July 4, 2025.

My heart is broken. I am exhausted, emotionally more than physically, but above all spiritually. I have heard it said a disaster will bring out the best and the worst in people. I would agree.  I don’t consider myself part of a political party. I vote for whoever I think is better for the job. No matter which way I voted, I don’t believe God punishes people by killing their children because they voted for the wrong political candidate. I think that kind of thinking is misguided. God is so much more vast and important than political parties of one government in one country.  God does not care point-blank, God does not care what political party we are involved in or what political candidate we vote for. There is no section of the Bible dedicated to whether people should be a Democrat or a Republican. God speaks to all the people of the world. These two parties don’t even exist outside of this country. That should tell you something.  God calls us to focus on the realm beyond us, not the one we are in. But it is easy to get caught up in what you can touch and see and forget that God is focused on eternal concepts…not temporary ones.  Weather happens.  And both God and the Devil can use it for their purposes.  I have seen the teachings of Jesus in the people that threw their tools and some food and water in a truck and drove to us from all over with whatever skills they had to offer.  I see God in the endless trains of trucks coming to haul away the debris with the texas and american flags hanging from them.  I see God in the droves of people that quietly leave home depot buckets full of water and food next to every smashed house being taken apart by a grieving family so that it can be dried out and not mold.  I see God in the people under the tent with the cardboard sign upon which is scribbled “free hugs”.  I see God in the methodical national guard members who keep their heads down and quietly recover all the hundreds of bodies from the water and debris so that we dont have to identify people we know and so that we can have a break from the work of following the buzzards and the stench of death to the next bad news.  I see God in the people who make casseroles and brisket and trail-mix and bring watermelons and go door to door feeding people who no longer have a refrigerator or stove while they try to clean their properties up to rebuild.  I see God in the HEB and Home Depot trucks that pulled up and began unloading food and supplies to all of my neighbors for free so that they would not have to drive 2 hours to make a supply run in the middle of losing everything they know and grieving people who have died.  I see God in the endless line of vehicles racing into and out of this town every morning and evening, carrying everyone who was able and willing to and from this area daily in order to help us in our time of need.  And unfortunately i see the Devil just as much.  I see the devil in the eyes of every smug individual remarking that God chose us to die because they are of better heritage or we voted for the wrong person.  I see the devil in the indifference of people in a nearby town who were untouched who refused to help with the initial rescue efforts and can find no way to empathize with the victims because they are of lower class financially and in their opinion culturally.  To put it bluntly, we could not afford to buy land in this nearby town. That’s why we settled where we are.  I see the devil in the individuals who say these babies’ lives didnt matter because most of the children who died were white and its about time something happened to white children because nobody would be covering the story if the dead children weren’t white.  Weather doesnt check for skin color before doing its thing.  Hurricanes and tornados dont have radar for certain shades of skin.  They just destroy indiscriminately, everything in their way.  I see the devil in those starting false GoFundMe pages for our fire department, using our devastation for their own purposes and pocketing the money.  I see the devil in the people who use their hands to take away wheelbarrows and chainsaws that were delivered and meant for us and return them to the nearest town with a hardware store for a cash refund for themselves.  I see the devil in the people who open their truck doors in the name of gathering supplies to distribute them throughout our town to anyone they find in need and then just drive the truck away once full.  I see the devil in those who pose as helpers and rob the victims blind of every last trinket they have left while they’re busy tearing the buckled floor out in another room.  I see the devil in predators who show up and ask women if they have a husband or a boyfriend and case battered houses to see who will be sleeping in the remnants of their dwelling at night.  I see the devil in human shaped vultures who sneak down to the river bed and pull the tools out of dead mens trucks and then disappear like wraiths when called out for their wretched deeds.  The people who floated down the river and drowned trapped in their vehicles…their surviving relatives are not going to get their water logged watches, their pocket knives, dad’s belt buckle, mom’s wedding ring.  Because human vultures found them first.  Every time someone says to me, “oh stop it. You’re so dramatic, it’s not that big a deal.” Or “are you still moping about that? You know it was last week?” I see the devil.  I see the devil in people who cannot put themselves in other people‘s shoes and then accuse me of trying to depress them when I show them pictures and tell them stories of watching the National Guard pull body after body out of the river.  I see the devil in the color of the river. It was mud brown and is now an ominous rust red.  I smell the devil when I drive through my town and I smell a smell that can only be a combination of sewage, oil, bacteria in standing water, mold, and rotting bodies.  The presence of the national guard soothes my raw soul because of consistency.  They do not announce themselves, but I always know when I am looking at someone who is here from the National Guard. I will not say how I know because the imposters do not need any more of a blueprint for how to deceive us, I won’t teach them to do it better, but currently it is very easy to tell them apart.  I will say that I do not have a lovely view of law enforcement or military because of things that have happened in my past, but none of the law enforcement or National Guard here have ever given me reason to resent them.  This town is currently run by the National Guard. We are no longer in control of it, but somehow it does not feel as if we are occupied. They are doing a good job. They are focused on the task at hand, and in my opinion are doing a stellar job of ignoring the devil‘s handywork and continuing their mission to recover bodies for the families who are still waiting for closure on the whereabouts of their missing loved ones.

I wish I could subscribe to the very popular opinion that nothing could have been done to warn the people here. I have been told over the years that oblivion can be bliss. In this case, I wish I could be oblivious, but I know what I know. I know it because I lived it. I was here, I was awake, and I had two different sources of weather report. I also know what I know because two of my friends are married to firefighters who either live here or live in a town 3 hours away.  They were discussing this as a possibility and who might help in a response if it was needed days before it happened. I also possess a copy of a weather broadcast in Austin two days before this tragic flood event happened discussing that there was a tropical depression developing.  We were told there was no way to know, it just cropped up and appeared out of nowhere. Tropical depressions don’t appear out of nowhere, they build.  Tell me why people in different states knew that there was a tropical depression off the coast before we did?  If you are wondering why this is such a raw subject for those affected by the flood, it begins rooted securely in the fact that in an effort to protect themselves from blame the weathermen initially placed the fault solely on the individuals affected in the flood zone saying that we did not heed flood warnings, even though we were warned sufficiently because it was a boy who cried wolf situation in which we received a flood warning each time it rained so we didn’t even bother to open and read this one.  The problem was, they did not count on us being farmers, ranchers, and homesteaders. We live and die by the weather report. More people opened and read that flood warning than they suspected or hoped.  The weather forecasted a 30 percent chance of rain on friday, a 40 percent chance of rain on saturday, and a 30 percent chance of rain on sunday.  If you clicked the hourly report, the hourly predicted that the chance of rainfall oscillated between 5% and 25%, with the majority of the hours listing 5%.  The flood warning stated that up to 3 inches of rain in the area was possible.  Nothing was mentioned about a tropical depression or a tropical storm. I did not learn the name of our tropical storm until a day after the flooding when I watched the news on YouTube being reported by a weatherman in a different state. They called our storm “tropical storm Barry”.  I needed someone up north to give me the name of my own storm. There’s something wrong with that.  Tell me why the rest of the world knows what’s happening to us and we are in the dark? Why are we not entitled to the name of the storm that destroyed us?  I remember the moment when I realized there was a tropical depression in the area and I also remember the moment when I had confirmation that I was right.  It began raining here around 9 PM on thursday night. It rained all through the night. I woke up once because the dog was barking. I woke up again to take my pills during the wee hours of the morning. I noted that it rained all throughout and when I woke up the following morning. It was raining still. At 7:57 AM the power went out. At that point I had gone back to bed and was asleep. I didn’t think anything of it since the forecast had not mentioned anything about a tropical event, I figured it would stop raining at any moment. It was not raining heavily, just steadily.  At 9 AM I asked the neighbor via text what time the power went out because I was starting to get concerned about the refrigerator. It was then that I learned people were dying.  The power lines and poles had been swept down the river hours before.  It was then that I learned the river was no longer where the river should be.

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I live on a hill in the higher part of my town and while people were scrambling to save who could be saved, I had no idea any of this was going on. I was told by Friends to stay where I was at because by the time I woke up everything that was going to be in the river was already in the river. Getting people out of the houses before they went down the river was the last ditch effort performed by brave volunteer firefighters who were woken from slumber by phone calls from friends and neighbors in trouble before the sun came up. There are stories circulating that flood victims in hunt called center point minutes before the water arrived there to say it was coming that way and it gave firefighters a head start to pull people out of an rv park right by the river. It seems hunt had a lot of quick thinking heroes in it that night.

Now we were just watching the Guadalupe river get faster, bigger, wider, and angrier. The rain continued. I am told the river rose 35 feet in 40 minutes. It was not a peaceful event. The water didn’t simply rise up bit by bit. That water was fast moving angry rapids that took anything in its path and smashed it into everything else in its path. It is not the water itself that will drown you, though it does a good job, it is the cars, the houses, the sheds, the boat ramps, and everything, including giant ancient trees that is now in the water that angry rutheless water will smash you into with a force that will kill you instantaneously or just break your limbs like toothpicks.  After looking at video footage of the water, I knew there would not be many survivors. The few that did survive said those who were carried away and drowned by the rapids advised them to grab onto anything and everything they could in an effort to get out of the water, that it was imperative that they grab onto something at first opportunity and get out of the fucking water. They did, and after clinging to whatever they grabbed onto for hours, they were rescued.  When water is moving that fast and that violently it is not as easy as reaching out and grabbing onto something.  whatever you grab can be ripped out of your hands or swept away with you. There is no swimming in water like that. You will not get anywhere. It is a miracle anyone who went into that water lived to tell about it.  I remember calling my mother to tell her that i was up high so i was okay but i had no idea this was coming so i hadn’t bought water.  In my panic i forgot about the 3 gallon jugs i keep around for use during winter.  They were in the shed.  I came to my senses eventually but at the time i initially realized what was happening the power was off, the poles had gone down the river, and my phone was about to die.  I knew the water was over both bridges and the highway so every way in and out of my town was closed and we were stuck here, cut off from the other towns.  I wasnt sure how long i’d be stuck here.  I couldnt imagine that we’d soon be occupied by law enforcement and national guard so i was worried if we needed something we wouldnt be able to contact anybody.  I called my mother and i told her i was high up and i loved her and i said i needed her to do a wellness check on my property in two days time.  Just call the non emergency line, give them my name and address, and have them do a wellness check at my location and then if we were out of water or needed something i’d have someone coming to find us who i could ask for help with finding drinkable water.  Because without electricity it’d be hard to boil my emergency rain water that currently had green stuff growing in it.  My mother said she understood and that if she didnt hear from me in two days, at the end of the second day she’d call in a wellness check and see if she couldnt check if we needed water.  She then said something that caught my attention.  She said, “its just parked over you and rotating.”  I was surprised by those words.  “Rotating…like a hurricane?” I hadnt heard anything about a hurricane.  There was still milk and bread in the grocery stores and gas in all the stations so i was quite sure no one else had heard anything about a hurricane.  We do a pretty stellar job of panicking and buying up all the perishables in the stores right before the refrigerators are supposed to go out when we hear of these things so i knew, from the lack of panic shopping, no one had any inkling of an idea about a hurricane.  I looked at the radar and sure enough…a green mass was present on the radar, parked and rotating.  There wasnt any noteworthy wind, so i knew it couldnt be a hurricane.  I asked, “is that a tropical storm?”  I said, “i mean the only two things besides tornados that rotate are hurricanes and tropical storms, and theres not enough wind for this to be a hurricane.  Two hours later…im listening to the weather radio for any mention of what the heck we found ourselves in and the monotone voice is droning on about daily temperature forecasts and whether its sunny or cloudy in every surrounding town.  It says the thing about three inches of rainfall possible in a localized area and then all of a sudden a new line is tacked on to the end of the broadcast loop: “no further tropical depressions beyond tropical depression 3 expected to form off the coast of the united states at this time.”  I wasnt sure what the difference between a tropical depression and a tropical storm was but i was dumbfounded that they had neglected to tell us of ones existence in the first place and just skipped to the part where they informed us that no further ones like this one would be coming down the line.  I gathered that i had been right about the rotation indicating the presence of something tropical.  I was astonished that we as a community had skipped the thing we did during hurricane harvey where even though it just sprinkled and fizzled out by the time it got to us, we bought every drop of milk, every loaf of bread, and every gallon of gas that our town and any surrounding towns had to offer.  Then we enthusiastically tied down all our patio furniture, locked everything in sheds, and went into our houses to hide with all our dairy products and sandwich making supplies while it sprinkled outside.  It is clear to me that no one knew this was coming because we panic buy and panic prepare for storms that never even reach us.  If we knew this was coming, we would have done it with the same gusto we always do…but i had been to the store recently and there were still bread loafs as far as the eye could see on aisle four.  I wondered why they didnt tell us we were expecting one of these.  

The weather service changed their tune after we all stood up and said wait a minute, do not blame the victims, we were awake, and we did read the weather forecast. We read the flood warning. The landscape is limestone, we do get a flood warning every time it rains. Up to 3 inches of rainfall possible means one specific thing to those living in the Hill country. Stay away from low water crossings. It does not mean the river will be in your backyard. It does not mean the river is coming to you, be warned.  No one told us the river was coming to us. As for Camp Mystic, that was a tragedy, but they do have a no cell phone policy. I hope this changes that for the future, but they didn’t get the warning simply because at Camp Mystic, the focus is being in nature and leaving technology behind. They have a landline, or they did.  Landlines dont receive weather alerts.  For those who say this is a disaster that could not have been prevented, they are partially right. There was no guarantee that this was the way the weather was going to behave. It was a model that was a possibility that they knew about two days in advance, but the weather is unpredictable, and you never know which possibility will be the one that actually happens.  The river was virtually empty to begin with anyway so releasing water downstream ahead of time would not have made a difference, and even if they had floated the idea of letting water down the river in advance, nobody would’ve gone for it because water is so precious and scarce here and the river was so low, we would’ve viewed that as a death sentence for us and our animals. The buildings near the river were always going down the river that night. That was going to happen no matter what. The problem is, when they went down the river, they had people in them. Those of us affected by this flood want planning for the next flood, because we know things could have been done differently given that they knew this was a possibility two days in advance, and there is evidence of that. They did our thinking for us. First, they blamed it on us, then they came out and apologized and said that the reason they didn’t warn us was because of short staffing and outdated equipment. I’m not sure exactly what that means. I’m not sure if there’s truth to that or if that’s a blanket statement that you say when things have gone wrong.  I took my little eyeballs and saw rotation on a cell phone app radar in the middle of the flooding and I told myself that is some kind of tropical storm or hurricane hours before they admitted it. If my eyeballs can do that, and my neighbor down the road…his eyeballs could do that, I’m sure the weathermen have cell phones with apps, they have at least this technology. They can look at their cell phones and identify rotation. I don’t know what kind of outdated equipment they speak of, but everyone has access to a smart phone these days. The problem is we all have day jobs so we don’t monitor the weather ourselves, we listen to what the weathermen say, or we did.  After they came out with the excuse of short staffing and outdated equipment, we raised concerns about that answer stating that some of us could see rotation on the cell phone so how come they couldn’t see rotation on their cell phones? They then responded by letting us know that they actually were aware that this was a possibility. They won’t say how long in advance, One person admitted that they knew 45 minutes in advance, another person said a day, I have information that suggests they knew two days in advance that this was a possibility. They said by the time they realized this possibility was going to be a reality, it was too late for anyone to successfully evacuate…that if they had told us this was going to happen, we all would’ve gotten on the road at once and panicked. So, let’s talk about that. If everyone had gotten on the road at once and panicked, they’d all still be alive. The roads didn’t go into the river. Everything on the riverbanks did. So because this was not a hurricane, but a tropical depression, there wasn’t a lot of wind and the flooding was isolated to the area surrounding the river. We didn’t need time to evacuate Texas. We needed time to pull people from the side of the river to higher ground. Everyone living on the river knows someone who does not live on the river and if we had five minutes notice that this possibility was now a reality we would’ve gone down there ripped the doors open and dragged people from their houses back up the hill to where we lived. These are small towns. There are small town gossipers in these small towns. I heard one weatherman say that they had 45 minutes notice that this thing was going to happen And that that is not enough time to get everybody out. True. That is not enough time to get everybody out. And so we get nobody out? That’s not what you do with people‘s lives. These are people‘s babies, people‘s brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grandchildren, friends, husbands, wives. If it was your loved one, you would hope that they would take a chance on saving them, knowing that not everybody would get out. You save who you can. You do what you can until there’s nothing left to do. An official in Kerrville stated that the reason they didnt put out another alert by the time they realized what the river was doing was that they didnt want the firefighters to go door to door rescuing people, get swept into the river themselves, and then we have no firefighters to manage the aftermath of the disaster.  I have talked to some of the firefighters in my town. They did go door-to-door and pulled people out once they knew what was happening. They said they signed up for that. When they volunteered to be firefighters in our small town, they signed up to put their lives in danger for others. That’s their job and they took it very seriously and there are people alive today because they put their lives at risk to go get them. They would have used every bit of heads up if given by man instead of the sound of the river.  I am proud of the firefighters in my town. They are volunteers, they are good people, and they made their own decisions that night. They pulled people out until there was nobody left to pull out with the absolute little notice we got given to us by the river itself. The river itself told us what was happening. Nobody called. Nobody texted. Nobody sounded a siren or sent an alert. Nobody drove through the street honking horns or banging pots and pans. The river itself told us what was happening.  They said they made a decision to keep us in the dark because they didn’t want to panic us. That’s stupid. The time to panic is when the river is rising nearly a foot a minute.  If ever there was a time to panic, that’s the time to panic. It’s not the time to be sitting in your house living life business as usual, that’s for sure. That was the time for action. There’s a divorce court judge that always says the only thing worse than being with an abusive person for too long, is being with an abusive person for too long and one day. The moment they knew that this scenario was a reality, and this is not my words, even though I believe them, this is a retired volunteer firefighters words, they should’ve driven through the streets, blasting every horn on every car that they could find. They should’ve woken every single person up, and every person should have been down at the river, grabbing friends who lived down there and dragging them to higher ground. We should not have woken up after it was already happening and our friends had gone down the river unbeknownst to us. People should not have died alone in their cars, children should not have died alone, begging for their mothers, ripped out of cabin windows by flood waters.  People should not have gone down the river in their sleep.  So many less people would have died if we had five minutes heads up. You don’t grab your passport, your birth certificate, you don’t open the safe and grab your nest egg, you don’t even get an umbrella.  In this kind of disaster, we’re talking a heads up that means open the door and run. That’s all we wanted.  That’s why I can’t shut up about this. Everyone asks me “oh honey what the heck do you think you’re gonna change by not letting this go? What do you think you’re helping by trying to lay blame on someone?” I don’t need a pound of flesh. I don’t need an apology. I don’t need someone to sit in the blame chair just so I can point a finger at them. What I need is a promise of change. because we do live and die by the weather forecast here. These are ranchers, these are farmers, these are homesteaders, and our entire lives revolve around the weather, and you are asking us to trust this most important aspect of our lives to other people. You are asking us to go to work and trust somebody else to watch the weather for us. So most of us do. But right now, not a single person here trusts the weather forecasters in this area, because they did our thinking for us and it turned out to be wrong.  We didn’t deserve that. We deserved to know that there was a tropical depression in the area. We deserved to know that this was a possible outcome they were considering for two days. We deserved to know the moment they knew that the river was rising. We deserved that car running through the streets honking everyone awake. When they sent an additional flood warning hours into the flooding, when people were already standing on top of their roofs and electric boxes, when people had already died, breaking their families out of the houses they were drowning in, we deserved a tropical storm warning instead of the additional flood warning we got. it was a “no shit Sherlock” moment. Yeah, it’s flooding. If they were gonna tell us nine hours in, they could’ve told us during the 45 minutes the river was rising. I want them to give us all the information next time. It’s unacceptable that towns three hours away knew what was happening here two days in advance and we knew nine hours in. I don’t want them to do any thinking for me. I don’t want them to decide what I should panic about and what I should not panic about. I wanna know what’s going on down there. If something’s coming my way, I wanna know about it, and I will decide whether it’s something to panic about or not. And I want their word that if they have information, I’m gonna know about it. Because you cannot imagine how humiliating it is to learn the name of your natural disaster from a state up north, from their news broadcast, in which they are talking about us.  And they had the initial audacity to gaslight us and say it was our fault because we didn’t heed the flood warnings. Some said oh the citizens wouldn’t have even got the warning because they were all asleep. I was awake taking my morning pills. Some people work night shift. Some farmers are just up at that time because you have to get up and ready things for the animals. Mothers with fussy babies were up trying to rock them back to sleep.  With the town gossips here if they had given us a piece of information, we would’ve run with that like wildfire. If one person had gotten a notification that we were experiencing a tropical event, we would’ve understood that the rain was not going to stop. We would’ve understood the words, “tropical depression” meant prolonged rainfall. We would’ve understood the word “stalled system”.  And if we knew that the rain was going to be prolonged, we would’ve flown into action. Because we live and die by the weather here. These are not cities, these are country towns.  Towns governed by tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, fires… There’s a lot of things to watch for. People live out here because they want to live in nature, but we all have day jobs, we need them to support our mortgages. There must be a relationship of trust between the citizens and the weathermen. That’s gone right now and I hope that eventually they aim to fix it. Again, I don’t care about a pound of flesh. I have no death threats for anyone.  I don’t need to leave threatening voicemails, I don’t know what’s wrong with the people who do. I don’t need them to live in constant guilt, I hope that they know I don’t hate them. I just want a promise, I want a handshake and a promise that next time nobody is going to withhold information from me. I want to do my own thinking. So does my neighbor. So did the volunteer firefighters.  A former firefighter told me that had he been in charge and received the information he would’ve driven through the streets, honking the horn waking everybody up, that it would’ve been a time to throw the idea of panic to the wind and just get people up so that they had a fighting chance..  I’ll never understand why officials and important people with titles stand in front of the television cameras and say the words “there was nothing that could have been done”. If you ask me why I dare to disagree with them, I can tell you that I don’t care about titles. I don’t care how important the people that say these things are. I know what I know. I lived it. There are things that could’ve been done and they are pretty stark and blatant. this many people didn’t have to die. The structures were always going down the river, that is a given and was unpreventable. However, I would have preferred those structures be empty. So let the officials stand on television and say their piece about all of this being unpreventable and there being nothing we could have done better. If I know what I know, it does not matter how many people disagree with me, I will not move from the truth, simply because it is the truth. Don’t just take an official’s word for it, do the research yourself and form your own opinions.  If it were your town and a disaster was coming, you would want the opportunity to make the assessment of danger for yourself. You wouldn’t want them to do your thinking for you. And if they did, you would probably want change for next time.

When I come home, there’s trucks from all over the United States riding around our town flying the Texas flag. I know they are doing this for our benefit to give us hope and lighten our spirits, but it is a constant reminder that what’s going on here is not normal. There are looters running around in broad daylight doing what they do. There’s national guard in Blackhawk helicopters doing what they do.  The river and several of our roads are no longer available to us and are blocked off and guarded by law-enforcement. This area is not over this disaster, we are in it. The piles of debris everywhere and the trains of trucks coming every day to haul it all away, also a constant reminder. This morning on the way to work i noted orange x’s spray painted on the side of every rv and dwelling that had already been searched.  It reminded me of the footage of hurricane katrina, hurricane rita, hurricane sandy, and hurricane harvey.  It was eerie seeing empty overturned rv’s with one of the windows smashed out as if an object had been used to poke through from the inside out with the material of the black window warped, bent, and pointing outwards with a jagged hole carved in the middle.  It’s hard for me to drive to a city every day that was unaffected by this disaster and be asked why I can’t be over this already when I’m in it. I am surprised by the widespread lack of empathy in nearby towns. I am surprised by how little people can empathize with others when it did not affect them, touch their families, households, or livestock. I don’t love people to begin with, I identify better with horses and trees. Maybe that says something about who I am and maybe that says something about where humanity’s at in this day and age, or maybe both. Even I thought better of people than what I’m looking at in the city where I work and a couple other towns. I expected people to be better able to put themselves in nearby people’s shoes. I didn’t expect to have to work so hard or scream so loud about things for people to consider other people‘s feelings and hearts. I am surprised, so surprised, by how securely people feel this couldn’t happen to them, that God protects them, that God chose us to be a sacrifice for some reason. Some people hold the opinion that we are being punished for sins, and so we must have deserved it. They don’t feel they should have to have empathy or understanding for others loss because they must have done something to deserve this devastation. Every day I make a choice not to land in jail because of felony assault. Some days it’s a choice that is harder than others. Some days I’m too exhausted to fight or argue with anyone and some days I really think about whether it would be worth it to deck some people for the words that come out of their mouths and then I remind myself…I’m getting lost in my emotions for my own purposes. My desire for them to feel pain or retribution for the indifference they hold towards people I care about, it doesn’t further God’s message, it doesn’t do anything for Jesus’ teachings. I am called to have grace, I am called to use restraint, I am called to focus on God’s will, not my own. Because believe you me, there are conversations that I find myself in in which I wish I could deck the person standing across from me, but there is no place in the Bible that I am given permission to do so. God calls us to turn the other cheek, God calls us to focus on grace, and fist fighting has nothing to do with grace. I would merely make the problem worse because after I had decked somebody, the amount of empathy they had towards those I care about, would not increase. They would just hold the opinion that I was a maniac, probably press charges for the violence, and dig in with their opinion that the people who are hurting right now probably deserved it.

I just learned that the only reason we have our fire trucks right now is because it flooded first in Hunt and as soon as it did the Hunt fire chief thought of us and called the station in my town, warning them that a flood wave was coming down the river and had taken them out and would surely take our fire station next. He told our fire fighters to move all the trucks out of the station NOW and they did so. Thats why we have the trucks. There was no time to grab any of the equipment or even the uniforms. Thats how little time they had, but that little heads up from a quick thinking fire department in Hunt who had our backs saved our trucks.

The fire station flooded.

The landscape is forever changed.

I am going to try to list the stories of the survivors and their loved ones who didnt make it below.  They are not my stories, so please understand all of this information is second hand.  However, i think it is important that they be shared.  The questions i am getting are so far removed from what is happening here.  People need to hear their words so they can understand and try to step in each others’ shoes.  

A woman woke up to the sound of water in her house and found it already ankle deep.  She went to the bathroom and saw it was coming up from the toilet and also from under the walls.  She woke her husband up, put leggings on, and walked to the living room to get out.  By this point the water in the house was belly deep.  The door wouldnt open.  It was stuck shut.  She then realized in her mind “oh my god we’re going to die in here.”  Her husband yanked the door open and busted through the screen door.  When he did this a torrent of water rushed in.  As soon as they left the house they heard the windows cracking and popping under the pressure of the water.  

There was a little boy who was swept into the river in the middle of the night when water came into the house through vents, the sliding glass door, and then the roof collapsed on top of them.  His little brother, father, and stepmother are still missing.  He is holding on to hope that they are not dead but there is no sign of them at this point in time.

This story belongs to my coworker’s brother in law. A man in his twenties woke up to find the house flooding fast.   He tried to open the door but it was stuck.  He tried to open a window but the pressure of the water outside held it securely in place.  The water continued to rise higher every minute and he knew he had to break the window to get his family out.  He put his fist through the window and in doing so nearly cut his arm clean in half, severing a major artery.  He got his mother, fiance, and 3 children out of the house and onto the roof.  They called 911 but it was clear 911 was not going to reach them before he bled out.  He died in his mother’s arms on the roof.  His last words were, “im sorry, im not gonna make it.  I love yall.” 

A firefighter busted the door down in an elderly couple’s house.  At this point she realized the water in their house was ankle deep.  By the time the firefighter got to her it was knee deep and rising.  She used a walker and couldnt walk well in the dark and the water.  The water continued to rise.  At some point the woman quickly assessed that she was holding up the rescue with her poor mobility and the water was rising faster than she could move.  She said, “i can’t walk…i can’t make it.  Just take him and go.”  She pointed to her husband.  The firefighter responded with water rushing in from the door behind him, “Yes you can.”  With that he crossed the room, grabbed her, lifted her over his shoulder, and threw her in the boat. 

The flood waters enveloped the downstairs part of a riverside house and rose to the ceiling.  The woman climbed to the upstairs floor where she began rounding her cats up into pet carriers.  She called 911 and waited for rescue on the second floor.  

A man awoke to flood waters in his house rising by the second.  He broke a window to climb onto the electric box mounted on the side of his house.  He stood there for hours as flood waters crept up to his waist.  He tried to climb onto the roof but the gutter wouldnt hold him.  While standing there, he received a flood warning on his phone.

A woman was camping with friends in a cabin.  When the flood waters started coming in their instinct was to get higher in the house so they moved to the attic and found the water still rising into the attic.  At this point she called 911, not to ask for rescue but to give the dispatcher their names so that people could identify what happened to their bodies for their loved ones that would lose them.  They busted out a window in the attic and escaped onto the roof where they sat for several hours.  A woman washed by them in the water screaming for help in the dark.  The woman on the roof was shouting to the woman in the darkness to pray, telling her to pray because that was all anyone could do.

A 22 year old woman swept away by the flood waters managed to grab on to a cypress tree as the water hurled her down the river.  The water had stripped her of her clothes.  She clung naked 27 feet up in the tree for hours while screaming for help.  Eventually her screams alerted a nearby home owner to her presence and the couple who found her immediately called 911.  She was holding onto the trunk of the tree.  Afraid she would get tired and let go, the homeowners kept shouting to her to hang on because they had called 911 and they had rescue workers coming.  Firefighters rescued her in a boat upon arrival.  They released her to the care of the couple who found her and went on to the next rescue.  The couple gave her some of the wife’s clothes, fed her, gave her water to drink and a hot shower.

A couple’s mobile home began filling with water, lifted up, and floated down the river.  They opened the window and began shining flashlights into the darkness and screaming “we’re in her.  We’re in here.  Help us.  Get us out.” Men in a nearby semi truck began honking the horn back at them in response.  Strangers followed the home down the river and pulled the couple out at first opportunity.  

A 27 year old man died after carrying out his last act; placing his kids on a floating mattress.  The children survived.  He was swept down the river and drowned. 

The national guard evacuated the surviving girls from camp mystic via military trucks.  The girls sung christian songs to soothe their nerves as the trucks navigated washed out roads and questionable bridges to carry them out of the disaster area to safety. 

So many people called 911 to leave their names, not so they could be rescued but because they understood from looking at the violence of the amassing water that they were going to die and they didnt want their families to hold out hope and be tortured wondering…

A husband, wife, and one year old climbed into their attic from the kitchen counter during the flood because cars were already floating away outside and they understood the water was too high to just walk out the door.  The husband then busted a metal vent out of the attic and they climbed onto the roof as the attic flooded.  They crouched on the roof, the mother holding her one year old in her arms in the rain for an hour and ultimately a tree saved them because another house came crashing towards them down the river and slammed into a tree between them and the oncoming house.  The husband said the house they were in had been in his family for 90 years and was now destroyed by the flood waters.  

A woman and her husband inside of an rv managed to escape but heard a little boy screaming and saw him floating downstream at a high rate of speed.  Maternal instinct kicked in and she went to jump in after him.  Her husband physically held her back stating “you’re gonna go too and theres nothing you can do for him if you jump in.”  She didnt know how she was going to live with letting somebody’s baby go down river and then the next day she recognized his face online and saw that he had been rescued further downstream. 

A woman who got out before the flood waters took her dwelling heard people being washed down the river and begging for help.  Her and her husband tried to reach people with branches from the bank but people were just moving too quickly to grab on.  The wife is haunted by the screams of people that floated past who they were unable to help.  Her husband called off the effort stating it was time to get to higher ground and they couldnt help them…by then the river was just moving too fast.  

A woman’s son woke her up in the middle of the night saying, “someone is screaming.”  Neighbors were screaming “get out!” at the top of their lungs.  She opened the front door to see the river raging past.  Her and her two sons survived thanks to their neighbors screams that gave them seconds to scramble out before the house was swallowed by the encroaching waters.  

Flood waters carried a man’s car into the river.  He remained calm and rolled down the windows and then at an opportune moment climbed out and grabbed a passing tree after floating half a mile in his sinking car. He remained in the tree for five hours before rescue.  

My soul hurts. It has taken me a long time to organize my scattered thoughts to write about this. This is the best i can do. Im not going to include images of people or their personal property out of respect. I will include some images of the river and the debris. I did not take very many pictures as i was straddling two worlds and driving back and forth between my town and a nearby one. Most of the pictures were taken by my best friend. If my opinions or words on this subject have wounded or offended anybody i am sorry. That was not my intention in writing this. I have struggled with how to talk about this event and i am not entirely happy with this version although it is around the twentieth draft so i think at this point i cant do it anymore and whatever i have on paper is whatever its going to be.

I will leave you with this. My best friend wrote this prayer and sent it to everyone she knew:

“Dear Lord please help the Texas Hill Country heal and recover. Please help us not give up, and please give everyone more strength now, we need to keep reaching out to help our neighbors. Please Help the exhausted ones &  give them a place to rest in this chaos. 

In Jesus Name 

Amen.”