14h ago

Texas camp leader waited over an hour after flood warning to evacuate

www.theguardian.com

Camp Mystic leader, who died trying to save small children, waited over an hour after alert before starting evacuation

The adult leader of Camp Mystic, the Texas summer camp where 27 children and counselors died in the Hill Country floods, waited more than an hour after receiving a severe flood warning before initiating an evacuation, it was disclosed on Monday.

Richard “Dick” Eastland, who had run the popular all-girls, Christian-values sleepaway camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River with his family since the 1980s, was among the fatalities after a wall of water rushed through the camp early on 4 July.

A spokesperson for the Eastland family told the Washington Post that a National Weather Service (NWS) alert was sent to his phone at 1.14am warning of “life threatening flash flooding”, and only at 2.30am, with heavy rain still falling and the river level rising fast, he made the decision to begin evacuations.

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I get severe flood warnings all the time. Every spring and summer. I've lived through one actual flood where the water came in our house. It's insanely difficult to decide when to evacuate. One hour after a warning is not unheard of.
Now if they were standing around in knee high water then it's different but something tells me that this flash flood hit so fast that it hit them by surprise. It's easy sit here on our keyboards and virtue signal with our dry clothes and no immediate danger
I worked as the director of health for a major kids camp in Canada for a long while. This phone call would have come to me at our camp. We had almost 1000 people across three sites in our summer camp then. Only three people on each site had phones permanently but I guarantee this would have been responded to immediately. Evacuation plans in place and reviews and updates for them every year. I received emergency calls all the time. Day and night.
I guess what I'm getting at is there shouldn't have been that many people in one place without Evac plans, having practiced them and someone who answers an emergency line 24 hours a day who has experience and knowledge in emergency situations. An hour warning is more than enough time to evac this small a camp if you are prepared.
Not just the state and weather are to blame for this tragedy. The camp needs to bear just as much responsibility. They've taken on these children with the responsibility to care for and protect them. They didn't do that.
- Not just the state and weather are to blame for this tragedy. The camp needs to bear just as much responsibility as well.
  Absolutely. As I pointed out in another post in this thread, FEMA declared that part of the camp was on a flood plain in 2011. The camp appealed and got them to change the designation which would have required flood insurance and forced them to build to stricter standards as they built more structures on the flood plain.
I mean, "sent to his phone at 1:14am" does not mean they actually saw and read the alert at 1:14am.
It's 1:14am. Don't you think he could have been asleep or something?
No one knows better than a warning sign
Reminds me of this moment
Campers were not allowed to bring mobile phones, and counselors were made to surrender theirs, leaving them unable to see the emergency alerts themselves
The kids, I understand, but I think the counselors should have been allowed to keep their phones, at least after hours.
The Post said the NWS alert did not contain an order or recommendation for evacuation, a power it said rests with local government officials.
Yeah, the local government officials that debated a flood warning system for over a decade because they didn't want to pay the $1 million themselves, then were given $10 million in pandemic funds and re-directed most of it to the sheriff's department, and a footpath.
“We’ve heard accounts of trailer after trailer after trailer being swept into the river with families in them. [We] can’t find the trailers, we don’t know how many of them there are,” the county judge, Rob Kelly, said. One trailer was found “completely covered in gravel” 27ft below the surface of the river, he said, adding that sonar crews were searching the river and local lakes. Two reservoir lakes attached to the river would be drained to aid the search, officials said.
The more I hear, the sicker - and angrier! - I feel.
- You forgot to say that they spent the 10 million out of spite saying that spending it on an early warning system was woke and the money was communist money from Biden. Big MAGA brains in that county.
- This is pretty common at summer camps with cell phones, there are many reasonst. It's also common however to have people in place who are trained and will respond to such incidents regardless of camp size, location or time of day.
- Saw an article the other day about how Texas is the most disaster prone state, while simultaneously being the most against any sort of disaster preparedness.
  Dumbfucks.
  
  I'd say the big three are California (fire, potential earthquakes), Florida (hurricanes with tidal surge), and Texas. But as you say, Texas is the one that refuses to do anything to mitigate their risks, even those of their own making - and it does seem that so many of the disasters Texas has are massively exacerbated by their refusal to mitigate risks.
  A friend of mine suggested that Texas' nickname should be "The One Star State".
I’m not sure what this article is trying to imply but if I got an evac alert at 1am I would be dead because I would’ve been asleep.
- Yea I agree, about ten years ago I moved to a waterfront place and I get flood alerts for my area often and 9 times out of 10 nothing comes of it.
  Now I am not a commercial entity.
- I think it might be trying to imply that if you were the only one with communications equipment in a known extreme flood risk zone full of children that you are responsible for, you had better not be sleeping at 1am. Also that you probably shouldn’t have fought as hard to be allowed to be in this situation.
- Yeah, this seems like a weird way to place blame on the victims of a natural disaster. Because, y'know, we all do our best critical thinking at 1:00 in the morning. Article strangely makes no mention of the local government voting against flood warning sirens in that exact location, though.
  
  The camp already got the cell phone alert. What possible difference would the siren make?
  
  It is a weird way. Particularly when there are much better ways to assign blame to this particular individual whom the guardian refers to as the "camp leader" and the person who ran the camp, when he was, in fact, the owner.
  Federal regulators repeatedly granted appeals to remove Camp Mystic's buildings from their 100-year flood map, loosening oversight as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain in the years before rushing waters swept away children and counselors, a review by The Associated Press found.
  The Federal Emergency Management Agency included the prestigious girls' summer camp in a "Special Flood Hazard Area" in its National Flood Insurance map for Kerr County in 2011, which means it was required to have flood insurance and faced tighter regulation on any future construction projects.
  That designation means an area is likely to be inundated during a 100-year flood — one severe enough that it only has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.
  He repeatedly got exemptions from regulation that might require him to update or move old buildings and meet more stringent construction requirements over the last decade and a half even as the expanded the camp in the flood plain putting even more kids and counselors at risk.
That's going to be an interesting lawsuit.

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