This flood was Biblical in its scale, they tell us

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The four-by-four bumps up and down the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country with Abby’s muzzle behind me and by my head with Fox News blaring on the radio. Abby is a cadaver dog, but we are not looking for bodies, even if Camp Mystic camper Cile Steward and RV camper Jeff Ramsey have yet to be found.

Instead, we are looking for the traces of the flood that has me in Texas, researching for a forthcoming book. Tom is a first responder who was scouring the Texas River basin after the July 4 flood last year that washed away 27 campers and 119 people in the path of a 37 foot wall of water. It has been called a 100-year flood, a 500-year flood, and even a 1,000-year flood, an inland tsunami, a cyclonic bomb and Armageddon. Take your pick, but there is no precedent for the pitch black wall of death, as some residents later called it, that swept through the Texas Hill Country on the night of July 4, 2025.

I am here for five days of interviews.longtime resident Tom Olson who is a Vet, firefighter, nurse, paratrooper, drone flyer and cadaver dog master has given me an entrée where there would be none for a writer from Chicago.

“Don’t tell them you are from Chicago,” he tells me on the phone. “Say Virginia.” I was born in Richmond, so that seems good enough. After the flight into San Antonio and the forty-five-minute drive to Kerrville, the mission of research could have ended right there at the Holiday Inn Express, were it not for Tom telling people it was okay to talk with me.

The residents of Kerrville, Hunt, Ingram, Center Point, Comfort and the owners of the camps up and down the Guadalupe have all been media-saturated, with not-great results. A war has since broken out since the catastrophe. Lines have been drawn and lawsuits filed. On one side is the century old, storied Christian summer camp for girls, Camp Mystic, owned and run by the Eastlands, with the captain of the ship Dick Eastland literally going down with girls he was trying to save in his Chevy Tahoe.

On the other side is Heavens 27, the grieving, legislation-driven, well coiffed and educated parents of the girls who were lost on the Fourth of July weekend. There is no middle, and I have to tread lightly to find out what I can.

We have now stopped below Camp Mystic, our final destination. Abby is out and running around in the river. That terrifying inland sea is no longer there, but it took houses and trees and semis and cars and flung them up about or destroyed them. In its place is this meandering, shallow river that at places you can easily cross on foot — which at one point I do.

Days after the flood, Abby had circled spots on new fields, new roads formed by the tons of sediment left behind, as if a giant road crew had laid out new lanes for a super highway leaving gravel and earth as a base. Abby found many bodies after the flood. Human Remain Dogs can detect the scent of a human body through tons of earth and even water. The backhoes would then move in and begin excavating, to find an adult or child entombed in the new river bed that had spread out for miles.

We have been making our way and stopping for the interviews. Many are in the corner of the Eastlands. Their comment that “people who have not lived through this don’t understand what happened” has become a mantra. Translated, it means there is no precedent for what happened and no one could have done anything about it. It was an act of God, period. The media, the lieutenant governor, the Heavens 27 parents don’t understand. They don’t live here, we do. This flood was Biblical. It was an inland sea moving across the land in the night and washing away people, recreational vehicles, camps, tents, cars, trucks and leaving behind desolation. Unless you were there, it is impossible to understand.

Tom and I, driving up the Guadalupe, find crosses, slabs of cement where houses stood, more slabs where RVs had once been hooked up, lone chimneys, 50-foot trees bent sideways, 15-foot cement stilts that didn’t save a vacation home from being destroyed. We find toilets, kitchen tables, the detritus of life, and always the great vast highway of the river’s migration. It is awe-inspiring and impossible to square with the barely moving river we splash across.

Moving on, we finally arrive at the camp itself. It has been raining the whole time I have been in Texas, and today is a gloomy mist shrouded morning. Camp Mystic is in the distance over the river that destroyed it. There is a security guard, and we cannot cross the river. A drone Tom has brought scours the camp, and I take pictures of the memorial cross with stuffed animals and mementos from the first responders.

The weather has already bleached some of the stuffed animals and the hats and badges have faded from the rain. The camp sits abandoned with many of the trees gone. It looks denuded and strangely sterile. Abby sniffs the bracelets, jewelry, water bottles, stuffed animals of the eight-, nine- and eighteen-year-old girls that have passed. The thousand memories of girls who have gone there are not there anymore. They have been washed away with everything else.

William Hazelgrove is the author of the forthcoming book “The Camp Mystic Flood A Story of Tragedy and Heroism” will be published in July 2027.