This is a hard read, and it leads off with the story of three of the flood’s victims, so skip on by if that’s not how you want to start your day. But it’s worth your time if you can handle the emotion of it all.
Alicia Baker can’t bring herself to clean her daughter’s bedroom.
Eleven-year-old Madelyn “Emmy” Jeffrey left a pile of craft supplies on the floor in their San Antonio home before heading off to the Guadalupe River with her grandparents, where they drowned in the flood last Fourth of July.
A year later, the pile is still there.
Baker, who wears a diamond made from her daughter’s ashes, said seeing the mess allows her to pretend her daughter is away at camp or traveling.
“If all of her things are gone then I can’t rationalize that anymore,” the 43-year-old said.
When the Guadalupe River swelled into a huge, raging waterway in the early morning hours of July 4 last year, it carved a horrific path of destruction. Baker’s daughter and parents, staying at their one-bedroom vacation house by the water, died along with 116 others in Kerr County.
The raging flood toppled old cypress trees that shaded the emerald water where generations of families swam. It washed away cars and entire houses. As one person there put it, the area looked like a bomb had gone off.
Nearly one year later, after months of cleanup and rebuilding, people are still grappling with how to heal both physically and emotionally. The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved only slightly more than a fifth of the several thousand applications from Kerr County for assistance, according to a nonprofit tracking the data. The local community foundation meanwhile doled out millions to groups helping people buy new homes or RVs or rebuild. Others still haven’t decided what to do with their land.
Signs of normalcy have reemerged: Crider’s Rodeo and Dance Hall on the river rebuilt in time for its 101st summer season. The Hunt post office, where even the 1,400-pound safe washed away, is going back up, and the Ingram Little League has new fields to play on. Summer camps welcomed back children, eager to keep the magic alive even after 27 girls at Camp Mystic died in the flood.
People returned to the river, to fish, to kayak, to play.
Reminders of the flood linger. The iconic Hunt Store and River Inn remain closed. Camp Mystic is shuttered and last week filed for bankruptcy. More than 90 new flood warning sirens that the directors of Camp Mystic raised money for stand ready to blare while six sirens expected to be paid for with state funds have been installed.
Many say they feel nervous when it rains or haunted by the sounds of screams they heard that night. “Y’ALL OK?” ask yard signs around town that encourage people to seek help. Others carry overwhelming grief of losing a loved one. “Live Like Jane,” says a banner on a fence in memory of one victim, camp director Jane Ragsdale. Small crosses by the river marked the places some Mystic campers were found.
“We are not recovered,” said Austin Dickson, chief executive officer of the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country. “We are in recovery, and there is much more work to be done.”
In the months after the flood, when Baker would go by her family property, she would sit on the ledge by the water and reflect on how calm it was. She felt, in those moments, a familiar peace. This was the river she grew up going to camp by and where she and her husband got engaged.
Her fiercely spirited daughter was spending the July 4 holiday with her adoring grandparents. Grandma Penny Jeffrey taught yoga to other seniors and Grandpa Emlyn Jeffrey regularly golfed, dialing his daughters every time he left the course to say he loved them. They picked up Emmy after every day of fifth grade so she could be in safety patrol, helping other kids get to and from car drop-offs. Soon Emmy would start middle school, where she couldn’t wait to learn debate and play sports.
In the early evening on July 3, before eating brisket her grandpa made, Emmy FaceTimed with her mother, who planned to drive out to the river house with her husband and baby in two days. The house, raised on stilts, seemed better prepared to withstand the flood, but the river, choked with debris that included entire houses, swept it away, too.
Seven months later, Baker said she didn’t let herself think too much about what happened because she didn’t want to get stuck in those negative feelings. She still had her baby and husband to get out of bed for. She celebrated her mom’s 70th birthday as they’d planned, going to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York without her. She made Emmy’s 12th birthday pancakes in December without her.
Looking at the river, Baker felt betrayed. How could she still love a place that violently took three people she cherished?
“There are two truths,” Baker said. “This bad thing happened, but it is not a bad place.”
There’s more, so read the rest. And then when you’re ready, read this Chron story.
The post popped up on Alicia Baker’s Facebook newsfeed when she was scrolling on her phone. By the time she looked, it already had dozens of comments, some from people she recognized.
“It’s been nearly a year since a devastating flood along the Guadalupe River killed more than 100 people in Kerr County,” read the post from a local Fox affiliate in early June. “Over the next 27 days, FOX 4 will share 27 updates on the children who died and how their legacy lives on.”
Baker read through the responses.
“There were 119 tragic losses!!!!!!!” one person wrote.
“I’ll remind you of their names,” someone else said, “since you can’t seem to remember.”
“You should fix your headline and stop acting like the politicians that have forgotten about the rest of our community.”
Baker typed her own comment.
“Other children died, including my daughter who was 11,” she said. “This sentiment is wonderful but you’ve left out a whole group of people whose families are also grieving and ensuring their legacies live on.”
The 27 campers and counselors whom the television station promised to commemorate all died at Camp Mystic, the storied girls’ camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Their deaths became the focal point of national attention after the July 4 flood that killed 119 people in Kerr County and at least 135 across Texas.
Nearly a year later, many people in Kerr County say that the focus has come at an unintended cost. They don’t begrudge the attention paid to Camp Mystic or the girls who died there; many have their own history at the camp, or loved one of the lost. But they worry that a disaster that unfolded for miles along the river has come to be remembered as the tragedy of one place.
The flood left almost no one in Kerr County untouched. People either knew someone who died or narrowly escaped the floodwaters. Or they themselves barely survived. Or they searched the riverbanks for survivors and, as the hot days wore on, recovered bodies. Or they organized volunteers, cooked breakfast tacos for families shivering in fire departments or pulled belongings, thick with mud, from the river to return home.
Many survivors say they have come to feel like footnotes in their own trauma. They’ve responded by pushing for further investigations to prevent future heartbreak and with everyday acts of intentional remembrance, carrying the people they lost into the rituals of everyday life so that they can keep on living.
That’s the same Alicia Baker in each story. To put this in a bit of perspective (I think I’ve done this before, but I’ll do it again), 119 deaths in a city of about 24K people means one out of every 200 people died. That would be the equivalent of a disaster in Houston that killed more than ten thousand people. To put it bluntly, that will leave a big and long-lasting scar.
For that first story, I have nothing but love and empathy for the survivors, and I understand why they don’t want to leave. There will almost certainly come a time when that decision won’t be theirs to make, thanks to climate change, but that day is not today. It will take this community a long time to recover, and they will never be the same. I wish them the best as they work towards that. The Chron, which looked at the legislative response after the flood, has more.