I've already written this week about the catastrophic flooding in Kerr County, Texas. What I am going to highlight in this post is recent reporting from the New York Times on the 2019 decision by Kerr County to let Camp Mystic build additional structures--including cabins for campers--in places that were at risk of flooding. (This is on top of the county's decision not to invest in a warning system, which is discussed in my prior post).
Why would the county do that when, as one expert suggested, the proposal to construct more buildings was a good time to re-evaluate the risk level associated with the existing structures? Perhaps what the journalists are suggesting here is Kerr County officials simply trusted the camp as a long-time landowner and patron of the county. Perhaps what is being suggested is the turning of a blind eye. I wonder what sort of property taxes and other types of revenues Mystic and the otter camps provided to the county?
Here's an excerpt from the NYT story:
In 2019, Camp Mystic...underwent a substantial expansion. Camp owners received approval from local authorities to build a new group of cabins over the hillside to the south, in an area known as Cypress Lake. But even there, flood maps show, some of the new cabins were in areas at risk of flooding.
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At the same time, Kerr County officials were considering how to manage floodway areas, including those at Camp Mystic.
The county said that floodways were to be considered “an extremely hazardous area due to the velocity of floodwaters which carry debris, potential projectiles and erosion potential.” It adopted rules in 2020 to limit new construction or substantial alterations in floodways to ensure that structures could better survive flood events, and that these buildings would not result in raising floodwater levels in other parts of the river.
This NYTimes piece gives a sense of the local lore around the Eastlands, who owned and ran Camp Mystic. This New York Times podcast, The Daily, also gives a sense of the beloved status of the camp and its long-time owners; the title says it all, "A Love Letter to Camp Mystic."
Postscript: Here is a July 12, 2025 NYT story that suggests FEMA over-rode Kerr County on the designation of parts of Camp Mystic as a flood zone. An excerpt from Mike Baker's reporting follows:
In the years before floodwaters killed more than two dozen people at Camp Mystic in Texas, regulators approved a series of appeals that removed many of the camp’s buildings from official federal flood zones, records show.
Flood maps developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2011 had placed much of the camp within a 100-year flood zone, an area considered to be at high risk of flooding. Camp Mystic successfully challenged those designations, which would limit renovation projects and require flood insurance, citing elevation calculations of a series of buildings that allowed them to be exempted from the federal restrictions.
Sarah Pralle, an associate professor at Syracuse University who has researched federal flood mapping, said she found the exemptions granted to Camp Mystic, a girls’ camp on the Guadalupe River near Hunt, to be “perplexing.” Some of the buildings were still very close to expected flood elevations, she said.
“I think it’s extremely troubling that it’s a camp for children,” Ms. Pralle said. “You’d think you want to be extra cautious — that you’d go beyond the minimum of what’s required for flood protection.”
Here is the Washington Post reporting similar conclusions on the role of FEMA.
Here is the WSJ reporting on what happened at Camp Mystic, cabin by cabin. You'll see here featured some aspects of the impulse to secrecy regarding arguable failures of a revered Texas institution.
This excellent episode of New York Times "The Daily" on July 15, 2025, asks if the floods had to be as deadly as they were. It includes some attention to the rural context.
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