Editor’s Note: North Texas resident Caprice Capri, a frequent visitor to Kerrville, Texas, describes her experience of the horrific flooding in Kerr County in the words below. Deceleration invited her Community Voices contribution after hearing her describe ongoing struggles with heat intolerance and online speculations of how long she may be able to stay in Texas, where climate change is contributing to consistently rising temperatures and climate-related disasters, including extreme rainfall and flooding events such as we have witnessed in recent days. Governor Greg Abbott’s ‘Texas Miracle’ has begun to show signs of crumpling into a Texas Nightmare as in-migration has slowed, in part, to fears over rising climate-related disasters. Deceleration will have a lot to say about how MAGA priorities are harming (and killing) our friends and neighbors, but for now we want to take a moment to honor those we have lost and those whose lives have been forever changed by this most recent disaster and the increasingly apparent failures that contributed to it. Donations to help the community recover are being accepted at the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund. — Greg Harman
I come down to Kerrville often. My friend has a house here and we come on the holidays. This holiday was meant to be like any other. We could have never imagined what would actually occur. At the time I’m writing this, at least 80 people have perished in the horrific Fourth of July flood, at least 28 of them children. More than 40 people—including 10 campers from Kerr County’s Camp Mystic—are still missing.
We woke on Friday, July 4, to total devastation: whole RV parks swept away. Boy Scouts in their cabin floating down the river, standing in the doorway with flashlights in the dark of early morning. Thankfully they were stopped by some trees and were able to escape the surging Guadalupe River. The waters rose over 25 feet in less than an hour, they said.
The day before, pinging weather apps and local residents informed us that there would be a small storm. That it would probably be over by 1 a.m. early Friday morning.
We were all planning to go down to the river and watch Robert Earl Keen, the headliner at the “Fourth on the River” celebration—although I decided that I was not going to celebrate the Fourth as a personal protest, as I don’t think our country has anything to celebrate right now.
I was exhausted from an all-day headache that I chalked up to dehydration. For the last 20-plus years, I’ve felt like I’m in a constant state of dehydration no matter what. It’s gotten so bad that this past week I broke down while I was at an estate sale. I was outside with the heat index hovering around 100-degrees Fahrenheit for just five minutes after leaving the sale, trying to figure out why my van wouldn’t start. Five minutes is all it took for me to get completely overheated. I went back into the sale, seeking a/c and help. They took me to a cool room and gathered around me, worried as I could not speak or think clearly. For the next two days I was completely trashed just from that five minutes of being outside.
On the night of the Fourth, I went to bed early because I wasn’t feeling well, and at some point in the night I woke up to thunder. I assumed it was my friend in the other room playing video games, but then I realized what it was and where I was and fell back asleep. Some time later, I woke again when my phone went off with an alert: there were flash flood warnings for Kerr County.
I didn’t think anything of it, because we get these sorts of alerts in North Texas too, but nothing ever happens. So I just went back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I started seeing images of what was taking place. The entire stage where we’d planned to catch Robert Earl Keen had been taken out by the water, along with many lives and homes and dreams.
This was not the vacation I expected, nor was it the life Kerrville residents expected. In fact, from our phones and social media feeds we saw that, beyond Kerrville, a huge swath of the Texas Hill Country in and around Austin was flooding.
Like Hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017, the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry had stalled out above Central Texas, rotating and rotating as it poured rain on the ground. Up to 12 inches of rain were recorded in Kerr County in a matter of hours.
It was inconceivable to me. I’ve never been anywhere during a natural disaster, so I still was thinking it wasn’t that bad; we’d flooded up in North Texas not long before, and everything was okay. But the news stories just kept coming, the pictures of the missing adults and children showing up on all the Kerrville Facebook pages I’m on. So many people missing; so many lives lost.
We discovered there were some leaks in the house, so drove to Home Depot for buckets. We knew Home Depot was on the side of town that hadn’t flooded, so off we went. We decided to take a little drive down a few roads along our side of the river. It was complete devastation. My roommate pulled into a parking lot where there was an overlook; others were there as well. It did not register until later what I was looking at—Louise Hays Park, a place I go every time I’m in town, whether I’m jumping in the river or not.
I had no idea I was looking at this park until my roommate told me where we were. The river was a wide swath of brown with chunks of debris floating. I’ve never seen so much water moving so fast in my life.
I’m safe in bed in Kerrville as I write this, warm under my blankets, with everything to be grateful for. Many, many others are not so lucky. It’s a lot. If the humidity lets up between now and Monday when we leave, I want to go help however I can. But my heat intolerance, plus hot flashes on top of that, make it hard for me to do anything outside for any length of time. The only reason I was able to be outside as much as I was today, photographing and filming the devastation, is because it was actually still raining, keeping the heat in check.
I will be moving to Kerrville by the end of the year and what happened this past weekend does not deter me. I know that this town is resilient, and I know that the parts physically damaged by the flood will eventually return to normal, but there’s gonna be a big hole for much of the town for a long time to come. Please try to donate if you can; the Red Cross is here, and they are accepting donations of all sorts for people who lost everything.
Robert Earl Keen promised a benefit concert for the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country in the near future. And he urged everyone to contribute to the Foundation’s Kerr County Flood Relief Fund to aid in local recovery efforts.
I’ll never forget how on the morning of the flood, before we saw the extent of the damage, we were having breakfast at Cracker Barrel when all phones in the restaurant suddenly went off at once. It was another flood warning alert; it was all anyone had on their mind that morning, and still.
