Posted on 08/20/2025 4:46:20 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Dick Eastland warned for decades about the hidden dangers of the beautiful but volatile Guadalupe River, a peril he saw firsthand while running his family’s youth camp alongside its banks.
Eastland saw floods damage Camp Mystic again and again – and his pregnant wife was even airlifted to a hospital while the camp in central Texas was cut off by floodwaters.
He successfully pushed for a new flood warning system after 10 children at a nearby camp were swept to their deaths in 1987, and in recent years served on the board of the local river authority as it supported renewed efforts to improve warnings on the Guadalupe.
“The river is beautiful,” Eastland told the Austin American-Statesman in 1990. “But you have to respect it.”
But after 27 people were killed at Camp Mystic in last week’s cataclysmic flooding – along with Eastland himself, who died while trying to rescue his young campers – the scale of the tragedy highlights potential missed opportunities by Camp Mystic’s owners and government officials to better mitigate those risks.
About a decade after it was installed, the warning system Eastland had championed in the late ‘80s became antiquated and broken. The river authority ultimately shut it down in 1999, saying it was “unreliable with some of the system’s stations not reporting information,” according to an article in the Kerrville Daily Times.
Yet periodic attempts to adopt a more modern flood-monitoring system, including one with warning sirens that might have alerted campers last week, repeatedly failed to gain traction – stalled by low budgets, some local opposition and a lack of state support.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
So the River Authority said it was better to have no warning system than one that wasn’t 100%.
Bizarre.
Horse...
Barn door...
All bureaucrats and politicians, who had any part in precautionary actions not being taken in this second child-killing disaster, need 20 years in jail...
There’s plenty of fatal hubris on the hands of all involved in putting people in ‘Flash Flood Alley’ without a hardwired audible alarm system. This event was virtually guaranteed to happen.
Not to minimize his death, but he’s the one that continued putting kids in the camp, knowing the risk and shortcomings of the warning system.
I worked in a large computer lab back in the late 90s
Right next to the door was a Big Red Button that said “emergency power cutoff” and yes I wanted to push it.
one day I walked in and there was an electrician messing with the Button, I asked him what was going on and he said
“it was determined that there is .0004% chance that if you hit the button the power will not shut off, so after consultation with the corporate Attys we have decided to remove the button since we could get sued if you pushed it and it did not work”
I still have that Big Red Button.
What a DICK!
Someone ELSES problem???????? Why didn’t the gubmit DO something? /s
NO! What did YOU do?
Close this dangerous camp?
Drive through the camps with a blaring siren (FLOOD WARNING, EVACUATE NOW!)
NOBODY watching the weather reports? NOBODY monitoring water levels upstream 24/7? As owner of the camp, maybe one of those persons should have been YOU!
You got your reward.
The government is not responsible for technological systems to warn people of dangers they already know exist.
Hindsight is sad sometimes.
I personally wouldn’t prefer my tax dollars going towards flood warning systems. Considering the multitude of things they’re wasted on instead.
I personally would* prefer my tax dollars going towards flood warning systems. Considering the multitude of things they’re wasted on instead.
Water dissolves the uncoated aspirin, the clothes pin closes, and completes the circuit. I'd use a lawn mower battery, and larger alarm, to protect a camp, and the cost would be less than $50. Maybe a bit more if have to buy wire, clothes pins, and aspirin.
The plaintiffs will take all the cash and all their land.
Correct. Back in 1987 the camp owners should just have moved the cabins located in the river flood zone above the flood zone.
Yea it seems to me they could hire a 24/7 person on a high platform monitoring the internet for warnings, and the river. Easy for me to say but that would not have been millions of dollars or anything. Have an air horn uo there to alert all; warm the counselors of the meaning of the air horn?
Yeah, but then you need a WiFi/Cellphone connection back to Headquarters for each of the 50 or so ‘sensors’.
I worked in a place that had a Big Red Button by the door.
Someone leaned on it once by accident.
It worked.
After that they installed a safety cover over it.
The cabins were not built in a flood zone alone, but in a floodway, a place where everyone in the Hill Country understands that water rises quickly, and violently. Kerr County and Camp Mystic had a duty to protect these children, and they failed.
As a result of that failure, seven- and eight-year-old girls were swept away. These were not acts of God. They were preventable tragedies.
My daughter wanted to attend Camp Mystic. My wife attended when she was a child. Several of my nieces have been campers there, as have the daughters of close friends.
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