Camp Mystic’s owner warned of floods for decades. Then the river killed him

A volunteer holds a Camp Mystic t-shirt and pink backpack in Comfort, Texas, as search and rescue efforts continued on July 6. (Danielle Villasana/The Washington Post/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

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.

At Camp Mystic, meanwhile, several of the cabins that were hit hardest in the flooding were in an area identified by the federal government as the highest-risk location for inundations from the Guadalupe. Even as the camp built new cabins in a less-risky flood zone elsewhere on its property, nothing was done to relocate the buildings in the most danger.

“Camp officials might have not been aware of flood risk when they first built the cabins,” before the county even had flood maps, said Anna Serra-Llobet, a University of California-Berkeley researcher who studies flood risk. But after the recent construction, she said, officials should have realized they were in an area of “severe hazard.”

Eastland has been praised as a hero for his efforts to save campers on Friday and remembered as a beloved figure by generations who spent their summers in the idyllic riverside refuge. His legacy is less clear as a public steward of the sometimes deadly river that ultimately took his life.

“If he wasn’t going to die of natural causes, this was the only other way—saving the girls that he so loved and cared for,” his grandson George Eastland wrote in an Instagram tribute. “Although he no longer walks this earth, his impact will never fade in the lives he touched.”

Camp Mystic did not respond to a request for comment.

History of floods

Camp Mystic has a long history with flooding, going back to just a few years after it was established 99 years ago.

In 1932, flood waters “swept away” several cabins at the camp and led campers to evacuate across the river by canoe, according to an article in the Abilene Daily Reporter. A counsellor told the Austin American-Statesman at the time that campers might “have drowned if we had gone out the front door and walked face-into a sheet of water!”

In 1978, an article in the Kerrville Mountain Sun reported that Camp Mystic was “the most severely damaged” of local summer camps affected by a flood that year. A separate article reported that five Camp Mystic counsellors “had their automobiles swept into the Guadalupe River” by flood waters that year.

And in 1985, Eastland’s wife Tweety, then pregnant with their fourth child, had to be airlifted from Camp Mystic to a hospital due to floodwaters, local news reported.

One of the region’s most devastating floods – until last week’s Fourth of July disaster – came in 1987, when 10 children attending a different camp in the area were killed by floodwaters during a rushed evacuation.

Eastland, who at the time was serving on the board of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which manages the river, pushed for a new flood warning system. In newspaper articles, he described a computer-powered system that would lead to automatic alerts if water levels on the Guadalupe rose beyond a set limit.

The proposal was delayed, but officials eventually created a system of 21 gauges up and down the Guadalupe and its tributaries.

Even as Eastland voiced pride in the new system, he was quick to remind the public of the Guadalupe’s deadly power.

“I’m sure there will be other drownings,” Eastland said in a 1990 interview with the Austin American-Statesman. “People don’t heed the warnings.”

A lack of progress

In the following years, the early flood warning system that Eastland advocated for – and was once considered state-of-the-art – started to suffer problems. In April 1998, the company that maintained the system “closed its doors without notice,” and the gauge system soon stopped functioning because of lack of maintenance, the Kerrville Daily Times reported.

In February 1999, the river authority shut the system down because it had become “unreliable with some of the system’s stations not reporting information,” and board members worried about “liability concerns that the system would send ‘false signals,’” according to an article in the Times.

A handful of river gauges remain in service on the Guadalupe today, but the county lacks a full-scale warning system to broadcast public alerts when floodwaters rise.

Kerr County officials, along with the river authority that Eastland periodically served on, worked to change that over the last decade, searching for funding for a flood warning system that included more river gauges and a network of sirens.

But they found themselves struggling to overcome funding deficits and opposition from some skeptical residents.

Grant applications for the system were denied by the state in 2016 and 2017, and the authority later decided not to pursue a separate grant after realizing that it would only cover five percent of the system’s cost.

Around the same time, Camp Mystic was embarking on an expansion project. As the number of girls attending the camp grew over the years – leading to waitlists to get in each summer – the camp built more than a dozen new cabins farther south of the Guadalupe River alongside the smaller Cypress Creek.

Some of those cabins were located in an area that the federal government has determined has a 1% chance of flooding each year, which would have required officials to get special approval from the county government to build there.

But the risk was even higher at some of Camp Mystic’s cabins closest to the Guadalupe, several of which are located inside the river’s “regulatory floodways” – the areas that flood first and are most dangerous – according to federal flood maps. Those cabins have been around for decades, historical aerial photos show, apparently before the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s first floodzone maps were developed.

Dealing with preexisting structures like these inside risky floodzones is especially challenging, said Serra-Llobet, the UC Berkeley flood expert.

“When they did the construction of the recent buildings, they should have seen the FEMA maps,” Serra-Llobet said. That, she said, was a “window of opportunity” where camp officials could have realized their decades-old dorms were in a high-hazard zone and acted to address it. Camp Mystic could have relocated the buildings to higher ground, or just turned them into structures for recreational activities and made sure that campers were sleeping in safer areas, she said.

Still, Serra-Llobet argued that Kerr County should move past the “blame game” that comes after any disaster and focus on the lessons that could be learned for protecting people from floods going forward.

It’s not clear whether Eastland personally grappled with the high-risk flood zone running through his own campground. But in recent years, he was part of continued efforts for an improved flood warning system for the region.

Eastland returned to the river authority’s board in 2022 after being appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. After the previous setbacks, the board this year moved forward with a proposal to create a new “centralized dashboard” of rainfall, river depth and other data sources “to support local flood monitoring and emergency response,” according to the county government.

In April, the river authority voted to hire a firm to develop the data system and had planned to begin work this month. That was postponed after last week’s disastrous flooding.

A ‘pillar’ of the community

After Eastland was found dead, tributes have rolled in from his colleagues, community members and former campers whose lives he touched over the decades at Camp Mystic.

“Although I am devastated, I can’t say I’m surprised that you sacrificed your life with the hopes of someone else’s being saved,” Eastland’s grandson wrote in his Instagram post.

April Ancira spent summers from the age of 8 to 14 at Camp Mystic. In an interview, she remembered Eastland helping her catch a big fish – and being just as thrilled as she was when she successfully reeled it in.

“My memories of him wrapping his arms around so many campers and being so excited to see them excel is incredible,” she said.

Austin Dickson, who served on the river authority board along with Eastland and sat next to him at board meetings, remembered him as a “pillar in our county and our community” who had championed a recent effort to create a new park along the river.

“So many people say, ‘Mystic is my heaven,’ or ‘Mystic is a dreamland,’ and I think that’s true,” he said. “That’s Dick and Tweety’s life’s work to make that true.”

By Curt Devine and Casey Tolan, CNN

CNN’s Allison Gordon and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed reporting.