https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2025/camp-mystic-alerts-texas-floods/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=acq-nat&utm_campaign=RH-ACQ&utm_content=dtpmonthly_20250714_RH
Camp Mystic Executive Director Richard “Dick” Eastland did not begin to evacuate the young campers asleep in cabins near the rapidly rising Guadalupe River for more than an hour after he received a severe flood warning on his phone from the National Weather Service at 1:14 a.m. on July 4, the family said through a spokesman.
Eastland — who had run the beloved Christian-centered all-girls camp in Hunt, Texas, with his wife since the 1980s — rallied family members, some of whom lived and worked at the camp, on walkie-talkies to “assess the situation” soon after the alert went out, said Jeff Carr, the family’s spokesman. At 2:30 a.m., when rain was falling hard and fast, Eastland decided to begin evacuating campers, Carr said.
Richard Eastland Jr., 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 Jr. said. The National Weather Service’s more urgent alert at 1:14 a.m. 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 campus, killing 27 counselors and campers.
Dick Eastland died trying to rescue some of the youngest girls. Carr said that before making further comment, the surviving Eastland family members were gathering 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 from the nearest town, was relatively isolated. Campers were not allowed to bring cellphones, and counselors had to keep theirs mostly locked away. Some of the cabins were less than 500 feet from the river, a natural feature central to several of the camp’s traditions.
Interviews with nearly two dozen counselors, 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.
As the water encroached, the teenage counselors, 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 staffers eventually realized 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 1:35 a.m., 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 11:28 a.m.
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 2 a.m. — eventually surging to 37.5 feet, according to measurements taken by crews with the U.S. Geological Survey after the floodwaters receded.
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