By Jonathan Allen
June 18 (Reuters) - Camp Mystic, the Christian summer camp for girls in Texas where 27 people were killed in a 2025 flash flood, did not have written emergency evacuation plans and poorly trained its staff, according to a report released by the Texas Legislature on Thursday.
With the proper plans and counselor training required by state law, there would have been time to evacuate the cabins and for campers to head to high ground safely on foot, the report concluded.
Instead, teenage
counselors and their young charges sheltered in place, as they had been told to do, while cabins filled with water in the middle of the night, and 25 girls, all 8 to 10 years old, were swept to their deaths, along with two 18-year-old counselors and the century-old camp's owner, Dick Eastland.
Camp Mystic, which failed safety inspections needed to reopen this summer, did not respond to a request for comment.
At the time of the July 4 disaster, there were at least 39 adults at the camp by the Guadalupe River in flood-prone Kerr County, the report found, who could have been "tasked to assist with an orderly flood evacuation" if they had been so trained.
Although cellphones were banned in cabins, the report faulted camp leaders for not using the public address system to issue evacuation instructions, and for not issuing walkie-talkies to counselors.
The 115-page report said only Eastland and a night watchman stayed up that night after dire flash-flood warnings were issued by the weather service, although a little before 2 a.m. Eastland wakened his adult son Edward Eastland, who would survive the night, to secure boats.
They did not think the campers' cabins were at risk of flooding until two teenage counselors in cabins near the river "ran through the storm to the main office, reported water entering the cabins, and asked for help" around 2:30 a.m., the report said.
"From the 1:14 a.m. Flash Flood Warning until this time, if all campers had been instructed to evacuate their cabins by foot, there still was ample time and opportunity for them all to move the very short distances to reach higher and safer ground," the report concluded. Even by 3 a.m., only an inch of water covered the nearby road.
The report describes Eastland and his son inefficiently driving their sports utility vehicles to evacuate a few cabins at a time as waters steadily rose. By the time Eastland drove to the Bubble Inn cabin, the third round of evacuations, it was too late.
Water gushing around him, Eastman managed to get all 14 girls and both counselors into his vehicle just before it was swept into the Guadalupe River.
Other girls were killed in nearby cabins as water rose to the ceilings, even though some tried to escape by swimming beneath the raging waters through windows or doors, according to the report, written by two investigators commissioned by the legislature with cooperation from the Eastland family.
The bodies of two of the young victims have still not been found.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
