The Guadalupe River had returned to calm by Saturday evening and was beginning to give up its grim secrets, as more than 60 people – many of them children – were recovered from what just a day earlier was a terrifying flash flood that had turned land into water, taken homes and retreated to leave miles of terrible devastation along its banks.
At Camp Mystic, on a bend in the river flanked by cliffs that sped the torrent as if through a chicane, 700 young girls had five days earlier joined for a month-long summer camp of fun and spiritual growth, the evening brought a strange calm to Texas Hill country.
There were the flashlights of emergency vehicles; search helicopters clattered overhead; and wrecked cars marked as searched and clear with paint. A drenched mattress could be seen in the high branches of trees. Homes were obliterated, now stuffed with debris, as rescue workers continued to pull the camp girls and adults from the muddy waters.
Crystal Lampard was at her home up a road 150ft from the river early Friday when the first flood alerts started coming through on her phone.
“My husband and I woke up about 2.45 to a loud boom that was probably one of the transformers,” she said. It was raining, but there was nothing to suggest an apocalyptic scene developing below.
“This type of thing – you don’t get a warning,” she said. “We knew the rain was coming but not what we got.
“That water comes down those hills [and] this is where it goes. So if it’s pouring 11 inches up at the headwaters, it’s got to come here,” she said. “But there was no indication that’s what it would be.”
Yet surveying the cypress trees combed flat by flood waters along the Guadalupe’s banks, bent canoes and other detritus, Lampard, 51, said the houses that used to be on there – and the people in them – were gone.
“It doesn’t matter if you knew them or not – those poor babies,” Lampard said of the children killed by the flood. “My heart breaks. This river is beautiful but she does get ugly.
“She’s a beautiful river with a temper. It’s going to be a while before everything is cleaned up, and a while before everybody is found – if they’re found.”
Her friend, Alisha Sore, 26, said her family had planned to go to the river on Friday for an Independence Day cookout with hotdogs and fireworks. Sore, too, said she gets weather alerts and received a flood alert early Friday morning – but “there was nothing letting us know it was 20ft tall and we’re under water.”
On Thursday, a former classmate, Julian Ryan, gave Sore’s dad a hug at the bar. He had just become a father for a second time. But hours later, as waters rose furiously, Ryan punched his hand through a window to help his family escape their home, severed an artery, and bled to death.
Now, the flood waters were heading to areas downriver. “They’re getting our flood on top of where they’re sitting,” Sore said.
‘It came all of a sudden’
An initial flood watch for the area was issued at 1.18pm on Thursday predicting rain amounts of between 5 and 7in (12.7 to 17.8 cm). The weather messaging included automated alerts delivered to mobile phones to people in threatened areas. Those warnings grew increasingly ominous in Friday’s early hours, urging people to move to higher ground and evacuate flood-prone areas.
And as questions are asked about whether meterologists missed the signs of the storm’s force, and if alert systems were enough, many in the area grappled with flashbacks to another deadly flood nearly four decades earlier.
Some recalled one such emergency a few miles downriver in Comfort in July 1987, when a caravan of buses attempted to escape from a church camp through a low water crossing after an overnight storm. When the buses stalled, the teenagers attempted to form a human chain – and a wall of water washed them away. Ten were killed.
“You can’t do anything in 45 minutes,” Lampard said, referring to the window of time she estimated having to flee after it became evident the flood threat was much more serious than initially estimated. “If we’d try to leave out of here, we would have drove right into it.”
Amanda Chaney, who was on the road checking on neighbors, said several of her house-cleaning clients had lost their homes.
“I had my phone on, and I kept getting alerts,” she said. “But the rain didn’t seem much heavier than usual.”
Chaney said she noted how emergency responders had “spread out in different locations instead of planting them all in one”. She interpreted that as a sign of the uncertainty surrounding where the storm which triggered the flood would cause the most damage.
At an emergency rescue staging post outside Hunt, a few miles below Camp Mystic and one of the hardest hit hamlets, workers said they had recovered over 15 bodies. By Saturday afternoon, emergency crews from all over the state had converged on the valley.
“Honestly, there could have maybe been more warnings,” said Justin Barnatt, who had driven with his crew 250 miles in three hours from Odessa in west Texas. “But the river rose 29ft in maybe 45 minutes, and it was three or four o’clock in the morning.”
Gunner Alexander, 14, who was resting in the back of an off-road vehicle, said: “We’re not used to seeing our town like this. It’s sad – people you know whose house is gone.”
He said he knew two girls at Camp Mystic. One had for sure gotten on an evacuation bus, he said.
Alexander said the storm’s strength was unexpected. “The rain gauges on our apps showed 3 to 4in,” he remarked. “It came all of a sudden. It was really unexpected.”
Despite the scale of the deadly devastation, he said everyone he knew was trying to find a way to help out fellow community members.
‘Just devastating’
Up at Camp Mystic, as night began to fall, tender scenes began to reveal themselves. A man who gave his name as Bobby appeared from the river, drenched and out of breath. Officials had pleaded with the public to leave the search-and-rescue work left to be done to professionals. Yet Bobby drove up two hours from San Antonio to assist.
“I don’t work for anyone except for Bobby,” he said. “I do this completely voluntarily. It’s the right thing to do. There’s never enough rescue workers. The more rapid the response, the more chance there is of survivors.”
A mile downstream, 55-year-old Dan Murray said he had flown down from San Francisco to search for his best friend, his best friend’s wife and their son – whose holiday home had been swept clean off its foundations.
Neither the home nor its occupants have been found. But their daughter, who they had been coming to collect from Camp Mystic, had survived. “They haven’t found them yet so I have hope – but coming and seeing this utter devastation is rocking my belief that everything is going to be OK,” he said. “It’s just devastating.”