The adult leader of Camp Mystic, the Texas summer camp where 27 children and counselors died in the Hill Country floods, waited more than an hour after receiving a severe flood warning before initiating an evacuation, it was disclosed on Monday.
Richard “Dick” Eastland, who had run the popular all-girls, Christian-values sleepaway camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River with his family since the 1980s, was among the fatalities after a wall of water rushed through the camp early on 4 July.
A spokesperson for the Eastland family told the Washington Post that a National Weather Service (NWS) alert was sent to his phone at 1.14am warning of “life threatening flash flooding”, and only at 2.30am, with heavy rain still falling and the river level rising fast, he made the decision to begin evacuations.
The account sheds new light on a chaotic few hours at the campsite, where almost 700 girls were sleeping in dormitories. Campers were not allowed to bring mobile phones, and counselors were made to surrender theirs, leaving them unable to see the emergency alerts themselves, two teenage Mexican counselors previously revealed.
The family spokesperson, Jeff Carr, said Eastland spent time after receiving the alert conferring with family members, some of whom lived and worked at the 725-acre camp as staff. The Post said the NWS alert did not contain an order or recommendation for evacuation, a power it said rests with local government officials.
Separately, the actions of authorities in Kerr county, which bore the brunt of the flooding that killed 132 and left 160 missing, continue to come under scrutiny.
Carr said staff communicated with each other by walkie-talkie about how to respond – and that Eastland eventually ordered an evacuation after realizing that the situation had become critical, particularly at dormitories closest to the river containing some of the youngest campers.
Eastland, 70, died after his truck was swept away as he tried to move a group of small girls to safety, Carr said. Many of the fatalities occurred in the Bubble Inn and Twins cabins, which the Post analysis said were caught between swirling eddies rising to 4ft. Ultimately the Guadalupe River crested at 37.5ft, the US Geological Survey said.
Many of the teenage counselors in charge of the dormitories were left to make instant life-or-death decisions on their own, having lost contact with adult supervisors, the Post said.
Carr added that the Eastland family wanted to put out the information about the timeline to try to avoid speculation. “It will be important to go through this process and avoid sharing information on a piecemeal basis,” he said following a family meeting on Sunday, which he said was the first real opportunity they had to meet and grieve together.
While the statement explains some of the decisions by camp staff, others will continue to be questioned. The chief of the Hunt volunteer fire department, closest to Camp Mystic, told the newspaper it did not receive any calls for help from the camp. Meanwhile, families of some of the campers have said they did not receive any notification from the camp about the situation until an email shortly before 11.30am.
The search for those still missing was halted in some places on Sunday and Monday after further heavy rain created dangerous conditions and fears of further flooding.
At a meeting of the Kerr county commission on Monday morning, the first since the disaster, officials revealed grim new details of the aftermath of the emergency. “We’ve heard accounts of trailer after trailer after trailer being swept into the river with families in them. [We] can’t find the trailers, we don’t know how many of them there are,” the county judge, Rob Kelly, said.
One trailer was found “completely covered in gravel” 27ft below the surface of the river, he said, adding that sonar crews were searching the river and local lakes. Two reservoir lakes attached to the river would be drained to aid the search, officials said.
The Kerr county sheriff, Larry Leitha, told the meeting that his office’s search and recovery operation could last up to six months, CNN reported.
The sheriff’s office said 2,200 people from multiple local, state and federal agencies had been deployed to assist in the recovery effort.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
