Rather than try to summarize or even condense these articles, I’m just going to link to them .
The common thread should be obvious from the headlines.
Or, I should say, the topic is set by the first headline, and the second two develop the theme, ironically voiced by the late owner of Camp Mystic who died trying to rescue campers he also, it must be said, knowingly put in harm’s way.
I “The river is beautiful,” Eastland told the Austin American-Statesman in 1990. “But you have to respect it.”The river has its place, and it won’t yield to your convenience.
Another excerpt from that New Yorker article:
On July 3rd, Lee Pool, the chief of the Hunt Volunteer Fire Department, was heading home to Texas from a vacation in Colorado with his family when his wife, Stephanie, showed him the weather forecast. Severe storms were predicted in the Hill Country that night. Pool warned the members of the department to stay alert. Like many people in the area, Pool wears many hats. Besides being the chief of the fire department—an unpaid position—he’s also the vice-principal at the high school and, during the summers, he works nighttime security at Camp Mystic, a summer camp for girls. When his flight home was delayed, Pool asked a colleague to cover his shift at the camp.I’m not assigning blame. I’m just underlining the point: “You gotta know where you are.” And government, from city upwards, has an obligation to make sure people do. Especially visitors, like campers, and young girls who trust the rest of us to not put them in harm’s way.
That night, after Pool and his family made it back to Hunt, the rain was relentless. Around 3 a.m., Pool’s fire-department radio went off. The river was rising, and the situation was quickly developing into an emergency; Hunt, a town of about thirteen hundred people along the banks of the Guadalupe River, sits in what’s known as Texas’s flash-flood alley. Pool was alarmed but not panicked as he threw on his clothes and headed to the station. The drive should have taken less than ten minutes, but the water was already all over the road. When he reached Schumacher Crossing, just before the street that leads to the fire station, a low bridge over the river was underwater. By this point, the road behind him was impassable, too. He backed his pickup truck into a sloped driveway, seeking higher ground, and texted Stephanie: “I am stuck on Highway 39. I can’t go anywhere.”
In front of him, the highway was now a swift-moving river. When the flood reached the front of his truck, he got out, worried that he was about to be washed away. His radio was alive with more distress than he’d ever heard—reports of people stuck in trees and hanging onto roofs. “I mean, it’s just constant,” he said. “Just, help, help, help, help.” He thought about the children in the summer camps along the riverbanks, and about his colleague filling in for his security shift. It was the worst possible time for a disaster to strike: a summer weekend when, between the camps and the July 4th vacationers, the town might see roughly triple its usual population. Over the radio he counselled his fellow-firefighters, many of them similarly stranded, reminding them, If you can’t save yourself, you can’t save somebody else.
Then a pair of headlights cut through the night. It was a car with people in it, drifting through the flood. They saw the beam of his flashlight and called out to him. It was the most helpless he’d ever felt. “I think I just saw some people on their way to their death,” he texted Stephanie. “This is horrible. They are floating down the river and there’s nothing I can do.” He told me, “Having your hands bound, not being able to help people, especially when that’s in your heart, when what you want to do is serve—it kills you.” When the water finally began to ebb, hours later, it receded so quickly that it left fish flopping and gasping on the highway. Pool kicked them back into the water with his boot. “I’m, like, If I can’t save people now, I’ll save fish,” he said.
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