KERRVILLE, Texas — Lucy Kennedy said it was about midnight when she woke up to the sound of thunder.
“I couldn’t go back to sleep,” Lucy, 10, said Tuesday in an interview, her mother sitting by her side. “I just had a feeling that something really bad was about to happen.”
Lucy had been asleep Thursday night in her bunk at Camp Mystic, a roughly 750-person summer camp in Hunt. Rain had begun to pound an area known to be at severe risk of flash floods.
On “Here’s the Scoop,” podcast co-host Morgan Chesky takes listeners on the ground to hear from survivors of Texas’ catastrophic flooding.
As water began to inundate her campsite, girls from her cabin were told to grab blankets, pillows and water bottles and line up single file, Lucy said. They moved to the second floor of a rec hall for safety, where they sat in soaking wet pajamas before they migrated to a campsite on higher ground.
In the light of day, survivors were airlifted Friday to safety by helicopter — a sight Lucy said was “pretty, but also not pretty at the same time.”
“Everything looked flooded and broken, so it was also kind of sad,” she said.
After the helicopter ride, Lucy was shuttled to an elementary school where her mother, Wynne Kennedy, waited with other parents in the gym, hoping to hear their children’s names called out.
“When I saw her, she was wrapped up in a blanket, had a teddy bear,” Wynne Kennedy said. “We just held each other tight, and I held her all night.”
Days after floodwaters swept through Texas’ Hill Country, rescue workers continue to comb the region. More than 100 people are dead across six counties, and Gov. Greg Abbott said Tuesday that 161 people are known to be missing. Few places, if any, were hit as hard as Camp Mystic, a private Christian summer camp for girls that has been around since 1926.
At least 27 attendees and counselors at Camp Mystic are either dead or missing. Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said Tuesday that five campers and a counselor are still unaccounted for.
On Tuesday, a sign that reads “Jesus Wept” was propped up on debris by the riverbank next to the camp.
Officials in Kerr County, where Camp Mystic is located, said over the weekend that they were caught off guard by the onslaught of floodwaters, noting that parts of the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes. But some crucial questions remain unanswered, particularly around whether adequate warnings were issued. At a news conference Tuesday, local authorities dodged questions about the local alert system.
In a statement on its website, Camp Mystic said it had been in communication with state and local authorities in efforts to find those still missing.
Wynne Kennedy, who used to work at the camp, said she felt her daughter “was in the safest place she could be because of the extensive flood evacuation plans that they trained us on.” Last week’s devastation felt unprecedented, she said, saying that “the water never got near any of those cabins, ever, before, when we would have a little flooding.”
Destruction from the flooding was not contained to Camp Mystic. The Kennedys’ house in Kerrville was destroyed overnight. Doors were ripped from the hinges, a storage shed was swept away and a tree crashed into Lucy’s bedroom. Wynne Kennedy said the family was used to flash flooding in the area but could never have predicted the “wall of water” that washed over their home. The river, which could be seen sparkling on a sunny day from their kitchen, is now brown and filled with debris.
She said she is optimistic that it will sparkle again. And she looks forward to the reopening of Camp Mystic, which was due to celebrate its 100th anniversary next year.
“We’re just trying to keep the spirit of Mystic alive,” Wynne Kennedy said.
Lucy recalled her favorite memories from camp over the last three years — horseback riding and fishing, the latter of which earned her a silver charm last year for her skills. Her favorite meal was the chef’s salad, she said, served Mondays for lunch.
Summer camps can be familial traditions in Texas, with some families having sent their children to Camp Mystic for generations. Wynne Kennedy’s mother was a camper and a grandmother was a counselor, she said. She described the other campers and their parents as a “big family.”
“Unfortunately, I do have loved ones that have girls that are still missing or unaccounted for and loved ones who have lost their daughters,” Wynne Kennedy said, adding: “Some parents said things like, ‘They’ll be forever playing at their favorite place in the world, at Camp Mystic.’ And I think that is beautiful.”
