Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio's newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.
Editor's note: TPR's special coverage of the floods is now centralized in a special blog from The Texas Newsroom.
Organizers of the Kerrville Folk Festival have opened up the festival grounds as a center for flood relief in Kerr County.
Quiet Valley Ranch, where the festival is held, has been opened up for displaced people from the disaster. Volunteers are also using the space to distribute supplies and serve food.
Deb Rouse, executive director of the Kerrville Folk Festival Foundation, explained that “I came from Houston where we're used to hurricanes, and we have a very robust [alliance of] government groups, city government that coordinates all that, and they just really don't have it here and there are a whole bunch of different little towns. It's not even just Kerrville.”
John White, a volunteer, said that “So like lunch we'll have 400+ tomorrow — dinner we'll have another 400+ — and there's no way that just two or three of us would be able to get that all accomplished.”
In a recent interview on The Texas Standard Rouse said that calls have been coming in from around the country from music fans who want to help.
“What I’ve been fielding over the past two days are loyal festival attendees — in some cases someone who’s only been to our festival one time — from all across the country calling me and messaging me saying, 'what can we do to help? What can we do to help those in the Kerrville community that are impacted by this?' ”
Rouse said that while supplies and aid are pouring in now, they will eventually decrease.
“Right now, the city of Kerrville has said, 'we have all the water and other supplies that we need,' and that’ll be great, but in a couple of weeks, in a couple of months, we all know those supplies are going to dry up. So, we are staging for our community members who want to donate physical goods to be used for this, trusting us to make sure that they are used in a thoughtful responsible way.”
The Kerrville Folk Festival attracts tens of thousands of music fans every year in the early summer.
Visit Kerrvillefolkfestival.org to make a direct donation.
