I keep hearing about comparisons to the 1987 floods because of how high the water was then and now. Think about this:

The world was very different in 1987. Cell phones and the internet were practically non existent. Communication isn't even in the same universe. We need to commit ourselves right now to putting some kind of a state of the art warning system in place to get people out before this happens again. The technology is there. Weather forecasting and reporting is light years ahead in the last 38 years. As soon as a threat happens, there should be an automatic cell phone alert to everyone in the area. We should put in sirens that go off to wake everyone up if it's in the middle of the night. If there's not reliable power, put a solar panel there. Don't get cell coverage in an area? Put a damn tower in there. Not so people can send texts and shop, but to communicate when there's an emergency. Get it working, and then test the systems regularly. If you know an area is vulnerable, we need to do the right thing and put countermeasures in place. Have every single summer camp do flood drills as soon as the kids arrive, and then do surprise ones. Cruise ships do lifeboat drills, and they almost never have tragedies like this. Why can't we do something like this?? Schools do fire drills, why not camps for this situation??

Please tell me I'm not wrong about this. There's so many bright minds out there that would love to help put some kind of comprehensive system so this NEVER happens again. Let's get a meeting of the minds going as soon as possible to make this happen now. Do it in the memory of all the children who are likely gone. Let their family's loss carry forward to make a difference going forward. No more tragedies.

I'd like to see the Governor take the lead on this. Get the A&M Emergency Management people to lead some kind of a 'Blue Ribbon Committee' to bring in Weather, communication, river, power, transportation and any other experts to put all the best ideas out there and then put some kind of executable and comprehensive plan in place.

There will be another flood. Period. I don't want it to ever be 'Look it was even worse than the 1987 floods. We did the best we could, but I didn't think it was that bad'.

Again, please tell me I'm not wrong on this. Start working on it as soon as possible. I mean Monday morning start putting a plan together.

Regardless of big government solutions, people should install their own alarms. While this river rose 10s of feet in less than an hour, it wasn't instant. Even 3 minutes notice would save lives.

We could also quit building in the floodway but who wants to give up their view or river access.

rwtxag83 said:

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I keep hearing about comparisons to the 1987 floods because of how high the water was then and now. Think about this:

The world was very different in 1987. Cell phones and the internet were practically non existent. Communication isn't even in the same universe. We need to commit ourselves right now to putting some kind of a state of the art warning system in place to get people out before this happens again. The technology is there. Weather forecasting and reporting is light years ahead in the last 38 years. As soon as a threat happens, there should be an automatic cell phone alert to everyone in the area. We should put in sirens that go off to wake everyone up if it's in the middle of the night. If there's not reliable power, put a solar panel there. Don't get cell coverage in an area? Put a damn tower in there. Not so people can send texts and shop, but to communicate when there's an emergency. Get it working, and then test the systems regularly. If you know an area is vulnerable, we need to do the right thing and put countermeasures in place. Have every single summer camp do flood drills as soon as the kids arrive, and then do surprise ones. Cruise ships do lifeboat drills, and they almost never have tragedies like this. Why can't we do something like this?? Schools do fire drills, why not camps for this situation??

Please tell me I'm not wrong about this. There's so many bright minds out there that would love to help put some kind of comprehensive system so this NEVER happens again. Let's get a meeting of the minds going as soon as possible to make this happen now. Do it in the memory of all the children who are likely gone. Let their family's loss carry forward to make a difference going forward. No more tragedies.

I'd like to see the Governor take the lead on this. Get the A&M Emergency Management people to lead some kind of a 'Blue Ribbon Committee' to bring in Weather, communication, river, power, transportation and any other experts to put all the best ideas out there and then put some kind of executable and comprehensive plan in place.

There will be another flood. Period. I don't want it to ever be 'Look it was even worse than the 1987 floods. We did the best we could, but I didn't think it was that bad'.

Again, please tell me I'm not wrong on this. Start working on it as soon as possible. I mean Monday morning start putting a plan together.

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IIRC such systems are in place and have been for years. My parents were caught in a Thompson River flood due to a dam failure in late 70's or early 80's in Estes Park Colorado. They got a warning to seek higher ground about 10 minutes before flood waters hit. There was some type of warning system for the affected area.

It is always easy to Monday morning QB this type of disaster. The issue with any plan like what you propose is when they warn about the risk and cause an evacuation, many people lose faith in the system and ignore it.

Essentially everything you propose is already available and used and many ignore it.

A better system is for people/businesses to use the tools you mention and take personal responsibility rather than rely on the government. Once the government gets involved, the results are worse.

Sirens with automatic triggers is not hard.

Cell phones isn't enough

Also you need qualified people awake in the middle of the night to see what is happening real time. Good luck

There may be systems in place, but it sure didn't seem like it in this case. Even if there were, did they work? I think the dead and missing answer that a big 'NO'.

Do any of these camps actually practice what they are supposed to do if a flood happens? Maybe, but I've never heard of it. Are there sirens that go off to wake everybody? I haven't heard anybody yet say 'We heard the sirens and got up and got out in time!'

We don't have a working, comprehensive system that is effective. If we did, this wouldn't have happened. Emergency systems won't work if you aren't doing any kind of rehearsals/simulations. This needs to happen throughout the affected area, not just some isolated parts.

lb3 said:

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Regardless of big government solutions, people should install their own alarms. While this river rose 10s of feet in less than an hour, it wasn't instant. Even 3 minutes notice would save lives.

We could also quit building in the floodway but who wants to give up their view or river access.

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Sort of. If you watch the videos the wall of water is pretty instant.

When they say it rise 27 feet in 45 minutes, half of that happens in about two minutes. I saw a video of the wall earlier where people were standing in knee deep water and barely made it 50 feet to get up the side of a hill. Within seconds where they had been standing was ten feet under water.

The speed it rises is always underestimated.

Camp Mystic was executing their plan when the wall of water hit. The cabins that washed away were 30-35 feet above the water line and just minutes before being washed away were dry.

They were actually the highest cabins on the property. They had evacuated the lower cabins and were going to the higher ones when the wave hit.

Edit to add, the reason we are missing 20 girls and not 120 girls is the building they evacuated too is two stories and did not wash away.

2nd edit-this is posted in another thread. I'm just relaying the story.

Systems can always be better.

But if you design that system for a storm that has 0.5% chance happening, someday that 0.2% chance storm will hit, and so on.

We should strive for making the best systems better, but can't ever assume that the best-designed systems are fail proof.


I guess the point of all that is that sometimes things are out of our control, even when everyone does the very best with whatever information and resources they have. God be with all those directly and indirectly impacted by these latest storms.

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Please tell me I'm not wrong about this. There's so many bright minds out there that would love to help put some kind of comprehensive system so this NEVER happens again. Let's get a meeting of the minds going as soon as possible to make this happen now. Do it in the memory of all the children who are likely gone. Let their family's loss carry forward to make a difference going forward. No more tragedies.

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Never is a long time when you are talking about risk, statistics, probability, and other people's money. I am not making light of any of this tragedy. I just don't think you realize what you are asking for when you use absolutist language.

agsalaska said:

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Camp Mystic was executing their plan when the wall of water hit. The cabins that washed away were 30-35 feet above the water line and just minutes before being washed away were dry.

They were actually the highest cabins on the property. They had evacuated the lower cabins and were going to the higher ones when the wave hit.

Edit to add, the reason we are missing 20 girls and not 120 girls is the building they evacuated too is two stories and did not wash away.

2nd edit-this is posted in another thread. I'm just relaying the story.

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This is good news, partially. They had a system, but it didn't work well enough to get all the kids out. It's very good for the 100 who made it, but not good enough.

This is the thread to talk about what ifs, yes?

How about this....don't build your house in the river bed or watershed? When you look at a topo map, you will clearly see boundaries of the flood top. It does not matter if "peepaw hadn't seen a flood like that since 1932. If the evidence is there, it flooded once and it will flood again.

The idea that we need to have state of the art warning systems so we can keep doing dumb things is not the best idea to me. Yes, we need that, but it should be a last resort system abused so we can justify putting structures in unsafe locations.

We need not consider what if's for the situation at hand. The variables that coalesced to the situation yesterday were such that there was no good outcome to be had. They did the best they could with the information available at the time.

To the OP point, you already have flood gauges. Those flood gauges already have wireless communication. My 14 year old could probably write an app to link that data paired with geolocated GIS data to devise a live 'water wall' alert with some pretty basic spatial math.

"The water is 20' high at point A, 15' high at point B, 5' High at point C with a rise rate of X per minute...you live at point D, evacuate immediately."

But, again, even with that information, the TRUE scope of the flood would likely have resulted in minimized effort and loss of life. I just don't think this particular situation ends differently in any case whatsoever short of not having the camp in that spot on 7/4/2025. That simple to me.

Burdizzo said:

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Quote:

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Please tell me I'm not wrong about this. There's so many bright minds out there that would love to help put some kind of comprehensive system so this NEVER happens again. Let's get a meeting of the minds going as soon as possible to make this happen now. Do it in the memory of all the children who are likely gone. Let their family's loss carry forward to make a difference going forward. No more tragedies.

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Never is a long time when you are talking about risk, statistics, probability, and other people's money. I am not making light of any of this tragedy. I just don't think you realize what you are asking for.

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I hear you, and it's best not to talk in absolutes, but we have to do better.

Quote:

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I just don't think you realize what you are asking for.

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Is this what you say to the 20 parents of the kids who are gone? Would you say 'OK, I guess you're right' if it were your kid? I know I wouldn't, and this is what I'm trying to get at.

I don't think it would be that expensive. How expensive is the litigation going to be when these parents decide to come after everybody who should have done better?

rwtxag83 said:

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agsalaska said:

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Camp Mystic was executing their plan when the wall of water hit. The cabins that washed away were 30-35 feet above the water line and just minutes before being washed away were dry.

They were actually the highest cabins on the property. They had evacuated the lower cabins and were going to the higher ones when the wave hit.

Edit to add, the reason we are missing 20 girls and not 120 girls is the building they evacuated too is two stories and did not wash away.

2nd edit-this is posted in another thread. I'm just relaying the story.

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This is good news, partially. They had a system, but it didn't work well enough to get all the kids out. It's very good for the 100 who made it, but not good enough.

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True. But I'm ok accepting that there are some extremes that you just cannot prepare for. These buildings had been there for over 100 years and water had never reached them or really come close. And there is nowhere else to go.

It was biblical.

Ah, yes. The old "what do you tell the parents" trump card.

I have empathy and sympathy for the victims and the families. One of my childhood friends is still missing too. But I have never been good with expressing the sorrow. What I know is that I am in a similar field that deals with public works and public safety. What I know is that we don't allways have a budget to build anything that is absolutely, positively, never going to fail. We deal is probability, statistics, risks, budget, and a reasonable amount of care to ensure things are safe. Sometimes we fail. That's risk. That's life. Sometimes things are out of our control as humans.

You are the person who used "never" and then didn't explain how we are supposed to design to that. We can do better, but we will never be perfect.

Good post.

They had warning and were executing an evacuation plan, but the water level rose too much. Sometimes those tail events are much worse than you plan for.

All I'll say is this. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for Kerr County more than 12 hours ahead of the catastrophic flood. A flash flood warning was issued for Hunt & Ingram 3 HOURS before the Guadalupe started to climb.

They did their job and they did it well

— Avery Tomasco (@averytomascowx) July 5, 2025

Yep.

Also, there are different levels of floods. They issued a flood watch 12 hours in advance. They issue flood watches all of the time. This was a once in several lifetimes flood.

From what I have read, and maybe I'm just focused on the Mystic tragedy, but from what I've read they did everything they could.

Unfortunately budget is always an issue. If a town only has $50K to spend in a year, do they add a flood warning system, maintain their culverts, make spot repairs to some roads, or repair their water supply system?

It's a real issue that small towns and rural counties face.

Sometimes tragedies happen. Natural disasters happen, we will never be able to stop all of them. Even if we wrap all of our kids in bubble wrap and keep them in their padded rooms, something could still happen. One of the scary parts of life is death, but you never experience real life without it and trying to eliminate every risk will take up your whole life.

Don't build habitable strictures in shaded zone X or anything that starts with A.

There, I solved the issue.

I'm not trying to play trump cards. Bilical event--I get it. I think we can still do better. Somehow, someway we can do better. If some kind of signal got to the staff even 10 minutes earlier. If maybe the campers had been ready to go. Something more than what they did.


I have a feeling that attendance at these camps will dwindle drastically over the next few years. I wouldn't send my kid there like this.

as far as communication goes

with 5G/CBRS/LTE

you can build out a radio plan for a community to facilitate communication for emergency personnel and first responders. You could plan for the whole city or just areas of importance like evac zones, pathways or to hazardous outpost.

In an emergency situation or for emergency personnel you can have dedicated devices that are the only things that are allowed to access those radios. These end devices still have full access to everything.

5G frequencies generally allow for an end device to achieve communications with minimal signal.

Burdizzo said:

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What I know is that I am in a similar field that deals with public works and public safety. What I know is that we don't allways have a budget to build anything that is absolutely, positively, never going to fail. We deal is probability, statistics, risks, budget, and a reasonable amount of care to ensure things are safe. Sometimes we fail. That's risk. That's life. Sometimes things are out of our control as humans.

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Sadly, it is so true. Risk tolerance and mitigation, there is only so much you can spend to take that mitigation up to 95%. Then it would be (just tossing a number out there) maybe the same amount of money to take it to 97%. Then double that money to take it to 98%. And we are still not at "never again". This is tragic, terrible, horrible. I can't even imagine when we dropped our daughter of decades ago at a camp up near Hunt that she wouldn't come home.

There are just physical, budget, and mitigation limits that can never be achieved.

I'd send my kid to one. If it's not on a river, it's in an area that can be hit by tornados. Or wild fires. Or who knows what. Life comes with inherent risk. It always will. We can't always engineer our way to 100% safety. And even if we could we don't have the resources for every scenario.

I grew up near the Sabinal river. When we got heavy rain on the headwaters, people would call and alert friends and family downstream. A land line call in the middle of the night really got your attention back in those days.

I send my kids down there every year. I went when I was a kid. And would send them again. You can't protect yourself from everything. You going to send them to a camp in Oklahoma? What about those tornadoes? Do you let them fly? How about those planes that crashed.

Kids have been going to camp down there for 100 years. Literally hundreds of thousands of kids.

Yea we can always do better. But understanding the area and hearing the actual story of what happened that night…. I wouldn't make any assumptions on timing.

rwtxag83 said:

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I'm not trying to play trump cards. Bilical event--I get it. I think we can still do better. Somehow, someway we can do better. If some kind of signal got to the staff even 10 minutes earlier. If maybe the campers had been ready to go. Something more than what they did.


I have a feeling that attendance at these camps will dwindle drastically over the next few years. I wouldn't send my kid there like this.

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From my understanding the camp was actively moving campers as quickly as possible and taking them to where they thought was safest from the very beginning. Even if you know a 30 foot wall of water is coming in 15 minutes, are you going to be able to move 150 people to safety at 3am? There's only so much you can plan for, even with perfect information.

This isn't a complicated problem. Every lift station in America has an audible alarm and red light to alert operators that the pump has failed and a discharge of raw sewage is imminent.

Any domicile in a flash flood zone should have similar alarms in place. Alarms start at $69 on Amazon.

Camp Mystic had no chance. Yes there was a lot of rain, but no one could predict that the wall of water would channelize around the South Fork. The "early" warnings were issued for Hunt and Mystic was already dealing with it being 6 miles up river. The only thing that would have saved campers is an evacuation once the flash flood watch was issued. In hindsight, that would have been the right call, but how many flash flood watches would that be overkill for in 100 years? I'm curious if Camp Mystic used a flood analyst service to analyze flood risks in real-time. The only reason this wasn't worse is that the other camps in that area were on break.

I still maintain there was not enough warning for Kerrville proper and I am interested to see what changes will be made for that in the coming years.

It's not going to matter about sending these kids anymore - these camps destroyed with owner-operators deceased. The estates of the children will take what's left. The land will be parceled out in due time.

Phatbob said:

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rwtxag83 said:

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I'm not trying to play trump cards. Bilical event--I get it. I think we can still do better. Somehow, someway we can do better. If some kind of signal got to the staff even 10 minutes earlier. If maybe the campers had been ready to go. Something more than what they did.


I have a feeling that attendance at these camps will dwindle drastically over the next few years. I wouldn't send my kid there like this.

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From my understanding the camp was actively moving campers as quickly as possible and taking them to where they thought was safest from the very beginning. Even if you know a 30 foot wall of water is coming in 15 minutes, are you going to be able to move 150 people to safety at 3am? There's only so much you can plan for, even with perfect information.

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Exactly my point. I think assuming they could have moved faster or know earlier is just that, an assumption. He is making an assumption that they could have acted earlier if they had known. Sounds like they were moving pretty quickly.

Biblical.

Vista was on break. My daughter was headed there Monday for her last year. Obviously that's all cancelled.

Yes Vista could have been another disaster, especially the boys side.


Agreed Mystic had no chance.

Tony Franklins Other Shoe said:

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Burdizzo said:

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What I know is that I am in a similar field that deals with public works and public safety. What I know is that we don't allways have a budget to build anything that is absolutely, positively, never going to fail. We deal is probability, statistics, risks, budget, and a reasonable amount of care to ensure things are safe. Sometimes we fail. That's risk. That's life. Sometimes things are out of our control as humans.

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Sadly, it is so true. Risk tolerance and mitigation, there is only so much you can spend to take that mitigation up to 95%. Then it would be (just tossing a number out there) maybe the same amount of money to take it to 97%. Then double that money to take it to 98%. And we are still not at "never again". This is tragic, terrible, horrible. I can't even imagine when we dropped our daughter of decades ago at a camp up near Hunt that she wouldn't come home.

There are just physical, budget, and mitigation limits that can never be achieved.

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Not to those who lost someone {very sorry} but it's honestly a blessing or miracle that we probably have less than 50 deaths considering what just happened. I can't fathom being through this event

pacecar02 said:

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as far as communication goes

with 5G/CBRS/LTE

you can build out a radio plan for a community to facilitate communication for emergency personnel and first responders. You could plan for the whole city or just areas of importance like evac zones, pathways or to hazardous outpost.

In an emergency situation or for emergency personnel you can have dedicated devices that are the only things that are allowed to access those radios. These end devices still have full access to everything.

5G frequencies generally allow for an end device to achieve communications with minimal signal.

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Better communication out there would probably go a long way to improving safety. I took scouts on several trips to Bear Creek Scout Reserve which is in a valley not far from Mystic and Junta, and cell coverage is spotty at best. I think all they have there is one landline phone and weak Internet service. I understand the need to get off the grid, but reliable communication is critical in an emergency.