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Nearly a month ago, the usually peaceful Guadalupe River swelled with rainwater and unleashed walls of water that tore through Hunt, Ingram and Kerrville. Since that holiday weekend, thousands have converged to help locals clean up, including a San Antonio mom and writer for a digital marketing company.
Whitney Alexander has four kids, and the recent flooding struck a chord with her. It made her want to help. She’s volunteered there twice, once the week right after the flood, and then last week.
But at first, like many who wanted to help, she wasn’t sure how to get started.
“I had been looking for somewhere to go and volunteer. And I saw a post from Hunt VFD that said that you don't have to call. You can just show up,” Alexander said.
Their instructions were simple and precise: “You can go directly to Hunt VFD, and they will figure out where they need you the most, and they will send you there, though they will assign a team leader, and you will be connected with everybody else that is working at that job,” she said.
The man who owned the property she was assigned to was there cleaning, too.
“A very, very nice gentleman. He told us that he and his wife had moved there about five years ago in their retirement,” Alexander said.
His home was hundreds of feet from the Guadalupe, but much of that rain upstream had to go somewhere.
“He talked about waking up to find standing water inside of their home and quickly realizing that the opportunity for them to evacuate had already passed,” she said. “He and his wife were in the process of getting up to the attic when the water came through their patio doors, which at first it was about four feet of water, and he said it immediately rose to seven feet.”
The man and his wife managed to escape safely when the water went down. Alexander said the difference between her first visit and her second visit — a little more than three weeks after — was starkly different.
“It was almost startling when we came in this week, because I looked around and the quiet shocked me,” she said. “Two weeks before that, everything was moving. People were climbing over each other. There was heavy machinery everywhere. There were trucks, trailers, vehicles, side by side — you name it.”
That was when searchers still had hope of finding victims alive. Almost a month later, that hope is gone.
“You know, the first time I went up there, I went up by myself, and the second time, there was a group of five of us, and it was three women, and then my teenage daughter and her best friend.”
Alexander’s daughter is Scout Vroman.
“You don't really process how high up the water is until you see it on the trees. And there's stuff like towels and blankets and clothes up 30 feet in the trees,” Vroman said.
She felt that seeing the extended public doing all they can to help flood victims was a great life lesson for her. “It was cool to see the fact that there were still people trying to help, even though there weren't as many,” she said.
Alexander feels the lessons she came away with apply to everyone's lives.
“It's so important for communities on every scale that we show up for each other. Nobody is an island. Nobody is immune to tragedy,” Alexander said. “And so I think it's, especially with something like this, this is so heartbreaking, the burden, the amount of work involved in rebuilding every single part of this — it's just too much for any community to bear. The more people that show up, even taking a tiny piece of that burden, it's meaningful.”
For people interested in volunteering, TPR's guide for how people can help (below) offers some contact information and useful links to learn more.
