On July 4, 2002, my childhood home just south of Kerr County flooded after a heavy rainstorm moved through the Texas Hill Country, hitting the headwaters that feed the Medina and Guadalupe rivers hard. That morning 23 years ago, I, age 8, woke up in a cabin at an overnight summer camp near Kerrville rattled but safe after a night of timber-shaking thunder and rain, not knowing that 20 miles away my mother and brother were taking refuge in the attic of our home as the waters rose around them.
Twenty-three years later, over this past Fourth of July weekend, I was attending a small family wedding in Boerne, hearing about nearly 30 missing camp girls, around the same age I was all those years ago, who were swept away overnight by a wall of floodwater from the Guadalupe River. It’s a different camp, different year, different creek, but the same story. This story—the one where the Hill Country experiences devastating and unexpected flash floods following an intense period of extended drought—is a familiar one for those of us who grew up in the area.
There was a six-year drought in the 1950s that ended with floods in the spring of 1957. There was the extreme drought of 1970 and 1971 that ended with floods in August of 1971. There were dry summers in 1967, 1978, 1991, and 1998, all of which were followed by flooding caused by remnants of tropical storms and hurricanes. This isn’t to mention the infamous 1987 flood that washed away a bus carrying 43 campers near Comfort, resulting in the deaths of 10 teenagers, a tragedy that old-timers still talk about today in hushed voices.
