It was about 1 o'clock in the morning on July 4 when the facility manager in a summer camp in Central Texas Water from the Guadalupe River saw rise steadily in the midst of a flood of rain.
Aroldo Barrera informed his boss, who had followed reports of the storms that Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly approached, a recreational destination where an intercultural youth conference had been canceled only a few hours earlier.
Despite a absence of warning by local authorities, camp officials quickly acted on their own and moved around 70 children and adults who spent the night in a building near the river. With the children safely, camp leaders, including President and CEO Tim Huchton, were able to avoid the catastrophe who touched at least one other camp near Hunt, where the 500-hectare MO-Ranch is located.
“They helped them to pack,” Lisa Winters, communication director for MO-Ranch, told The Associated Press on Sunday. “They got them on, they took them out, put them on higher terrain.”
Other places did much worse.
Flash floods that broke through Texas Hill -land before dawn, decimated the landscape near the river, so that at least 79 deaths and many others are not justified. From Sunday, 10 girls from the nearby camp Mystic remained missing, said civil servants. Rescue and recovery teams comb the area for them and others who are still not justified days after the flood.
The decision to leave added to the increasing accounts of how camps and residents in the area say they have been left to make their own decisions in the absence of warnings or reports from the province.
Local authorities have had to deal with heavy research and have sometimes taken off questions about how much warning they had or could offer to offer the public, and say that the assessments will come later. For now they say they are concentrating on saves. Officials have said that they had not expected such an intense downpour, the equivalent of months of rain for the area.
Mo-Ranch did not suffer a loss of life, said Winters and added that the camp did not receive direct information from provincial officials about floods that could take and did.
“We had no warning that this was coming,” said Winters, adding that it would have been “devastating” if camp officials had not looked at weather reports and the rising river waters.
Mo-Ranch “saw it coming well in advance and they did something about it,” she said.
Around 7 hours Friday, camp staff started contacting the parents of children and told them that their children were safe.
“They knew that those parents would wake up and see these media images of lost children or the river alone,” said Winters. “They are like:” Tell your parents that you're okay “… We have ensured that every guest, every child, was responsible.”
The camp, which lies on higher site than some in the area, suffered some damage, but not as important as others, said Winters.
“The buildings don't matter,” she said. “I can't imagine losing children or people.”
She said that a sturdy aluminum kayak was wrapped around a tree 'like a cracking'.
“That just shows you the pure power of the water. I don't know how people can survive. We are blessed,” she said.
The camp remained closed on Sunday and MO-Ranch worked on ways to help other camps affected by the flood.
“We are in a difficult place because others really suffer,” said Winters, who became emotional during an interview. “We are a sisterhood of Kampen. We take care of each other.”
