Days after flash floods laid waste to parts of central Texas, volunteers converged on Kerr County to help with search and rescue efforts. There were so many that officials had to ask civilian volunteers to stay away from the area, fearing that they would be the ones needing to be rescued.
But Team Rubicon, an experienced veteran-led disaster response organization, was one of the groups welcomed in. They landed in Hunt, Texas, one of the hardest hit areas, and set up their command center at the local elementary school. They also brought in their own food, water and tents so they wouldn't compete for scarce lodging and essentials.
Bob Bledsoe leads the 60-person team on the ground. He's the group's incident commander for Kerr County. Bledsoe served in the Air Force for 20 years and has been with Team Rubicon almost since its founding in 2010.
A majority of the organization's 200,000 volunteers nationwide are veterans or active-duty military. Bledsoe said strike teams of volunteers, known as "greyshirts," are dispatched to clear out buildings.
Even though there are many civilians in the corps, they work with military-like precision.
There's an urgency, Bledsoe said, to clear out anything flood damaged in order to prevent mold from growing in the extreme heat and humidity.
"If you can get to it before it continues to climb up all the walls, you can take less of the walls out and, you know, make less of a rebuild," Bledsoe said.
On this day, a small crew was gutting a building in the nearby town of Ingram, which lies next to the Guadeloupe River. It housed living spaces and an antique store named "Lamps & Shades and More." A hand-scrawled cardboard sign said they had moved across the street.
Volunteers–two men and two women–pulled out floor boards, insulation and sheetrock ruined by the muddy river, and dragged them to the curb.
Katherine Nicasio, a civilian, is a business analyst who drove up from San Antonio to help. She grew up not far from Kerr County. This is her first time volunteering for the group.
"I've learned a lot just in the couple days I've been here, on the power of nature, of the power of people, and what a group like that and the organization around it can do," Nicasio said.
Driving into the Texas Hill Country after the floods, Nicasio said she was overwhelmed by the amount of debris scattered along the river. Seeing the damage for the first time, she understood the huge toll it has taken on the community.
"(It's) just very physically taxing, but it's almost like a distraction from the emotional piece," Nicasio said, taking a break from the heat. "If you're working and you're doing something to help, it just makes you feel better about doing something."
Bob Bledsoe said the central Texas flooding is only one of the disasters that Team Rubicon is responding to right now.
He says volunteers are responding to another flood here in Texas, a tornado in Missouri, flooding in North Carolina and New Mexico, and a wildfire in California.
It's not unusual, he said, for Team Rubicon to respond to multiple crises at once as they try to help communities across the U.S.
This Sunday, they will wrap up their operation in Kerr County and move on to the next disaster.
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