The Texas Hill Country has long been a landscape of winding rivers, limestone bluffs, barbecue joints, dance halls and summer camps where childhood memories were made.
But one year ago, those familiar landmarks became the setting for one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern Texas history. Since then, many Texans can’t hear the words “Hill Country” without thinking of the lives lost and the many others that were forever changed.
In the early morning hours of July 4, rapidly rising floodwaters left 25 campers and three staff members at Camp Mystic dead.
In all, that weekend’s floods claimed 139 lives in what would be the deadliest flood disaster in Texas in more than a century. And as the waters receded, the questions rose: How could this happen? Could it have been prevented? What can be done to save lives in the future?
State lawmakers commissioned a report into Camp Mystic’s flood response, which was put together by investigators Casey Garrett and Michael Massengale, a former justice on Texas’ First District Court of Appeals.
That report was released in June and included, among other details, that Camp Mystic did not have state-required written emergency plans or evacuation measures that could have prevented deaths.
Massengale described a cascade of failures that led to the deaths at Camp Mystic last summer.
“If there had been an emergency plan that included plans for evacuation, the leadership of the camp from the top down to the counselors would have had some idea of what to do if they were confronted with a terrible flood situation as they were a year ago,” he said. “The fact that there was no written plan, nothing done in the way of training for camp staff to be prepared to evacuate, no drill of any kind for letting campers and counselors both have an idea of exactly how you’re going conduct yourselves to remove yourself from the threat of a flood.”
Camp staff also did not respond adequately in the immediate lead-up to the flood, according to the report.
“There were warnings, first flood alerts leading up to the flood that should have put the leaders of Camp Mystic on alert that they needed to be watchful and prepared,” Massengale said. “The report of the Legislature concluded that there was no adequate preparation leading up to the flood, except for Dick Eastland, the main leader and patriarch of Camp Mystic. The other senior leadership of the camp all went to bed on July 3, 2025 without any sense that there was a risk of severe weather that night.”
Eastland died during the flood trying to evacuate a cabin of girls from the rising water.
“We believe that he was up and watchful, but he’s one person,” Massengale said. “They had a staff of dozens, as you would expect, to be able to operate a camp with nearly 600 young girls.”
The report also details a series of communication failures in the hours that the Guadalupe River was rising over its banks.
“There was a functional loudspeaker system at Camp Mystic. They used it every night. They played ‘Taps’ late at night to signal it was time to go to bed. It was expected that the loudspeakers would be used to communicate to campers if there was a need for them to leave their cabins,” he said.
“But it was never used. And it’s been a big mystery why it was ever used. If it had been used, there was every reason to believe that all of those children had the opportunity to get out of their cabins at a point in time when it was safe for them to do so. They could have moved to higher ground that was safe.”
Once the floodwaters rose, counselors and campers were trapped in their cabins. At that point, Massengale said, the lack of any communication devices in the cabins also became a problem.
“It’s a separate problem,” he said. “It’s not the problem that caused lives to be lost, but it was still a real problem in the aftermath.”
Massengale said Camp Mystic was inspected by the state several days before the flood, but the report explains that state inspections were not designed to go in depth on emergency plans.
“One of the items on the inspection, nominally, required the inspector to check for emergency plans,” he said. “What came out in the immediate aftermath of the floods, and this was addressed by the Legislature last fall, the inspectors really were not doing that. They were trained as sanitation inspectors. Their main focus was making sure that the kitchens were sanitary — they’re checking temperatures in refrigerators and ice machines and things like that.”
Massengale also clarified that the purpose of the report was to inform legislative policy making, not to make a determination about fault or liability.
“We didn’t try to address the question of whether the owners and operators of Camp Mystic were negligent,” he said. “In a jury trial or in an arbitration or before a bankruptcy court, wherever these questions ultimately get resolved, both sides are going to have an opportunity to present their arguments. That’s what we call an adversarial process, and both sides get to be heard. We didn’t have a process like that here. We were simply seeking facts.”
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