Posted on 07/04/2025 8:20:39 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Months worth of heavy rain fell in a matter of hours on Texas Hill Country, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said.
The region is dotted with century-old summer camps that draw thousands of kids annually.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said about 23 girls attending Camp Mystic, a Christian camp along the Guadalupe River, were unaccounted for Friday afternoon.
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I cannot imagine.
All of the summer camps I went to, in Oregon, were on high ground. No, there was one Boy Scout camp that was on low ground beside the Marcola River.
I looked at the maps, it looks like Guadaloupe River has a series on dams and Camp Mystic was between dams, on a small flat area between slopes.
I didn’t hear anything on the local DC news and the cable news only had short blurbs.
Do any of our local FRiends have updates?.
Did you see the debris in the trees?
I am from this area and camp in and around the Guadalupe all the time. I own a home on Canyon Lake that is about to be tested with can it hold all this flow back the ACR will start releases at 909 MSL the lake is 40 ish percent full so it’s not a given they have to release waters.
These camps do not put cabins down in the River banks they are above the 100 year flood level which was absolutely smashed with this storm. 46+ feet of water came up in under 45 min in the middle of the night as the already soaked ground didn’t have any infill capacity left and 10 inches of rain got dumped in a few hours time. This is a unprecedented event probably the 1:1000 certainly the 1 in 500 event.
People just don’t understand that on limestone bedrock rivers there is no where for the water to go but up and over the banks and when it does it’s not a gentle flood it’s a raging torrent with high velocity as this is the hill country with large gradients to drive such flows.
I am also from the Hill Country, and I understand what you are saying all too well.
This USGS curve shows everything you need to know. 49.3 feet above the River bed that normally runs a foot deep. The vertical slope cannot even keep up with the rise rate. This is the 1:500 event if not the 1:1000
No way you can anticipate or prepare for something like that.
It’s devastating. Very young girls bodies found. Many found alive many still unaccounted for. It’s just horrible.
Canyon Lake? I’m trying to convince my wife to move there. She’s stuck on moving to downtown New Braunfels. I told her that if I fish every day,I’d sleep better at night. She isn’t biting.
I remember the 2002 Canyon Lake flood, 30 inches of rain fell in under 24 hours. Texas has the escarpment it is a vertical wall that pushes Gulf of America tropical moisture upwards and contributes to some of the highest 3,6,12, 24 and 48 hour rainfall totals on the whole continent.
The record event was Thrall Texas 38 inches in 24 hours, Harvey over Houston beat that with 5 feet of rain but needed 48+ hours to do it. Both records happened in Texas Gulf region. When you have these big rain events over limestone bedrock you get flows not seen anywhere else many hundreds of thousands of cubic feet per second nothing stands up to that not even solid concrete it gets eroded away so does solid rock the Canyon Lake spillway nearly failed as a Canyon was carved downstream of its overflow crest if it has eroded back to the crest face the dam would have failed. It came within a few hundred feet of once in a lifetime disaster.
My house is up on stilts it sits 10 feet above the maximum height water could flow over the emergency spillway the last 3 feet would be overtopping the dam itself. We had water half way up the property and it submerged the septic mound what a mess. Fortunately the property has a slope and the back half is above the overtop height of the dam so the trucks, boat and motorcycles all live above that level for good now.
Thos isn’t on national news because the DNC hasn’t issued the talking points yet. The usual BS.
Trump’s fault
Global warming
Cuts to USAID
The BBB
Republican budget cuts
Etc etc etc
Check out Sattler it’s close enough to downtown only 16 miles and you don’t have to deal with tourists all the dang time. I get all butt hurt you cannot eat the bass from Canyon it was for 30+ years in the rain shadow of a coal power plant who’s mercury emissions rained on and bio accumulated in the food web. Men can eat one fish a month or less and women shouldn’t eat it at all.
It has always bothered me that the “100 year flood” line
was named incorrectly.
It is actually calculated as the area that has
a 1% chance of flooding in any given year.
It should be called the “1 percent chance” line.
Instead of the term “100-year flood” a hydrologist would rather describe this extreme hydrologic event as a flood having a 100-year recurrence interval. What this means is described in detail below, but a short explanation is that, according to historical data about rainfall and stream stage, the probability of Soandso River reaching a stage of 20 feet is once in 100 years. In other words, a flood of that magnitude has a 1 percent chance of happening in any year.
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/100-year-flood
I remember bow hunting over southeast of Seguin around October 1992. We set out a bucket and got 18” in one day. We were stranded for three days. When we finally ran out of food, booze, and tobacco, we were able to get out. I still remember when we drove over the Guadalupe River bridge towards Luling. There were boats from Lake McQueeney over the bridge stuck in the tops of cypress trees.
Everyplace I have lived as as pre-teen to adulthood has been declared a disaster zone while I was living there.
I presently live in a rural part of Hawaii that is subject to every natural disaster you can imagine(although I have to drive to get to a blizzard).
I was very careful when I selected my present home and I definitely know where not to camp.
I know Flash floods are scary and deadly.
Hopefully most everyone is safe in Texas. I understand a few aren’t.
Yeah, that puts a different light on the tragedy.
The country in Oregon is either deep gravel beds or volcanic. Both soak up water like a sponge.
Thanks for the tip. As for mercury, since I was a little kid, I’ve consumed a couple of cans of tuna a week. On top of that I’d have swordfish or shark when the rest of the family was having steaks. I’m a walking thermometer.
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