and rescue volunteers in muddy boots probed for bodies. Just down the beach from Guadalupe Keys, several men tried to dig out a compact car enveloped in the riverbank like a fossil.
Why flash floods are so common – and deadly – in Texas’s Hill Country
Thirty kilometres northwest in Ingram, a popular recreation site, a pair of searchers from Texas EquuSearch picked their way along a riverfront strewn with downed trees. They were guided by smell, they said, finding the remains of dogs, deer and fish in the 30-degree heat.
Normally at this time of year, tourists and locals would be walking out onto the Ingram Dam and sliding down into the Guadalupe’s calm pools, Jeremy Edelstein said. “We won’t see that again for a long time,” he lamented as he cleaned out a small plaza of shops and apartments owned by his father. In one apartment, the high-water mark reached nearly two metres up the walls of the 40-year-old building.
“We’ve never seen any river water in here,” he said, “much less water going seven feet up the walls.”
He lost an RV and three trailers he used in his general contracting business. “I can’t complain,” he said. “We have friends who lost kids, friends who woke up to screams of people being washed away.”
People survey the damage at Guadalupe Keys Resort on Monday.Ashley Landis/The Associated Press
In trees all around Ingram, flotsam clung to branches 50 feet up: a blue kayak folded like a pretzel, a buckled aluminum rowboat, a green outhouse door, a deflated children’s floatie. Police closed public access to the highway leading farther upriver, where the death toll at Camp Mystic, a Christian girls’ summer camp, reached 27.
Over at the Ingram Little League baseball field, steel stanchions that held up the outfield wall are all bent in the direction of the river’s flow. In centre field, a reeking perch lies next to a battered Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner – a surreal still life of the flood’s reach.
Next door, the Hill Country Arts Foundation was getting ready for a production of Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville at its outdoor theatre just before the flood. “We were set to open this Friday,” said Jennyth Peterson, the theatre’s special events director. “But the entire set and all the props, all the costumes, they’re all down the river now.”
Both the outdoor and indoor theatres sustained heavy damage, along with several other foundation buildings on the riverfront property. A volunteer construction crew showed up Monday morning to repair what they could, but the future of the water-logged buildings remains unknown until an insurance adjuster can arrive.
“We’re overwhelmed right now but blessed,” Ms. Peterson said. “We had no fatalities on site. The rest is just stuff. And stuff is fixable.”