Explosive probe blames Camp Mystic horror on lawmakers' decisions: 'So haunting'

The sound of construction machinery filled the air as Kylie Nidever walked past properties ravaged months earlier by floodwaters.

Nidever’s home was among those in her Bumble Bee Hills neighborhood untouched by last year’s July 4 flood, one of the deadliest disasters in Texas history. The 35-year-old understood the draw of the tranquil Kerr County subdivision, where she played as a child in a nearby creek that fed the Guadalupe River. But she was taken aback by how enthusiastic most of her neighbors were to rebuild.

Nidever wondered why the government had let people build in any areas long known to be dangerous and whether leaders would intervene now.

“Is somebody going to come in and stop us?” said Nidever, who has considered moving. “If it happens again and it’s worse next time, people will die in this neighborhood.”

After last summer’s disaster, some Texas legislators scolded local officials for their decision not to invest in flood warning sirens and for the chaotic emergency response. Other elected leaders excused the storm as so massive that no one could have prepared for it.

But lawmakers failed to address the underlying problem: They have repeatedly rejected bills that could protect residents in the state’s most dangerous, flood-prone areas, an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

The majority of the 137 people confirmed to have died across five counties in the July 4 tragedy were staying in places identified by the federal government as being at risk for flooding, the newsrooms found. These were places where state lawmakers had a chance to curb development, but didn’t.

The newsrooms reviewed nearly 60 years of legislation and identified over five dozen flood safety bills rejected by lawmakers.

The most consequential measures, experts said, could have saved lives by stopping construction in the areas at greatest risk for flooding, including where people later died on July 4.

“Had the state enacted any of that legislation, we might not have had the excruciating loss,” Char Miller, a Texas environmental historian who now teaches at Pomona College in California, said after learning of the newsrooms’ findings. “The continued inability of the state to pass legislation to protect its citizens means it’s not doing the one thing it’s supposed to do, which is defend the health and safety of those who call Texas home.”

Lawmakers also didn’t pass measures that would have forced buildings in flood-prone areas to be elevated; blocked certain types of structures, such as solid waste facilities, from being built close to bodies of water; or granted local leaders additional authority to curb potentially unsafe development.

Texas has more buildings in flood-prone areas — at least 650,000 structures — than any other state besides Florida, according to a ProPublica and Tribune analysis of Federal Emergency Management Agency data. The analysis shows that only eight other states have a higher share of structures in flood-prone spots than Texas.

More people have died from floods in Texas, and more national flood insurance claims have been paid out here since 1980, than in nearly any state with the exception of Florida and Louisiana. Yet Texas trails at least 29 other states, including Florida, that have passed development standards that force structures to be built higher in flood-prone areas, according to a 2020 FEMA report.

“We need to resist this narrative that this disaster was unpreventable,” said Michael Slattery, director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at Texas Christian University. “The disaster is just shaped by policy choices made over what I thought were just years.” Instead, Slattery said, it was decades.

The need for stronger flood protections only grows more urgent, scientists say, as climate change makes heavy storms previously considered once in a lifetime more likely.

After this latest catastrophe, Gov. Greg Abbott called Texas politicians back for two special legislative sessions and tasked them with addressing aspects of the disaster. The only buildings legislators banned from flood-prone areas were youth camps, and only after intense lobbying by the grieving parents of 25 children and two counselors who died on July 4 at Camp Mystic. (Its executive director also died.)

Some Texas lawmakers over the years have pointed to protecting landowners’ rights to evaluate their own property risk as a reason not to pass additional regulations. At a hearing more than a month after the flood, Republican Rep. Wes Virdell, who represents Kerr County, said rural areas “enjoy the freedom to take our risk and build as we would like to.”

None of the top state leaders — Abbott, Lt. Gov Dan Patrick or House Speaker Dustin Burrows — responded to the newsrooms’ questions about whether legislators should enact stricter statewide building rules. Abbott’s office said he has addressed flooding issues by funding mitigation projects to lessen the storms’ impact.

Burrows’ office declined multiple interview requests, and Patrick’s office didn’t answer the newsrooms’ emails.

Without major changes, the same federal, state and local rules that permitted residents to construct their homes so close to the Guadalupe River in the first place are allowing many to build there again.

That includes 82-year-old Joan Connor and her husband, David Stearns, who live near Nidever in Bumble Bee Hills.

The couple had recently returned from an RV trip when last summer’s flood hit.

Water rose to Connor’s chest as she hollered to her 98-year-old husband. They needed to get out of their house. Connor and Stearns survived by wading and swimming out to their front yard, where the river transported them onto their pergola ledge and they clutched the wood structure’s roof supports.

The river’s muck filled the house. But they’d paid off the home. They didn’t fear another storm.

“It never crossed our mind to not rebuild,” Connor said.

A Critical Juncture

The homes that now belong to Connor and Nidever didn’t exist in the 1960s.

Back then, Kerr County was a small community nestled in the rolling hills of Central Texas, 65 miles northwest of downtown San Antonio. Youth camps operated on the river. Family homes passed through generations. Then, the expansion of Interstate 10 in the following decade helped unlock a wave of development in the area, known as the Hill Country. Homes went up along the Guadalupe River, though longtime residents knew it could flood viciously and with little warning.

A national initiative to address the effects of floods was also just beginning. In 1968, Congress launched the National Flood Insurance Program, which offered federally backed insurance to residents in cities or counties that voluntarily joined. In exchange, the program would require local governments to use federal maps that identified regions at risk of floods. Joining also ultimately meant that cities and counties had to enforce specific development rules in those areas, such as requiring buildings to be high enough to withstand a certain level of flooding.

In Texas, the program triggered skepticism from some state lawmakers, local leaders and landowners. They viewed the flood regulations as an infringement of their property rights and worried flood risk maps would cause their property values to plummet.

Amid this resistance, two Democrats put forward what flood experts characterized as a radical proposal in 1973, after a deadly flood struck the Hill Country. The measure would have prohibited all construction of structures “for use by humans” in the floodway, including the area flanking the river where the most dangerous flooding often occurs. That would not only mean houses but also hospitals, schools and nursing homes. The state proposal would go further than the federal rules, which still allowed people to build in the floodway in some instances.

But when the day arrived to discuss the proposal in its first public hearing, one of the bill’s authors handed out a revised version that removed the strict floodway regulations.

Under the updated measure, the state would still have to create its own flood maps to define what areas were most at risk during a deluge, rather than wait for the federal government to draw them.

State lawmakers scoffed at the price tag, at least $16 million.

“I don’t think there’s a chance in the world that you’re going to get this kind of money and tax all people in the state of Texas to do this kind of work, at least not right now,” said state Rep. John Wilson, a Democrat on the committee considering the bill, which did not pass.

And so homes continued to be built in the floodway.

Today, Kerr is one of the Texas counties with the highest share of buildings in that dangerous zone, according to the newsrooms’ analysis, which ranks it eighth in the state.

Roughly half of those who died during last year’s floods were staying in the floodway, according to the latest FEMA map. Many buildings went up after legislators filed the 1973 bills that could have prevented their construction, a review of county appraisal data found.

“This is the biggest shame, that we weren’t able to pass those back then,” said Rachel Hanes, policy director of the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, a nonprofit representing parts of the Hill Country that has pushed for stringent statewide standards. “It would have just made a drastic difference in lives saved and billions of dollars in damage avoided over the past 50 years.”

On one idyllic half-mile stretch that winds along the Guadalupe, at least 27 people died. Sixteen of them were staying in homes in the floodway, the ProPublica and Tribune analysis found.

That part of the river became one of the deadliest spots across the Hill Country that weekend.

It included a home belonging to Beth and Hutch Bryan’s family.

Dan and Martha Crawford, longtime friends of the Bryans, slept in the property’s guesthouse the morning of July 4. The Crawfords loved to spend weekends here, enjoying the peaceful setting away from their Houston home. Martha Crawford considered it her “happy place.” Their daughter and son grew up going to camp down the road, like the Bryans’ kids.

Around 3:30 a.m., the Crawfords were trying to get to safety as the water rushed around their bodies, roaring like an airplane engine. Dan Crawford, a 63-year-old landman, reached for the lattice on a second-floor deck, but his wife of nearly 30 years got swept away.

The lattice broke. Crawford grabbed a bush that gave way and then climbed a neighbor’s tree, which eventually broke on top of him. He fell into the river. He emerged only for the water to rush him toward a nearby home, where he used the gutters to heave himself onto a slick metal roof.

Later, he would have to tell his grown children: “I can’t tell you where Mom is.”

Martha Crawford and the Bryans died. Concrete slabs now line the roadway where homes once stood. Three white crosses mark the spot where the Bryans stayed. When Crawford went back to see the property months later, he drew hearts on each one of the crosses and wrote their names.

“I’m never going to understand this,” said Crawford, who has leaned on his faith in God. “I’ve got to try to just move forward, but it’s still been hard.”

Still, Crawford believes the government shouldn’t stop people from rebuilding altogether.

Behind the Nation

As the turn of the century neared, Texas lawmakers passed up two other major opportunities to strengthen protections in flood-prone areas.

In 1989, after 10 campers died in a flood in the Hill Country, state Sen. Ted Lyon proposed banning youth camps with buildings or tents within 150 feet of a body of water or in areas designated as flood-prone

Lyon believes that had his bill passed, at least some children and staff staying at youth camps on July 4 could have survived. FEMA identified areas of Camp Mystic and Heart O’ the Hills, a camp where one person died, as flood-prone in a 2011 map, its most recent countywide assessment.

“That’s so haunting to me,” the former lawmaker said. He later added, “They should have implemented these rules to protect those kids.”

Former Heart O’ The Hills owner Kathy Ragsdale said the building where the camp’s director — her daughter, Jane Ragsdale — died had never flooded in the more than 50 years that the family owned it. The camp’s new owners plan to relocate to a new site outside the flood plain.

Camp Mystic declined to comment but pointed reporters to previous statements in which it disputes being in a designated flood-prone area, because it successfully petitioned FEMA to exclude it in 2013. The change meant Lyon’s proposed ban may not have applied to the camp at the time of the flood. Camp Mystic will not reopen this summer, according to its leaders.

Catastrophic flooding that swept across the eastern half of the state spurred another measure in 1993. Longtime Democratic state Sen. Carl Parker of Port Arthur offered a bill that would have forced all cities and counties to enroll in the federal flood insurance program.

Participating in the federal program meant that all new residential construction in the so-called 100-year flood plain, areas with a 1% chance of flooding in any given year, must be elevated to a certain height above ground. Parker’s bill, however, would have gone even further than the federal standard by requiring buildings to be a foot higher than that.

The bill was quickly tabled in its first public hearing after one county official testified that the decision to raise the height standard should be left to local leaders.

Only in 1999 did Texas legislators pass a law requiring all cities and counties to adopt the federal flood insurance program’s elevation requirement and other minimum standards.

But they didn’t assign a state agency to enforce it. Roughly 1 in 10 Texas cities and counties reported to the state that they still had not adopted those minimum standards or any other related regulations as of 2024.

Lawmakers never passed the higher elevation requirements that Parker’s bill proposed. (Parker died in 2024.)

After Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston area in 2017, the Legislature, again, chose other solutions. That included a measure requiring Texas to create a statewide plan to study how to better prepare for floods. The plan recommended that buildings be constructed to a higher elevation, as Parker attempted decades prior. To date, state lawmakers have not required it.

“The legislature is very reactionary, not visionary,” said Robert Puente, a former state representative who served until 2008. “We react and try to resolve it, and invariably, we don’t.”

Without a state mandate in Texas, counties and cities must individually decide whether they should require new construction to be built at higher elevations.

Some local governments waited years after Parker’s proposal to pass higher standards. Kerr County, for example, passed its rule by 2011. Most Texas cities and counties have not strengthened their regulations, the 2024 state flood plan found.

“A lot of local communities just don’t have the capacity to undertake all these huge code changes, or the political willpower,” said Joel Scata, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit that has pushed to raise standards at the federal level.

That’s why, experts say, Texas needs statewide requirements.

Most states have implemented additional elevation requirements for buildings in flood-prone areas.

New Jersey passed two major provisions that Texas didn’t: It has blocked development of new homes in floodways since 1975 and required extra building elevation starting in 2007. It also started drawing its own expanded flood maps in the 1980s, long before Texas. Nebraska and Wisconsin banned building habitable structures in floodways and required an extra foot or two of height for homes by 1986.

Sarah Galster, the National Flood Insurance Program coordinator for Wisconsin, said Texas lawmakers should push for stricter regulations in the aftermath of last year’s flood. If they don’t, Galster said, then communities should.

“Now is the time before everybody forgets, while people are still having this conversation,” Galster said.

In the months since July 4, the Texas Legislature formed two new committees to continue investigating the disaster. But at the first joint two-day hearing last week, they only focused on what happened at Camp Mystic.

Some flood experts argue that no regulation short of preventing construction in flood-prone areas would truly guarantee safety. One engineer’s model estimates that the Guadalupe River in Kerr reached more than 30 feet in some places, flowing up to twice the strength of Niagara Falls.

But the flood experts also stress the importance of reducing risk through stronger building standards. The American Society of Civil Engineers has pushed for builders to construct homes more than 2 feet higher than the national standard and design for more ferocious rainstorms.

“The obvious thing is that we shouldn’t be developing in flood plains, but that’s not the answer that anybody wants to accept,” said Kimberly Meitzen, a geography and environmental studies professor at Texas State University.

“Looking back, any legislation we could have passed that could provide at least minimal protection would be helpful,” she later added. “And looking towards the future, this is something a lot of folks are working towards, trying to get this into the next legislative session, but it’s an uphill battle.”

“Not Going Anywhere”

In the absence of stricter state rules after last summer’s devastating floods, some local governments adopted their own, including limiting RV use in flood-prone areas. At least 48 people died in RV campgrounds last July.

Kerr County, however, has not changed its rules in any significant way.

The county has already allowed more than 100 residents to start rebuilding or renovating in flood-prone areas.

County commissioners and Kerr’s top county executive did not respond to the newsrooms’ interview requests and questions.

Katharine Deely and her husband, Pat, sold their Kerr County home after last summer’s storm. They bought the funky vacation house with hand-me-down furniture and maroon linoleum floors from his father and stepmother, not far from where the Crawfords and Bryans fought the river’s current. Usually, Pat Deely spent July 4 there, but instead, he went fishing with a former law firm colleague — a decision his wife believes saved his life.

The damaged house withstood the flood, but the couple, in their late 70s, didn’t have the heart to fix it up. Katharine Deely said it was as if her husband’s fond memories of the many visits there with family washed away with the disaster.

“I’m amazed people are rebuilding there,” Deely said. “Seems like it’d be like living in the graveyard.”

For many, those memories are part of what makes it hard to leave behind properties — places they’ve invested in, where they’ve delighted in watching the sun rise over the river and cherished time swimming and playing with family.

Joan Connor and her husband moved back into their home in Bumble Bee Hills before Christmas.

Connor only managed to save a few items: her loom, chairs her father made, her mother’s granite table. She left many of the rebuilding decisions to her daughter, like what light fixture to install. Volunteers filled the cupboards with dishes, draped towels in the bathroom and hung pictures on the wall.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Connor said. “We don’t think a thing like that will happen again in our lifetime.”

But if it does, Connor said, they will do what they did before.

They’ll face the flood.