{"id":156743,"date":"2025-07-12T18:01:17","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T18:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/how-the-deadly-texas-floods-unfolded-devastating-kerrville-and-camp-mystic-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2025-07-12T18:01:17","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T18:01:17","slug":"how-the-deadly-texas-floods-unfolded-devastating-kerrville-and-camp-mystic-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/how-the-deadly-texas-floods-unfolded-devastating-kerrville-and-camp-mystic-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"How the deadly Texas floods unfolded, devastating Kerrville and Camp Mystic – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This part of Texas Hill Country is known for flash floods. Why were so many people caught off guard when the river turned violent?
KERRVILLE, Texas \u2014 In the hours before the flood, the Miller girls \u2014 Eliza, Genevieve and Birdie \u2014 were eating fajitas in the Camp Mystic mess hall and watching counselors act in a \u201cWicked\u201d 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\u2019 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.
\u201cThe sun was shining like it was just perfect weather,\u201d 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\u2019t keep up, and in many cases didn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 \u201cafter-action\u201d report but that it wouldn\u2019t be immediate \u2014 they\u2019re focused on searching for the missing. Just in the past few years, authorities chose not to install a new alert system<\/a> that included sensors and sirens in part because of the cost. At least 36 children in the county died in the July 4 flood.
\u201cFirst responders from emergency services throughout Kerr County promptly responded to the recent emergency as the situation unfolded,\u201d Sheriff Larry Leitha said at a news conference this week. \u201cThis incident will be reviewed. You have my word. When or if necessary, if improvements need to be made, improvements will be made.\u201d
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\u2019s longtime owner, Richard \u201cDick\u201d Eastland, who also served as a director of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, spoke often of the perils of living on the flood plain. \u201cThe river is beautiful,\u201d he told a reporter in 1990. \u201cBut you have to respect it.\u201d
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\u2019t allowed to have phones, so they don\u2019t see the urgent National Weather Service warning that arrives as the rain keeps falling.
Cell service at Camp Mystic is spotty, and it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s brother swings open the bedroom door and says, \u201cWe have to get out. There\u2019s a flood coming. Grab your stuff and let\u2019s go.\u201d 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\u2019 tires. Some people get out and start walking to higher ground, but with no first responders in sight, Schoepf and her boyfriend don\u2019t know what to do.
The pounding rain wakes up Lorena Guill\u00e9n, who owns Blue Oak RV Park in Kerrville. She drives to the river\u2019s edge at around 2:30 a.m. to check how high it is. She\u2019s on alert because she received the earlier flash flood warning and her park is full of people. It\u2019s raining, but the water seems fine. After her rounds, she says, she calls the Kerr County Sheriff\u2019s Office for an update. They tell her there is no information to share, so Guill\u00e9n leaves her RV park residents sleeping.
Around the same time, Genevieve Miller\u2019s 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\u2019s owner, drives Genevieve, 12, and other girls to safer ground \u2014 the recreation hall where Lucy and her cabin mates are praying on the balcony.
\u201cIt came so very fast,\u201d Lisa Miller, Genevieve\u2019s mother, later says. \u201cI would assume they thought they had a lot more time than they did.\u201d
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. \u201cOK, you girls, be safe,\u201d 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\u2019s oldest daughter, Eliza, 14, is in a cabin called Cloud Nine on \u201csenior hill,\u201d where she is safe. They think they\u2019re just weathering a crazy storm; they read books by the constant flashes of lightning. They have no idea what\u2019s happening below.
Christian Fell<\/a>, 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, <\/strong>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\u2019t warning of a potential flash flood \u2014\u00a0the meteorologists say it\u2019s 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. \u201cEverything was fine,\u201d he later says. A half hour later, turning toward home, he notices no signs of rising water.
Around 3:30 a.m., Guill\u00e9n, 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\u2019s office had nothing to report. \u201cIt all changed that quickly,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was horrifying.\u201d
Guill\u00e9n\u2019s 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.
Guill\u00e9n 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 Texas <\/a>home 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\u2019s 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\u2019s son is still missing<\/a>; the friends\u2019 bodies have been recovered.
The National Weather Service alerts escalate in urgency, but Kerr County hasn\u2019t activated<\/a> one of its emergency warning systems.
At 4:22 a.m., a volunteer firefighter in Ingram calls a Kerr County Sheriff\u2019s Office dispatcher to say that he and his crew are having trouble getting anywhere because of the rising flood, according to audio obtained by NBC affiliate KXAN<\/a>. He asks, \u201cIs there any way we can send a CodeRed out to our Hunt residents asking them to find higher ground or stay home?\u201d He is referring to a notification system that allows county authorities to send emergency alerts to people who have subscribed.
The dispatcher replies, \u201cWe have to get that approved with our supervisor. Just be advised we have the Texas water rescue en route.\u201d
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\u2019t say whether the town\u2019s 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 \u201cand we\u2019re neck-deep in the flood. Our motor home is already floating away.\u201d 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: \u201cI\u2019m on my way.\u201d But he\u2019s in far more trouble.
Minutes after the call, Lucas runs toward his parents\u2019 cabin to look for them. But when he gets there, it\u2019s gone.
\u201cIt was chaos,\u201d Irene says. \u201cYou see the people in their RVs floating past you but you can\u2019t get to them because of how violently the river was flowing.\u201d
\u201cAll you could hear is the people screaming for help,\u201d she says. \u201cYou would hear trees snapping and the crush of the tiny cabins or the RVs just crashing into the RVs, just coming apart.\u201d
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, \u201cIt\u2019s bad. I need you to get your gear on and come find me.\u201d
Over the next hour, Kerrville police go door to door, waking people up, \u201cconvincing them that, yes, the floodwaters are coming and you need to leave now,\u201d 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 manages The Hunt Store,<\/a> 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.
\u201cI see you guys,\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s yard. Not long after, the river washes away Robertson\u2019s cabin. He is grateful for the police sirens. \u201cThey saved our lives by just waking us up,\u201d he says.
The county\u2019s 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. \u201cWe did not know, we did not know,\u201d he says of the flooding. \u201cI wasn\u2019t alerted. I had received zero alerts beforehand. They did not come.\u201d
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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s safe to head back to the River Inn, passing demolished homes along the way.
There is nothing left of Guill\u00e9n\u2019s RV park. All 28 trailers have been washed away. \u201cDevastated,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a nightmare. A complete nightmare.\u201d
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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 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 \u201cwould be in shock and awe\u201d over the kindness and support from the community over the past week. \u201cI know my mom\u2019s looking down and she\u2019s amazed.\u201d
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\u2019t matter. She also knows many other families who haven\u2019t gotten good news. \u201cI don\u2019t know what I did to be so blessed,\u201d 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. \u201cAt first, we were just thankful they were safe,\u201d she says. \u201cIt all kind of slowly dawned upon us how much our girls had gone through.\u201d
But so many of the other girls didn\u2019t 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.<\/em>
Note: <\/strong><\/em>Flood map data comes from <\/em>Floodbase<\/em><\/a>. Some emergency alerts and social media posts were shortened.<\/em>
Jon Gerberg is a producer on the investigative unit for NBC News.
Suzanne Gamboa is a national reporter for NBC News and NBC Latino.
Morgan Chesky is a correspondent for NBC News.
Colleen Long is a senior editor with NBC News Digital.
Jon Schuppe is an enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York.
© 2025 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

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ProfileSectionsLocaltvFeaturedMore From NBCFollow NBC News news AlertsThere are no new alerts at this timeThis part of Texas Hill Country is known for flash floods. Why were so many people caught off guard when the river turned violent?KERRVILLE, Texas \u2014 In the hours before the flood, the Miller girls \u2014 Eliza, Genevieve and Birdie \u2014 were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":156744,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}