HUNT, Texas — Camp Mystic’s executive director Dick Eastland began evacuating campers approximately 45 minutes after the National Weather Service issued an alert about a “life-threatening flash flooding,” according to an Eastland Family spokesperson.
The catastrophic flooding that continues to threaten central Texas left 27 dead at Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer camp located in Hunt, Texas, along the Guadalupe River.
Eastland received an alert on his phone from the National Weather Service at 1:14 a.m. on the morning of July 4 and began evaluating whether to evacuate the young campers who were sleeping in their cabins without access to electronics, according to Eastland family spokesperson Jeff Carr.
Based on a preliminary timeline of events, Eastland began moving campers to higher elevation by 2:00 a.m., as the situation began to deteriorate, according to Carr.
“They had no information that indicated the magnitude of what was coming. They got a standard run-of-the-mill NWS warning that they’ve seen dozens of times before,” Carr said on a call with ABC News.
Eastland died trying to help evacuate campers from their cabins, as the waters of the Guadalupe River rose. ABC News previously reported that some of those cabins lay in the river’s floodway, which Kerr County officials deemed “an extremely hazardous area due to the velocity of flood waters which carry debris, potential projectiles and erosion potential.”
The information provided by Carr provides one of the first windows into the late-night scramble that took place at the isolated camp, where 27 counselors and campers lost their lives in the flooding.
Carr previously told the Washington Post that the evacuations began at 2:30 a.m. but walked back the timeline when speaking to ABC News. He cautioned that the timeline determined by the family is preliminary and estimated the evacuations began closer to 2 a.m.. He said the timeline was pieced together based on the accounts of family members who assisted in the evacuation and Camp Mystic’s night watchman.
According to Carr, Eastland began communicating with his family members over walkie-talkie shortly after the first alert to begin assessing the scope of the rising waters. When they began to see the extent of the flood waters, Eastland began the process of moving campers from the lower-lying cabins to Camp Mystic’s recreational center, he said.
The National Weather Service issued a more dire alert at 4:03 a.m., warning in part, “This is a FLASH FLOOD EMERGENCY for South-central Kerr County, including Hunt. This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!”
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