What happened at Camp Mystic

0:01On July 4th at 1.14 a.m. Camp Mystic Executive Director Dick Eastland got a severe flood warning on his phone. He rallied his family members who lived and worked at the camp, including his son, Richard Eastland Jr. Richard spoke to my colleague, Aurelis Hernandez, on July 5th. I think we're in a watch, but we do get watches a lot in this area, and we have floods. But this, I don't know how else to explain it, it was tremendous, and it was fast. We've never had water this high, ever. This feels like a one in 500 year flood, maybe more.

0:48Richard said they started working to evacuate campers. But the water was rising quickly. By the time they started to reach some of the cabins around 2.30 a.m., it was impossible to get all the girls to safety. In the darkness of night, you know, rain coming down, just chaos. I'm just, I'm, I just can't believe. I don't know. I don't know.

1:1827 campers and staff have been confirmed dead. Richard's dad, Dick, died trying to save some of the youngest campers. My colleague, Annie Gallen, has been reporting on what went wrong. Camp Mystic was really important to generations of women, mostly from Texas, but around the South. It was this beautiful, very isolated place. One of the things that was important was that the kids don't have any screens. So the children didn't have cell phones. The staff seemed to be communicating mostly by walkie-talkie. So a lot of the things that had made it special for decades contributed to the tragedy that befell the camp on July 4th.

2:01From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Kolbie Echowitz. It's Thursday, July 17th. Today, I talk to Annie about the Post's exclusive reporting on what happened at Camp Mystic.

2:27Annie, hi. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. You've been looking into this camp in Texas, Camp Mystic. We spoke a bit about it on the show last week, but what is important to know about where it's located? Well, it's located on the confluence of multiple water bodies, the main ones being the South Fork of the Guadalupe River and Cypress Creek, which are there in the sort of isolated area where the camp was in a flood zone. Many of its buildings were in a flood zone. And a lot of the reporting that's come out since then has sort of been discussing why were these cabins allowed to be in flood zones?

3:04Why were these little girls sleeping so close to the river that could rise at any minute? The camp was put onto a FEMA flood hazard map in 2011, but they repeatedly asked for dispensations over time as they expanded the camp. So they had gotten dispensations for a number of their buildings that sat in the flood zone, according to FEMA. So there's going to be a lot of investigation that goes forth about sort of how this all came to be. Why were they given these waivers, et cetera. Annie, before we get into that, I mean, how long has Camp Mystic been around? Like, what is its significance to the community there?

3:38It was founded in the 1920s in Hunt, Texas. And the same family has owned it since 1939. You know, it's basically this camp that was well beloved. It was attended by generations of Texas women, the children of affluence, the children of leaders. And they canoed, they hiked, they rode horseback. It was also a Christian-based camp, so they had Bible study sometimes. It had a very special place in the hearts of a lot of Texans. For a lot of these families, going to Camp Mystic was kind of like a rite of passage, right? Like your mom went and your grandmother went, and you just knew you were going to go to Camp Mystic too.

4:18Yeah, exactly. I mean, as you said, generations of families, mothers and daughters and grandmothers went to Camp Mystic. Sometimes people waited on the waiting list for years to get their kids in. And we actually talked to one of the counselors about it, a 20-year-old named Anita Baker. Before I was even a camper, I knew camp songs. And like most of my friends, we were signed up. Like the day you were born, it's kind of the inside joke between everyone is that once you're, Mom finds out she's having a girl. And then when you're born, you get signed up to go. So it was just a very, very important fixture in the lives of Texans and their summers.

4:59So Annie, I want to go to the night of July 3rd, and that's when this rainstorm begins. When did people at the camp begin to realize that they could be in serious danger from this rain? So the Eastland family, as I said, you know, has owned the camp since the 30s. And the director of the camp was named Dick Eastland and his wife Tweety. They were well-beloved within the camp system. He was the executive director. He taught fishing. She handed out special hugs. And they had four kids. So one of them passed away, but the three remaining sons all worked within the camp system. The one we interviewed was named Richard Jr.

5:36He was a dining hall supervisor for the camp, and we heard from him at the start of this episode. So we discussed with him sort of what happened, what was the timeline of events at the camp that night. So the family got the warning from the National Weather Service at 1.14 a.m. on their phones, according to the family spokesman. There were a number of the family, as I said, are involved in camp activities, so they sleep or live near the camp. Dick Eastland, the executive director, got on the walkie-talkies. He rallied everyone to come, and they began, as the spokesman told us, to assess the situation.

6:09They decided that they were going to start with evacuating the furthest out cabins because there was a line of cabins by the river. But then as time went on, as these precious minutes went on, they began noticing that there was a confluence of water, a swirling eddy around two cabin structures where the littlest girls were sleeping not very far from the river. And one of the staffers told us that it looked like a toilet bowl flushing. That was what was the swirling eddy effect. One was called Bubble Inn and one they called Twins 1 and 2 because it was basically two parts together. And so eventually Edward Eastland, who is another one of the sons, who is the camp director now, ran towards the Twins 1 and 2 and the water was so bad that he ended up having to swim to the cabin and try to rescue the girls.

6:58They later found him in a tree, clinging to the tree with about 10 or 12 girls around him. So then Dick Eastland noticed that the bubble in was really struggling. It was in danger. So he ran there as well. And at one point he radioed to say, I need help. And that was the last time they heard from him.

7:24So the director of the camp, he goes to this bubble in and we're talking about girls that are what, eight years old are sleeping in this cabin. And he goes there to try to save them. And obviously was unsuccessful. Yeah, we don't know exactly how that went on, but we also spoke to a camp counselor. So the camp did have many college-age counselors, and they were trained in emergency procedures, but not all of them had water rescue training. And some of the parents have questioned about whether or not they didn't have enough emergency training now. But in any case, this counselor was next door, and she was trying to rescue her own campers, but she could hear the screams of the girls in the bubble end.

8:05next door screaming for help. Annie, what have you learned about why they delayed the evacuation by an hour? Like they got the notice, but they didn't start evacuating the cabins for that length of time. So there are about 18 camps along that river in that area, and many have been there for a long time. One of them was able to, they call it Mo Ranch. It's a Presbyterian camp. They got this at about 114 and they were able to get all their campers out. It's a lot smaller camp. Then there was a boys camp nearby that didn't start until 4.40 a.m. to evacuate its campers. So there was a wide range of reactions.

8:44And to be clear, the National Weather Service doesn't order evacuations. That would have come from the local authorities. But when we spoke to Richard Easlin Jr., he was explaining to us that, you know, they've been down there for generations. They'd never seen flooding like this. The largest flood I've ever seen has just hit our waterfront area, like maybe to the very bottom of our dining hall. And we heard the 39 flood, it went up to maybe to where like the floor, and this, it was maybe 8 or 10 feet higher than in 1939.

9:27and quickly, like every minute was like another foot. They were basing their reaction on past experience, but they said they had no way to estimate, you know, the devastation that was going to come because the water rose so high to historic levels so quickly. Annie, what do we know about why the flooding spread so quickly and got so intense that it hit these historic levels? Basically, the meteorologists have said that there were some extraordinary weather conditions that led to this initially. The atmosphere sent plumes of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico into the state, which is, of course, an area that we know is called Flash Flood Alley.

10:11It's the worst in the country. And then the storm stalled over this area, and it eventually dumped catastrophic levels of rain into that area. in just a few short hours. And as I said, it sits on the confluence of the South Fork of the Guadalupe River and this thing called Cypress Creek. Now, it was put into this high-risk flood zone onto a map in 2011, and it had asked for some exemptions as time went on. So basically, when the two waterways collided, the collective force of the collision created a swirl, and the river kind of pushed backward from against itself and uphill towards these cabins.

10:53This area, as we said, like the Eastland family had had several different scrapes with floods over time. And the camp was just well used to the water rising from time to time. But the camp had this sort of mystical relationship with the river. You know, they were baptized there. They had fireworks over the river. They had canoe races in the river. You know, that sort of relationship contributed to camp life was really masking a very dangerous location, a dangerous situation. Experts have told us it was only a matter of time before there was severe flooding there. So the water begins to rise, these evacuations start.

11:32How much direction are the counselors and the staff receiving about what to do? Well, we spoke to many counselors and some parents of girls who had survived, and it seems like it was really quite a chaotic situation. The counselors got conflicting advice on what to do, and the water was rising so fast. One of them said to us that she was hunkered down with the girls in her cabin, the one who was next to the bubble inn, and somebody ran by and she yelled out the window, what are we doing? Should we evacuate? And they said, stay in your cabin. And so she and the other teenage counselors in that particular cabin decided on their own when the water basically breached the door that they had to get out of there.

12:14And so they took the little girls again, one by one, across this chasm to higher ground. They scaled this hill. I mean, these little girls were in, it was dark. They were crying. They had their pajamas. They didn't have their shoes on. You know, they're scrambling up this rocky hill. And they eventually reached the top of this hill, where the famous Camp Mystic sign could be seen for miles around. And it was obviously dark because of the storm. And do we know how much communication there was between the camp and the authorities, or even the parents of the campers? Well, one of the major things that we're waiting to see is how did they or when did they contact 911.

12:49It may be some time before those 911 tapes are released, but we did speak to the local fire chief, and he said he did not recall hearing from them. The parents whose children survived were not notified about what happened to their girls officially by the camp until 1128 on the morning of July 4th. So it's many hours after the worst flooding had occurred. So these parents are all over the state of Texas in the South. seeing these horrific reports and they're terrified. And so they started calling the Kirk County Sheriff's Office, you know, hysterical, basically like wanting some information. And one of them told us that well into the morning that they didn't know what was going on out there, which of course contributed to their state of panic.

13:28And it also raises questions about how, to what lengths and at what time did they notify authorities? Right, when did the camp itself notify authorities? And so the other thing we also know, because we have some mom group text threads, is that Edward's wife, Mary Liz, who's the co-director of the camp now, had been asking moms from the alumni group to see if they knew anyone that had helicopters or military equipment to come to the camp to help with the rescues.

14:03After the break, we talk about the toll of this disaster and how it could be prevented from happening again. We'll be right back.

14:22When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters. From breaking news to politics that impact your life, to advice you can trust. Get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI. trained exclusively on post journalism with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app. Annie, it's gut-wrenching to think about the toll of the floods on just this one camp. The 27 campers and counselors that they've died, most of them were young girls. But based on what you've said, this area, it was primed for a high-risk flooding event like this Why weren't more precautions taken beforehand?

15:14There's a larger picture about what did the authorities in the area do and not do There was a cell phone deficit in the area around Hunt, which is the city closest to the camp Sometimes it was just a dead zone So people have been saying for years, we need a siren system down along the river and they actually did have one years ago, but the company that was operating it shut down and they sort of went back to the quote-unquote old-fashioned way of spotting the river on their own. They started talking seriously about like putting sirens down there around 2015, 2016, but it was going to be very expensive.

15:49And at one point they did apply for a FEMA grant and it was denied. And now the county officials have said, the reason why we don't have them is because folks decided it was too expensive, but that may all change now after this disaster. So, you know, there's a lot of questions about why there was not a better warning. I think alerts only go so far. Richard Eastland, you know, talked about how like they were in a watch at the time, you know, all day long they were in a watch. They had heard that the floods could be terrible, but they had had many, many times before they had lived with high waters.

16:23Sometimes when the water was up around the walkway, they would canoe supplies over to this place called Senior Hill, which is where the older girls stayed. And one time they even sent it over on a zip line. So they had lived with this for years and it had been manageable until the 4th of July. Was there a time when Kerr County could have put out maybe more severe weather warnings, but didn't, like, have they said why they didn't alert people in those critical hours? Yeah, there's a post reporting that showed that, you know, they did have the system in place to send out what would have been like an Amber alert about the flood.

17:01Why they didn't do that, we don't know because they haven't responded to our questions about why you did you not send this Amber style alert out that you could have done because the technology was there. And then two days later, when the waters rose again, they did send one of those out. So, you know, there's still a lot to be learned about why they didn't. And, you know, the parents were very angry about the fact that across the board, the authorities seemed to downplay the risk in many cases. I mean, in Texas, the judge is kind of like a county manager, county head of the county commission. I mean, they call them judges there.

17:35So the judge of Kirk County on the 4th of July was basically saying, we have floods all the time. What's the big deal? And in the meantime, these poor little girls and other people that were just down there camping or enjoying the fourth holiday had been swept away. So he basically said, there's no way we could have known, but in fact they could have known because there were a lot of weather service and other warnings that they probably did not heed. What now in the aftermath of this tragedy are people saying could be done in the future to make sure that something like this never happens again?

18:10Well, I think that every camp is probably going to look and see what is our emergency plan look like? Is it robust? Do the teen counselors know what to do if something happens, like a flood situation, are they all trained in water rescue? Because like I can't mistake, not all of them were trained in water rescue. How can we communicate with emergency authorities if the electricity is out and we don't have a working cell phone? What kind of sirens could we afford to put in that would assist? And the next, I mean, I think they're already talking about, can we put sirens in? And I know that there's local people who have already put together a petition asking for sirens.

18:49So there's a lot of things, a lot more precautions that folks think that they could take to prevent this from happening again. And Annie, I know you said you've spoken to some of the families from Camp Mystic. What's going on at the camp now? And what is the next few weeks going to look like for them as they try to kind of rebuild from this? The support and love for this camp is pervasive in Texas. So I think that the people who went to the camp whose children survived or passed away are still loyal in many ways to the camp, but they don't want to see it falter. So the funerals are ongoing, the memorial services, the prayer services, the grieving is ongoing.

19:31The owners of the camp met for the first time on Sunday. And so we're still waiting to hear what came out of that meeting, what additional information that the family feels comfortable sharing. They've only just got the electricity turned back on, apparently. That's one of the few things they said this week. So now I think they can sort of begin, I guess, begin their own response. And they've already started cleaning up, et cetera. But we're just waiting for more details. Well, Annie, thank you so much. Thank you for your reporting on this and for coming on to share this with us. Thank you for having me.

20:10Annie Gowan is a correspondent for The Post. Our colleagues have been collecting stories from loved ones about the Camp Mystic victims. They shared their memories of the girls, remembering what made them laugh, what they loved to do, and what made them so special. We'll include a link in our show notes.

20:34that's it for post reports thanks for listening today's show was produced by sabby robinson it was mixed by sam bear it was edited by maggie penman lisa gartner and gina harkins nicole dunca and our elise hernandez contributed reporting i'm colby ekowitz we'll be back tomorrow with more stories from the washington post

21:26We'll see you next time. We'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app.