Recovering the Dead in Texas’s Flash-Flood Alley
On July 3, Lee Pool, the head of the Hunt volunteer fire service, returned home to Texas for a Colorado vacation with his family when his wife, Stephanie, showed him the weather forecast. Serious storms were predicted in the country of the hills that night. Pool warned the members of the department to remain vigilant. Like many people in the region, Pool bears many hats. In addition to being the head of the fire service – an unpaid position – he is also vice -principe in high school and, during the summers, he worked night security at the Mystic camp, a summer camp for girls. When his return flight was delayed, Pool asked a colleague to cover his quarter of work at the camp.
That night, after Pool and his family came back hunting, the rain was relentless. About 3 years AMThe Pool Fire department radio has started. The river increased and the situation quickly turned into an emergency; Hunt, a city of about thirteen hundred people along the banks of the Guadalupe river, is in what is known as Texas Flash-Flood Alley. The swimming pool was alarmed but not panicked by throwing its clothes and heading for the station. The journey should have taken less than ten minutes, but the water was already everywhere on the road. When he reached Schumacher Crossing, just before the street leading to the fire station, a low bridge over the river was underwater. At this point, the road behind him was also impassable. He supported his van in a sloping driveway, looking for a higher ground and sent a text to Stephanie: “I am stuck on the highway 39. I cannot go nowhere.”
In front of him, the highway was now a fast moving river. When the flood reached the front of his truck, he came out, fearing that he was about to be carried away. His radio was alive with more distress than he had never heard – prisoners of people wedged in trees and hung on roofs. “I mean, it’s just constant,” he said. “Just help, help, help, help.” He thought of the children of the summer camps along the banks and his colleague to fill his security quarter. It was the worst time possible for a disaster to strike: a summer weekend where, between the camps and the vacationers of July 4, the city could see its usual population roughly. Above the radio, he advised his eldest colleagues, many of whom are blocked in the same way, reminding them, if you cannot save yourself, you cannot save someone else.
Then a pair of headlights crosses the night. It was a car with people in it, drifting through the flood. They saw the bundle of its flashlight and called it. It was the most helpless that he ever felt. “I think I just saw people on their way to their death,” he sent a text to Stephanie. “It’s horrible. They float on the river and I can’t do anything. ” He said to me, “Having hands tied, not being able to help people, especially when it is in your heart, when what you want to do is serve – it kills you.” When the water finally started to reflect, a few hours later, it fell so quickly that he left fish to flop and drop over the highway. The swimming pool pushed them back into the water with its boot. “I am, as if I can’t save people now, I’m going to save fish,” he said.
It was near dawn when he was able to go to the station. Daylight has revealed a transformed world – mattresses endangered from the top of the trees, crumpled canoes like cans of beer, houses shealed from their foundations. The Hunt store, where half of the city has had its morning coffee and gossip, had been destroyed. Finally, Pool would learn that his colleague from the Camp Mystic had led dozens of girls to security, but that many others still lacked. He would learn that the director of the camp, Dick Eastland, had died trying to save the girls and that the head of a voluntary fire service nearby, in Marble Falls, had been carried away by responding to the flood.
But all this would come later. That morning, the swimming pool brought together a team to go door to check people. They found their first death shortly before 9 AM The water threatened to get up again, so they wrapped the body and moved it to higher ground. Then it was time to understand what to do next.
Hunt, a community not constituted in society a dozen kilometers west of Kerrville, is at the junction of the North and South Fourches of the Guadalupe River. The fire service covers one hundred and sixty a square area and generally responds to sixty calls per year, managing everything, from brushes to social protection controls and vehicle accidents. “Many motorcyclists come here,” Pool told me when we met on Tuesday, a few days after the flood. “It’s a beautiful journey. Or, that was the case. “
Pool is a tagged man and in a good mood who leads a team of three dozen volunteers, including a cosmetology instructor, a retired police officer and a man who sells water tanks. When I asked questions about the average age of his firefighters, Pool smiled. “I do not do the calculation on this subject, out of respect for our members,” he said. “I am fifty-three years old and I am one of the youngest.”
That morning, the Hunt central fire station, a stone building perched on a hill, was animated by activity: running water had finally been restored, and a group of people was occupied in the kitchen, picking up the barbecue in polystyrene containers to feed the research teams. The high ceiling berries where the fire trucks would generally be parked were rather full of boxes of water bottles and pallets filled with given cleaning products. Two fire trucks were destroyed during the floods; Others were sewn but potentially operable.
Pool and I seated in the distribution room, where the air conditioner worked hard to follow the heat. On the wall was a hunting card, the Guadalupe river, a blue line, winding on it. Pool worked constantly since the flood, seeming to be fueled by a mixture of necessity and goal. “It’s a small town,” he said. “We have no mayor, there is no government of the city or something like that. Thus, the people who currently kept this city afloat are me, the superintendent of the school district and the two pastors, Baptist and Methodist. ” Someone interrupted to ask if it was possible to get a forklift to help unload supplies, then someone else interrupted to ask how to manage the species. “Being in public education, they say that you answer five thousand questions a day, so it’s a bit of my environment,” said Pool. “But it’s a lot.”
A firefighter pushed his head into the office. “The chef, someone calls you, priority,” he said. On the radio, the blurred voice of a man announced that he had found part of the body. Everyone in the room grimacted. “Look at your tongue on the radio,” warned the distributor. The pool is out. “They constantly find things,” he said, when he returns a moment later. “They just found someone else.” In the whole county, Pool explained, the human remains that the researchers discovered were stored in refrigerated trucks in the fire station until the funeral salons can manage them. Then the radio crackled, and he apologized again.
The floods of July 4 are among the most deadly and harmful in America in the last century, with at least one hundred and twenty people confirmed from Thursday, about a quarter of Camp Mystic. The state has deployed research and rescue teams to search for people who remain not recorded – more than one hundred and sixty, in the last count. While a large part of the objective, of course, was on the Mystic camp, the affected area is much wider and some of the peripheral communities, including Hunt, had to do with fewer official resources. In a disaster of this size, the Federal Emergency Management Agency generally deploys hundreds of people, including specialized research teams; On Monday evening, the besieged agency would have sent only ninety-six years, partly due to the cost reduction process set up by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security. (Tuesday evening, Fema had sent three hundred and eleven people to the region.) When the researchers called a discovery of human remains, it sometimes took more than two hours for state soldiers to arrive. The Salvation Army settled in Kerrville, the county’s seat, but a room speculated to me that Hunt’s people could be too proud to call on external resources. Instead, they contacted the place where they had always contacted the help: the fire service. “Realistic,” said Pool, “we are somehow alone.”
The community rallied to a certain extent which was comforting, even overwhelming: first the flood, now the flood of donations. I listened to a brilliant volunteer named Bobby Manning the phone in observation, with calls coming as far as New Hampshire and Dakota from the North. The appellants offered energy drinks, mourning advice, heavy equipment, IV hydration therapy, dry socks. It was difficult to find room to store everything, and people continued to want to bring more. “The diapers, the dog food – you call it, we have it,” Bobby told a caller who asked what the community needed. “It’s like Walmart here.”
