A search and rescue operation at the Guadalupe River near Camp Mystic on July 10, 2025 in Hunt, Texas. Photo / Getty Images
Camp Mystic executive director Richard “Dick” Eastland did not begin to evacuate young campers asleep in cabins near the rapidly rising Guadalupe River for more than an hour after he received a severe flood warning, his family have said through a spokesman.
Eastland rallied family members, some of whom lived and worked at the camp, on walkie-talkies to “assess the situation” soon after receiving the alert on his phone from the National Weather Service at 1.14am on July 4, said Jeff Carr, the family’s spokesman.
Eastland - who died after trying to rescue some of the youngest campers - had run the beloved Christian-centred all-girls camp in Hunt, Texas, with his wife since the 1980s.
At 2.30am, when rain was falling hard and fast, Eastland decided to begin evacuating campers, Carr said.
Richard Eastland jnr, Dick Eastland’s son, said in a brief interview with The Washington Post last week that “the warning came fast”.
The camp had previously been under a flood watch that leadership was aware of, Eastland jnr said.
The National Weather Service’s more urgent alert at 1.14am had warned of “life threatening flash flooding” in Kerr County, where Camp Mystic is in a flood zone.
The alert did not include an evacuation order. The federal agency does not have the authority to issue evacuation orders, a power that typically falls to local governments.
The statements from the family are the first indications that leaders at Camp Mystic – which has spotty cell service and a policy that limits the use of cellphones – received a warning about the flood before it devastated its 725-acre (293ha) campus, killing 27 counsellors and campers.
Carr said that before making further comment, the surviving Eastland family members were gathering on Sunday “really for the first time” to share experiences and knowledge of what happened that morning.
“It will be important to go through this process and avoid sharing information on a piecemeal basis,” he said.
While Camp Mystic was not the only camp in the area to delay its evacuation, a Post examination found that many of the elements that made it special for generations of Texas girls also heightened its risk that night.
The camp, six miles (9.65km) from the nearest town, was relatively isolated.
Campers were not allowed to bring cellphones, and counsellors had to keep theirs mostly locked away.
Some of the cabins were less than 500 feet (152m) from the river, a natural feature central to several of the camp’s traditions.
Interviews with nearly two dozen counsellors, emergency officials, parents and experts reveal that as Dick Eastland conferred with family members and other employees about how to respond to the alert, the camp descended into chaos as the floodwaters rose.
Camp Mystic sits at the confluence of the South Fork Guadalupe River and Cypress Creek. In the early hours on July 4, about 550 campers slept in their cabins.
One of the cabins, Bubble Inn, was hit hardest by the flood. None of the campers that were staying in this cabin has been found alive.
Many cabins here were built in high-risk flood zones, as defined by FEMA. But the waters reached buildings beyond these boundaries, including the Handy Hut cabin.
Satellite data from ICEYE measured water levels with radar, giving an estimate of the flooding. Water levels rose to at least 4ft (1.2m) around many of the cabins.
Where the waterways meet, the collective force created a swirl, pushing the Guadalupe River backward against itself and uphill toward more cabins. The fast current hitting against a sharp bend in the terrain thrust water and debris outward with centrifugal force.
Meanwhile, Cypress Creek and an ephemeral stream from the neighbouring ravine merged with the South Fork Guadalupe River at such speed that the river flow probably reversed upstream, widening the floodwaters and creating whirling eddies.
As the water encroached, the teenage counsellors, cut off from others, were left to make frantic life-and-death decisions.
They began rousting girls from their cabins, the younger campers screaming or crying as they waited for help or were ushered to higher ground.
Dick Eastland, 70, and other staff eventually realised that the Bubble Inn and Twins cabins, which held the littlest girls – some as young as 8 – were in the most danger, Eastland Jr. said. A swirling eddy of water had formed from two directions.
Dick Eastland and others on-site had walkie-talkies, which were used to alert the group around 1.35am, the family said. Whether camp leaders called 911 is still unclear, but the Hunt Volunteer Fire Department’s chief told The Post he did not recall any requests for help coming from the camp.
The camp had a loudspeaker system, but it would have gone silent without electricity.
Parents of surviving children said they endured hours of reports on social media and on news outlets of water rescues, and deaths and devastation wrought by the flood, before they received communication from the camp. The first official email was sent from the camp at 11.28am.
Serena Aldrich, a lawyer from San Antonio whose two girls were rescued from Camp Mystic, said leaders “should have been taking every precaution,” given the risk.
“My opinion is that they should have been paying attention to those warnings and evacuated the camp,” she said.
“The flooding is not a new thing. I don’t know if it’s ever been to epic proportions like that, but ignoring the warnings doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
The National Weather Service alert predicted significantly less rainfall than what ultimately reached the camp.
As the blinding rain sluiced down, the Guadalupe River downstream began its historic rise just before 2am – eventually surging to 37.5 feet (11.4m), according to measurements taken by crews with the US Geological Survey after the floodwaters receded.
In his previous interview, Eastland jnr, 48, the head chef at the camp, said he and others in charge on July 4 did not expect the ferocity of the flood to come.
“It was tremendous and it was fast and we’ve never had water this high, ever,” he said. A 1939 flood had reached the floor of the dining hall at the nearly 100-year-old camp, he noted, but in this flood, “every minute was another foot”.
Eastland jnr’s brother Edward waded through the water to rescue the girls in the Twins cabins, and his father moved toward Bubble Inn. Dick Eastland radioed that he needed help.
Then, nothing.
“In the darkness of night, rain coming down, just chaos,” Eastland Jr. said. “I just can’t believe …”
His voice trailed away.
For decades, summer camps like Mystic have been considered a rite of passage for families in Texas and beyond. Girls hike, canoe, fish and worship at the camp, which was founded in 1926, and has been owned by the same family for decades. Tuition was $7600 for a four-week term.
The camp has clung tightly to its traditions: It allowed girls sugary treats only on special occasions. Campers brought compact disc players because they were not allowed phones or other devices with screens.
Executive directors Dick and Tweety Eastland, who have been involved with the camp since 1974, were like parents to the girls. They were named the directors in 1987, according to a 2011 Texas Monthly story. Dick taught fishing, and Tweety was like “sunshine and rainbows and unicorns – that was just her,” recalled Aldrich, a former camper.
The Eastlands had four boys, three of whom are involved in the camp (a fourth, James, died in 2015). Aside from Eastland jnr running the dining hall, Edward and his wife, Mary Liz, are the camp’s directors. The last son, Britt, and his wife, Catie, run a nearby sister camp, according to Mystic’s website.
The relative isolation and peaceful backdrop of Camp Mystic, set on the river and dotted with cypress trees, were part of its allure for decades, but the idyll masked the danger.
It was almost inevitable that the cabins at Camp Mystic would experience massive flooding, three experts said. The Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2013 approved appeals from Camp Mystic to exempt several structures from a flood zone designation, according to federal records.
“It’s just obvious that this is a place that should never have been built upon,” said Oliver Wing, the chief scientific officer at Fathom, a water risk intelligence firm. “There should not be a single inhabited structure in a floodway. … It’s unforgivable what’s happened here.”
The camp long embraced the ebbs and flows of the river that was central to its ethos – girls competed in canoe races, went for swims and were baptised in its waters. Minor flooding events were common. The older girls on “Senior Hill” would routinely be cut off when the walkway along Cypress Creek was impassable in the mornings, so camp leaders would bring them food by canoe, Aldrich recalled.
But other, more serious events had affected camps in the area. In July 1987, 10 teenagers were killed as they fled a flash flood at Pot O’ Gold Ranch, a Christian camp also along the Guadalupe River. A year later, two brothers were swept away in flash floods at the Bear Creek Scout Reservation camp.
In 1985, trapped by winter flooding, Tweety Eastland had to be airlifted by a military helicopter from Camp Mystic to give birth at a hospital, according to news reports at the time.
Mark Nacol, an attorney for the families that sued and won a private settlement in the Pot O’ Gold case, said last week that he was stunned that flooding had again led to such tragedy.
He recalled telling the jury four decades ago that the Guadalupe “is a beautiful, beautiful river, but she ain’t no lady”. The lesson back then was the need for sirens and alarms.
An automated flood warning system that relied on water gauges was installed along the Guadalupe in 1989. But a decade later, the company that monitored it had closed, and river authorities shut it down. So locals returned to “the old-fashioned way,” with river spotters issuing warnings via telephone up and down the waterway, according to the Kerrville Daily Times.
The Post reported last week that Kerr County officials had the technology to turn every cellphone in the river valley into an alarm – the blaring tone similar to Amber Alerts – but they did not use it to alert people in the area until more than two days after the height of the crisis, as more rain fell and threatened further flooding.
The camp had a written disaster plan that staff had been trained on, according to a state health inspector who visited on July 2 and said everything was in working order.
But as the waters began rising around 2am, counsellors were given conflicting messages about how to keep the approximately 550 campers safe from the danger around them, according to interviews.
Ainslie Bashara, 19, a counsellor for the Giggle Box cabin for girls 8 to 10 years old, told The Post that she sat anxiously watching her campers through flashes of lightning – checking her watch at 1.58am. Not long after, she heard 8-year-olds in a nearby cabin start shrieking, and then saw older girls running up the road with blankets and pillows to the recreation hall on higher ground.
“Are we staying or leaving?” she yelled out the window.
“Stay in your cabin!” she recalled a staff member shouting back.
She and the other counsellors decided to leave when water breached their cabin around 3am. After a staff member removed the window screens from the outside, allowing them to escape, the counsellors took the girls through waist-high water and up a nearby hill. She said she could hear girls in another cabin begging for help over the roaring river.
Lara Clement said her daughter, Nancy, an 18-year-old counsellor and camp photographer, was woken up by the rain at 1.30am. As water rushed inside the staff cabin, the Baylor University student climbed to the roof. She was still there at 5am, when she texted her mother that she was safe.
Aldrich said the sound of thunder woke her 12-year-old daughter, who was bunking in the Look Out cabin on Senior Hill. Her counsellors soon appeared and moved the girls to a higher-elevation cabin, where they hunkered down for hours, making up silly songs.
Aldrich’s younger daughter, 9, who slept in an area closer to the river called “The Flats,” was woken by her counsellor, who told the campers to form buddy teams.
The counsellors led the girls, still in their pyjamas and some without shoes, through chest-high water to a nearby hill. Once they reached the top, they sheltered in a pavilion near the camp’s famous lighted sign that spells “MYSTIC”. It had gone dark.
The group went to the dining hall of the neighbouring camp run by the Eastlands, and they were later evacuated by helicopter.
Eastland Jr. said the family eventually located his brother, Edward, clinging to a tree with “10 to 12” girls about 200 yards (182m) from their cabin. They had all survived.
His father was found in a black SUV with three other girls from the camp that he had been trying to rescue. No one made it. Dick Eastland died on the way to the hospital, authorities said.
In interviews, parents faulted not only the camp, but also Kerr County and other authorities for not responding quickly to the Weather Service’s and other warnings. Kerr County officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Kerr County Judge Robert Kelly said at a news conference on July 5 that “no one knew this kind of flood was coming”.
“This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States, and we deal with floods on a regular basis,” he said. “When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here. None whatsoever.”
More than 10 inches (25cm) of rain fell in parts of the area surrounding Camp Mystic on July 4, nearly all of it at astonishing rates in the early morning hours.
The basin feeding into the South Fork Guadalupe River saw some of the most extreme rainfall, with water rushing down steep, rocky slopes into streams running past Camp Mystic. In such a landscape, “it’s almost instant translation from rainfall to river flow,” Wing said.
By 4.35am, the Guadalupe River downstream in Hunt had reached 29.5 feet (9m) after surging more than 12 feet (3.65m) in the previous hour. It was rushing with 2800 times the normal amount of water, according to a Post analysis of federal river gauge data.
Floodwaters inundated and destroyed the gauge shortly after, according to a US Geological Survey spokesperson. The Guadalupe River surpassed its previous record flood height by nearly a foot, reaching 37.5 feet (11.4m) on the morning of July 4.
Clement, whose daughter is a counsellor, said she is reluctant to criticise the staff’s decisions, saying, “I don’t know what could have been done differently, other than the idea of evacuating earlier, and just assuming the worst”.
Lee Pool, the chief of the Hunt Volunteer Fire Department, said he was woken early in the morning by radio chatter about the river starting to flood. Pool headed toward the river but encountered roads blocked by surging floodwaters. As the water kept rising, Pool said, he knew his 36-member volunteer force – the only fire department in that area – was overwhelmed.
Pool does not recall receiving requests for help from Camp Mystic, which is about eight miles (12.9km) from the fire station.
“I didn’t hear anything about Camp Mystic,” said Pool, 53, who has been the fire chief for eight years. “There was just a lot of water, and I knew everyone was affected.”
After the immediate surge of floods receded, camp officials seemed to have struggled on their own for hours to manage the rescue operation. They did not officially contact most parents, many of whom were growing hysterical seeing the terrifying images of the flood online and on the news, until the late morning, according to emails obtained by The Post.
The mother of one survivor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, said that she and other mothers were repeatedly trying to call the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office for information about the girls’ fate that morning.
She reached one deputy who “said they had no communication with Mystic,” she recounted. “When he couldn’t tell me anything about what was going on – that was frankly terrifying.”
At 7.48am, Aldrich sent a private text to Mary Liz Eastland, the camp co-director, whom she had known since childhood, when they had both been campers at Mystic. The two were also in a group chat of 2001 camp alumni.
“I’m getting lots of nervous texts from my look out cabin moms and mother in law. I’m sure you’re extremely busy. Is everyone ok and safe? Hungry and/or thirsty is fine, as long as no one washed away,” Aldrich wrote.
No answer.
At 9.09am, Aldrich heard back from Mary Liz on the 2001 Camp Mystic group chat.
“Your girls are ok,” Mary Liz texted.
“ML, are you ok??” Aldrich texted back.
“No,” she said.
“Sending all the love I can,” Aldrich said. Mary Liz put a heart emoji on that text.
At 11.28am, parents received the first email communication from the camp. Staff had decided to call only the parents whose children were missing, officials said at the time.
“Camp Mystic Families,” the email said, “We have sustained catastrophic level floods. We have no power, water, or wifi. … If your daughter is not accounted for you have been notified. If you have not been personally contacted then your daughter is accounted for.”
Mary Liz texted other mums and alumni groups, saying, “We need evacuation vehicles for the current campers here,” according to one mum’s group thread obtained by The Post.
“Like military tanks or something. If you have a connection please reach out to Mary Liz.”
The next email came at 2.41pm and said the campers were being evacuated by helicopter in small groups to an elementary school in the nearby town of Ingram, which had become an emergency command centre.
Aldrich and her sister started driving, reaching the school around 5.30pm. When Aldrich hugged her daughters for the first time, they all wept.
Earlier that afternoon, the director of the adjacent Cypress Lake location gathered the campus’ counsellors to tell them about the catastrophe that had engulfed the Guadalupe campus overnight.
One of those counsellors, Emma Claire Kraft, 20, recalled going back to her cabin and telling her young campers that girls from the other camp might join them for a sleepover.
Kraft, who had been baptised in Cypress Creek that summer, said she and her fellow counsellors didn’t tell the girls what had happened, to keep them calm. They played card games and focused on other rainy-day activities.
After dinner, the girls from Kraft’s cabin and one other piled into a boat hitched to the back of a truck to evacuate.
As the devastation at their sister campus came into view, she wanted to protect her young campers. She told the girls to close their eyes.
Tim Craig, John Woodrow Cox, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Imogen Piper, Niko Kommenda, Daranee Balachandar, Aaron Schaffer, Alice Crites, Monika Mathur, Razzan Nakhlawi and Beck Snyder contributed to this report.
For reconstructing and understanding the flood risks at Camp Mystic, The Washington Post consulted the expertise of: Hatim Sharif, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio; Allison C. Reilly, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park; Briana Wyatt, a professor of soil physics and hydrology at Texas A&M University; and Oliver Wing, the chief scientific officer at Fathom.