Rivers of Tears

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” - Elizabeth Stone

There were 16 people camped along the limestone banks of the Pedernales River that May evening in 1983. Twelve boys and two adults from a therapeutic wilderness program in Houston had traveled to the Texas Hill Country. The weather was pleasant, warm, and only slightly muggy. Upriver, though, later that night, rain began to fall in the stony reaches of the Pedernales’ watershed, and a wave began to build and move down stream at great speed. When it swept through the campsite where the boys and their counselors had pitched their tents inside Pedernales Falls State Park, they’d had no warning. A 20-foot wall of water carried them into a torrent of spring.

Four of them died, their bodies discovered in root tangles downstream. Three were boys in the 11 and 12 year old age group, and a camp counselor. Even the crudest of warnings might have prevented their deaths but they would have needed portable radios tuned to weather forecasts or park rangers who had gotten alerts. The tragedy prompted a discussion that led to the installation of warning sirens with float triggers that set off alarms when the water rises to dangerous levels. Eventually, more than a dozen sirens were installed upriver of the state park, and they remain in service.

No such warnings came to students at a summer camp on the Guadalupe River four years later near Comfort, Texas. Small towns and rural counties tend to lack the political influence needed to get money from the state for preventive infrastructure. The wall of water that roared down the Guadalupe Canyon that July day in 1987 was said by several witnesses to be more than 50 feet high. A school bus, being used to evacuate students from camp, stalled on a low-water bridge, and was tossed away like a child’s toy. Nine children died, and one adult. Three decades passed before local governments were able to raise the money to install a dual-purpose siren on the fire department building, and work began on a network of sirens.

I was a TV news correspondent and was present to report on both of those tragedies, and given all the time I’ve spent canoeing and camping near those rivers, I’ve never stopped thinking about those kids. There has not ever been a sufficiently coordinated effort to create an integrated warning system for the inevitable floods that run through those limestone canyons of the Texas Hill Country. State politicians ought to work with local governments to fund the technology and its installation. Instead, small local governments are forced to solve their own problems with limited resources, which means little or nothing gets done and people die. Hill Country floods are inevitable and predictable and there is no excuse for not implementing a warning system for the thousands of people who use those rivers for recreation.

There was a modest attempt to address emergency communications in the recent session of the state legislature, but it failed. In fact, it never got a chance. House Bill 13 proposed the creation of the Texas Interoperability Council to enhance emergency communications across agencies. The measure would have provided grants for outdoor warning sirens, evacuation alert systems, and training for local personnel. Total cost, which would almost certainly save lives, was $5.75 million, coffee money to a man like Greg Abbott who doesn’t get out of bed before spending a billion or two on a border wall that has no impact. Instead, after HB 13 passed the house, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick sent it to the Senate Finance Committee with orders to let it die there and not come before the full chamber for a vote.

The Texas Governor and Lt. Governor are two of the most disingenuous people in American politics, posturing and praying before cameras instead of taking actions that could save lives in the future. Kerr County, where most of the death and destruction occurred in the July 4th flooding, did not have warning sirens despite the upscale prosperity of most of the community. County Judge Rob Kelly said there had been discussions years ago about installing a network of sirens but the idea was abandoned “due to cost concerns.” His admission came even after he told reporters, “This is one of the most dangerous river valleys in the country.”

Kelly could have taken up the matter with his state representative, a Republican named Wes Virdell, who voted against HB 13 to provide state funds for the technology. He was one of the only 18 votes against the proposed law, which passed with 129 yeas before being sent to the Texas senate to die an inglorious death in a committee. Virdell, who worked with rescue teams, was quoted as saying, “My vote would probably be different now.” Dozens of deaths, many of them children, were all it took to get his attention.

Kerr County, one of the most conservative in Texas, had 68 of the 79 reported fatalities as of July 6. Elected officials at the state and local level failed to protect citizens but they did not want to take any blame or let their conservative politics suffer. Abbott and Patrick very quickly got out front of accepting any responsibility for the failure of warnings to reach campers and motorists. At a news conference, they pointed fingers at the National Weather Service, which had been dutifully issuing forecasts and warnings about potential dangers for more than 48 hours. Abbott’s advice, which he offers after the state’s multiple mass shootings, was for people to pray. He said prayers are answered, and bravely signed a proclamation making the Sunday after the disaster a day of prayer. That solved everything. But there are, at present, at least 79 families whose prayers will not be answered, and there will be more in the future if state leadership continues to do nothing.

The governor’s magical thinking in the wake of human disasters is disgusting. There are times when he does not appear to even live in the real world. In a state where less than a quarter of its citizens are Catholic, he speaks of “Holy Mary” and posts on Facebook that she is “exalted above the choirs of angels.” The 2015 message commemorating the Feast of the Assumption, asked for her intercession with the line, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us now at the hour of our death.” Abbott and Patrick don’t want to spend a dime to save Texans’ lives and they march out their supercilious religiousness as some kind of a temporary balm, hoping their constituents will get past the pain and forget the government’s culpability in those tragedies. No gun control laws. No flood warnings. Just prayer.

The next time Texans contemplate voting for Greg Abbott or Dan Patrick, they ought to first give thought to those little girls lost from Camp Mystic. Some were likely about to spend their first night away from home, excited about being with friends in the bunkhouse and thinking about camp fires and singing and wading in the river. Instead, in the darkness of the pre-dawn, as they slept, they felt water rise into their beds, tear them and their cabins loose from the earth, and send them into an eternal blackness. The governor offering prayers for them has never done anything to prevent such sadnesses in his state, and, the Lt. Governor, in fact, has made certain the latest attempt to fund an emergency system was defeated without a vote on his orders. Texans need to ask where was Greg Abbott and his prayers and his God the night innocent children were stolen away from their sleep in a flood, unlikely to be ever be seen again.

And when will this Texas horror be repeated again?