How the deadliest hours of the devastating Texas floods unfolded
KERRVILLE, Texas — In the hours before the flood, the Miller girls — Eliza, Genevieve and Birdie — were eating fajitas in the Camp Mystic mess hall and watching counselors act in a "Wicked" skit. There was a dance party in the cabins closest to the Guadalupe River, where the littlest campers bunked. Then it was time for lights out. Down the river, Lucas Brake and his wife, Irene, had invited Lucas' parents to a cabin for a weekend of fishing and a July 4 barbecue. And 19-year-old Riata Schoepf and her boyfriend were out kayaking on the placid water before heading back to the River Inn Resort. "The sun was shining like it was just perfect weather," Schoepf said. But there was a storm coming. The National Weather Service had sent out a warning in the afternoon. Sometime before midnight, the rain started to fall. Hard. The river swelled and surged over its banks, suddenly rushing with a reckless violence that snapped trees, carried away victims as they slept, swallowed up the cars they fled in and pulled them under as they ran for higher ground. First responders couldn't keep up, and in many cases didn't get there in time. At least 129 people died and 166 are still missing, mostly from Kerr County. A week after the flood, there are many questions that authorities have refused to answer. How could all these campers, revelers and residents be caught off guard? Why didn't many of them get flash flood alerts? What time did emergency response officials snap into action, and by then was it too late? Why were at least two high-ranking Kerr County officials still asleep when the waters were surging? The river has been taking lives and flooding homes for a century, and for nearly as long, authorities have discussed how best to monitor the flow and alert people to danger. Kerr County officials said they would produce an "after-action" report but that it wouldn't be immediate — they're focused on searching for the missing. Just in the past few years, authoritieschose not to install a new alert systemthat included sensors and sirens in part because of the cost. At least 36 children in the county died in the July 4 flood. "First responders from emergency services throughout Kerr County promptly responded to the recent emergency as the situation unfolded," Sheriff Larry Leitha said at a news conference this week. "This incident will be reviewed. You have my word. When or if necessary, if improvements need to be made, improvements will be made." In July 1932, after a daytime flood wrecked parts of Camp Mystic and killed seven people elsewhere, a local newspaper noted that it would have been a lot worse if it had happened overnight. The camp's longtime owner, Richard "Dick" Eastland, who also served as a director of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, spoke often of the perils of living on the flood plain. "The river is beautiful," he told a reporter in 1990. "But you have to respect it." What follows is a recounting of how the disaster unfolded in the crucial and deadliest hours of 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. for a dozen people. This report uses firsthand accounts, interviews with parents, official alerts, news reports and videos obtained by NBC News. Around midnight on July 4, a blast of thunder wakes 10-year-old Lucy Kennedy in her bunk at Camp Mystic. She struggles to fall back asleep with the storm overhead. She and her bunkmates aren't allowed to have phones, so they don't see the urgent National Weather Service warning that arrives as the rain keeps falling. Cell service at Camp Mystic is spotty, and it's unclear if anyone there receives the alert. Around 2 a.m., Lucy hears people outside her bunk hollering for everyone to get out: The river is rising quickly, and the cabin is in danger. Lucy's counselors tell them to grab blankets and guide them to a nearby recreation hall. The first floor is already taking on water, so the girls gather in a second-floor loft, huddled together in wet pajamas. Told to stay quiet, the girls wait and pray. They don't see any rescue workers; the camp is left to fend for itself. The storm wakes Riata Schoepf at the River Inn Resort around 2 a.m. She and her boyfriend have received no alert because the area is a cellphone dead zone. But someone notices the rising water, and her boyfriend's brother swings open the bedroom door and says, "We have to get out. There's a flood coming. Grab your stuff and let's go." Outside, the water is lapping a patio where they sat hours earlier. They jump in a car, but the road is flooded, and no one can drive out. They wait. The water rises to the cars' tires. Some people get out and start walking to higher ground, but with no first responders in sight, Schoepf and her boyfriend don't know what to do. The pounding rain wakes up Lorena Guillén, who owns Blue Oak RV Park in Kerrville. She drives to the river's edge at around 2:30 a.m. to check how high it is. She's on alert because she received the earlier flash flood warning and her park is full of people. It's raining, but the water seems fine. After her rounds, she says, she calls the Kerr County Sheriff's Office for an update. They tell her there is no information to share, so Guillén leaves her RV park residents sleeping. Around the same time, Genevieve Miller's counselor in Bug House at Camp Mystic wakes up first, sees water flooding into the cabin, goes to the office and is told by staff to evacuate. Eastland, the camp's owner, drives Genevieve, 12, and other girls to safer ground — the recreation hall where Lucy and her cabin mates are praying on the balcony. "It came so very fast," Lisa Miller, Genevieve's mother, later says. "I would assume they thought they had a lot more time than they did." In Giggle Box, one of the Camp Mystic cabins on the flats nearest to the riverbank, the counselors and staff have trouble opening the doors as the water rises. They break open the windows and start passing girls through. Nine-year-old Birdie Miller and her fellow campers hold hands in a long chain as they wade through rushing water to head to higher ground. Eastland runs over to give one of the girls her missing shoe. "OK, you girls, be safe," he says, heading to help Bubble Inn, the cabin closest to the water, which houses the 8-year-olds, the littlest at the camp. It is the last they see of him alive; all 13 campers and two counselors are swept away. Birdie and her bunkmates make a perilous trek to a hilltop, where she spends the night. Lisa Miller's oldest daughter, Eliza, 14, is in a cabin called Cloud Nine on "senior hill," where she is safe. They think they're just weathering a crazy storm; they read books by the constant flashes of lightning. They have no idea what's happening below. Christian Fell, 25, is jolted awake by a crack of thunder at around 3 a.m. The river he normally watches from the patio of the historic stone home his grandfather built in Hunt, about 6 miles north of Camp Mystic, is over his ankles and rising fast. Trees and debris are slamming against the house, trapping him inside as the waters rise. He tries calling 911 but is disconnected three times, he says. On one call, he says, the dispatcher tells him to call back when the water is at chin level. He dives underwater and swims out through a broken window. Fell tries to climb to the roof, but the gutter snaps off. He instead clings to a meter box mounted on the house, about 7 feet above the ground. He stands on its narrow top for hours, his hands dangerously close to electrical wires. He waits for several hours until the waters recede. By 3 a.m., the National Weather Service isn't warning of a potential flash flood — the meteorologists say it's already happening. But some key local officials are still asleep. Around 3:20 a.m., Schoepf and her boyfriend, stuck in their car outside the River Inn Resort, see people fleeing on foot and decide to join them. A wave of water knocks down her boyfriend, but they keep moving and come across a two-story house. Someone throws her a rope of sheets tied together and hoists her out of hip-high water. Her boyfriend makes it as well, and for nearly an hour they join a group of strangers helping dozens of others, including children and dogs, climb onto the second floor. Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice is jogging on a river trail at around 3:30 a.m. "Everything was fine," he later says. A half hour later, turning toward home, he notices no signs of rising water. Around 3:30 a.m., Guillén, the RV park owner, sees flashing rescue lights and a team trying to get a boat into the river. She joins her husband to check on their campsite. They find trailers tearing up from the ground and plunging into the river. It has been about 45 minutes since her last rounds, when the river seemed calm and the sheriff's office had nothing to report. "It all changed that quickly," she says. "It was horrifying." Guillén's husband sees a father holding babies in the rushing water and tries to take them from him. But the current overpowers them, and they are gone. Guillén goes door to door urging her guests to flee. Some run barefoot, barely clothed. In the dark she hears screams, cars honking, cabins crashing against trees. Around 4 a.m.,Thad Heartfield is awakened at his south Texashome by a phone call from his 22-year-old son, Aidan, who is with his girlfriend and two others at their river cabin in Hunt. Aidan tells his dad that there's 4 inches of water inside the cabin, but the water rises suddenly to about 4 feet. Heartfield urges his son to get out, to drive to the highway. But the water is rushing in so fast, their cars wash away. Aidan tells his dad he has to help his girlfriend and hands his phone to one of the other girls, who within seconds tells Heartfield his son and the others are gone. The phone goes dead. A week later,Heartfield's son is still missing; the friends' bodies have been recovered. The National Weather Service alerts escalate in urgency, but Kerr Countyhasn't activatedone of its emergency warning systems. At 4:22 a.m., a volunteer firefighter in Ingram calls a Kerr County Sheriff's Office dispatcher to say that he and his crew are having trouble getting anywhere because of the rising flood, accordingto audio obtained by NBC affiliate KXAN. He asks, "Is there any way we can send a CodeRed out to our Hunt residents asking them to find higher ground or stay home?" He is referring to a notification system that allows county authorities to send emergency alerts to people who have subscribed. The dispatcher replies, "We have to get that approved with our supervisor. Just be advised we have the Texas water rescue en route." More than an hour passes before some residents receive a CodeRed alert; for others, no alert ever arrives. Sometime after 4 a.m., Leitha, the Kerr County sheriff, is woken up and notified about the flooding. Officials won't say whether the town's emergency manager was awake, or what he and the other county officials were doing in the hours beforehand. Around 4:45 a.m., Lucas and Irene Brake jump out of bed in their RV near the Guadalupe River and see the roiling water. Lucas calls his brother Robert in Fort Worth and asks him to call their parents, who are staying in a cabin nearby, and tell them to evacuate. Then Lucas opens the door to their RV "and we're neck-deep in the flood. Our motor home is already floating away." He gets his wife and their dogs into their Jeep and moves up to higher ground. Robert calls their father, waking him, and asks him to help Lucas. Their father gets off the phone, saying: "I'm on my way." But he's in far more trouble. Minutes after the call, Lucas runs toward his parents' cabin to look for them. But when he gets there, it's gone. "It was chaos," Irene says. "You see the people in their RVs floating past you but you can't get to them because of how violently the river was flowing." "All you could hear is the people screaming for help," she says. "You would hear trees snapping and the crush of the tiny cabins or the RVs just crashing into the RVs, just coming apart." A Kerrville Police Department patrol sergeant is making his way to work between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. when he comes across the rising waters. From his patrol car, the sergeant sees dozens of people on rooftops. He gets on his PA system and tells them to hang on, be strong and that he will get help. According to a police spokesman, the sergeant drives to the nearby home of a detective and tells him, "It's bad. I need you to get your gear on and come find me." Over the next hour, Kerrville police go door to door, waking people up, "convincing them that, yes, the floodwaters are coming and you need to leave now," the spokesman, Jonathan Lamb, later says. During that time, more than 100 homes are evacuated and 200 people rescued, Lamb says. Courtney Garrison, who lives above and managesThe Hunt Store,a market near the banks of the Guadalupe, sees an officer warning people up and down the street at about 5:30 a.m. Garrison, her daughter and their dog have been on their roof for an hour and she has called 911 four times, asking if someone can send a helicopter or a boat. "I see you guys," the officer yells out on his bullhorn, but he tells Garrison he is unable to help. At 4:40 a.m., RickyRay Robertson, a pastor who lives in a cabin on the Guadalupe in Kerrville, is jolted awake by police sirens. Grabbing his gun and his cat Astros, Robertson notices that the river has breached a dam and is cresting a hill behind his cabin. He hurries to his brother's house next door, kicks in the door, wakes him up, helps him into the driveway and heads across the street for his truck. Before he makes it, his brother, who does not walk well, yells for help and Robertson turns around to see the water rising around him. Robertson dashes back and manages to pull his brother with him to the truck, and they drive off through a neighbor's yard. Not long after, the river washes away Robertson's cabin. He is grateful for the police sirens. "They saved our lives by just waking us up," he says. The county's first alert finally goes out on social media at about 5:30 a.m. Around the same time, Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring is awakened by the city manager. "We did not know, we did not know," he says of the flooding. "I wasn't alerted. I had received zero alerts beforehand. They did not come." Nine-year-old Birdie Miller spends four hours in the pouring rain in her pajamas with her bunkmates on the hillside at Camp Mystic. After dawn, the waters recede enough to walk to the recreation center, where she's reunited with her big sister Genevieve. The alerts keep coming as the danger shifts downstream. Counselors start to move the girls from the rec center to a newer part of the camp: Camp Mystic Cypress Lake. It is dry and warm, and there is food and water. The campers and counselors wait for helicopters to arrive. As she flies off with 14 others, Lucy Kennedy looks at the river and the camp she loves. It is ruined. They land at a nearby high school's football field, where Lucy is carried barefoot because she has given her Crocs to another girl. She is safe, but she knows that many are not. During the nighttime evacuation, she watched a friend get pulled away by the current. Birdie is the first of the Miller girls to be airlifted out. Her sisters soon follow to safety. Schoepf waits as the sun rises to see the damage around the home she is sheltering in with her boyfriend. They decide it's safe to head back to the River Inn, passing demolished homes along the way. There is nothing left of Guillén's RV park. All 28 trailers have been washed away. "Devastated," she says. "It's a nightmare. A complete nightmare." Kerrville sets up a reunification center at a local Walmart to help family members separated by the floodwaters find each other. That morning, parents of Camp Mystic campers are panicking. In phone calls and text chains and on social media, they search desperately for news. Lucy's mother, Wynne Kennedy, is a hub. She attended Mystic as a camper and a counselor and knows the staff is trained on how to respond to floods. It's one of the reasons she felt comfortable sending Lucy there. She tries to reassure other parents that their girls are in good hands. But this flood is so much worse than anything she's seen. Upriver from Camp Mystic, the water has destroyed her home. So while she knows Lucy is with people who would do anything to protect her, she is terrified. And there is nothing she can do but wait. By late morning, Lucas and Irene Brake, exhausted, take a break from searching for his parents. They spend the next few days alongside Lucas' brother Robert combing through downed trees and wreckage, searching for their bodies, until finally they are recovered. Robert Brake Sr. was 67, Joni, 66. Robert says his parents "would be in shock and awe" over the kindness and support from the community over the past week. "I know my mom's looking down and she's amazed." Around noon on July 4, after the longest hours of her life, Kennedy finally hears that Lucy made it out. She finds Lucy at a local elementary school, wrapped in a blanket and holding a donated teddy bear. They hug, and for the rest of the day and night Kennedy can hardly let go. Their house is gone, but at this moment it doesn't matter. She also knows many other families who haven't gotten good news. "I don't know what I did to be so blessed," she says. Lisa Miller soon learns that her girls have been evacuated as well. It takes time for the magnitude of what happened to sink in. "At first, we were just thankful they were safe," she says. "It all kind of slowly dawned upon us how much our girls had gone through." But so many of the other girls didn't make it out, little girls with toothy smiles and French braids and bright eyes. Twins Hanna and Rebecca Lawrence, 8 years old. Mary Kate Jacobe, also 8. Lila Bonner, 9. And everyone who was staying at Bubble Inn, including 8-year-old Linnie McCown and counselor Chloe Childress. Dick Eastland died too, trying to save them. Jon Gerberg, Suzanne Gamboa and Morgan Chesky reported from Kerr County. Colleen Long reported from Washington, D.C. Jon Schuppe reported from New York. Note:Flood map data comes fromFloodbase. Some emergency alerts and social media posts were shortened.
How the deadliest hours of the devastating Texas floods unfolded KERRVILLE, Texas — In the hours before the flood, the Miller girls — Eliza,...
