The flood that changed camp

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Texas camps prepare for summer under tough new rules.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: New state safety requirements took effect after last summer’s deadly flooding at Camp Mystic killed 25 campers and two counselors.

But camp operators say some of the changes are unrealistic. WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: When Carrie Hanna was a little girl, she spent parts of her summer at Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp in Hunt, Texas, near the Guadalupe River. When Hanna had little girls, she wanted them to go there, too.

HANNA: I met my best friends there, learned how to be a good sport, and grow spiritually.

Hanna told the Texas legislature about her 9-year-old daughter Hadley’s excitement at drop-off last year.

HANNA: Once I convinced them to come outside and take one last selfie, and tell me goodbye, Hadley jumped down from the porch and started cartwheeling her way to her cabin. She heard me laughing, stopped, turned around, threw her hands in the air and screamed, ‘I love this place.’

Hadley died in the flooding at Camp Mystic last summer. The Guadalupe River has seen some major floods, but last year’s broke every record. 

Afterward, investigators determined the camp’s safety plan was inadequate, even though the camp passed inspection just two days before the flood.

HANNA: Our precious, hilarious, kind, caring, silly, loving little girl who always wanted to help others died because there was no plan.

Lawyer and investigator Casey Garrett testified as well.

GARRETT: There was a Shelter In Place plan, there was not an evacuation plan for when sheltering in place was no longer viable.

In Texas, summer camps must have emergency plans to be licensed.“Shelter In Place” counts as a plan.

State Senator Pete Flores:

FLORES: We cannot change what happened, but we can change how we prepare for and respond to the next emergency.

In September, the legislature passed what’s known as the “Heaven’s 27 Camp Safety Act,” named after the 27 children and councilors who died at Camp Mystic.

Camps are now required to have an evacuation plan that every person at the camp knows. It also requires redundant warning systems, specifically, fiber-optic internet as a backup. 

That requirement raised alarms for rural camps. Fiber is too expensive for some, and others are so far off the beaten path that internet companies wouldn’t install it.

BILES: We also want to keep campers safe, and so, but there's not a one size fits all solution.

Paul Biles is the director of Tejas Camp and Retreat Center in Texas. His camp and several others filed a lawsuit to remove the fiber-optic requirement:

BILES: We don't like to put a price tag on safety and things like that, in that sense of, ‘oh, we're not going to do that because it costs too much.’ But for many rural camps a bill like that is their yearly revenue, and so to be able to expect them to pay for something like that is just unrealistic when there's definitely other options available that would serve the same needs.

Some of those options could include Starlink and wireless internet.

Biles and his lawyers believe nearly half of the 360 camps licensed last year did not have fiber optic internet. Many of those now have it, but Biles thinks about 50 were struggling to get it in time for the deadline and would have been unable to open. 

But the state of Texas struck a deal this month: Camps that maintain redundant internet services and meet the law’s other requirements will be allowed to open without fiber-optic internet.

What happened in Texas has set off preventive action elsewhere. Henry DeHart is the CEO of the American Camp Association.

DEHART: There are currently 11 other states that are looking at strengthening their emergency planning laws in along the lines of what Texas did.

DeHart says Texas needed to update its laws and other states do too, but too much detail can make it untenable.

DEHART: Details around, you know, having redundant communication systems, training and rehearsing where appropriate your emergency plans, you know, things like that. That level of specificity was helpful. Getting granular in that can be problematic in any law.

DeHart says summer camp laws vary from state to state, and parents should do their homework, but…

DEHART: Camps would not be in business if they didn't pay attention to the safety of the campers that were in their care… Folks are in this business because they believe in youth development. They’re trying to make a change in the world.

Texas is still in the process of making sure every camp meets the updated licensing requirements as camps prepare to start welcoming kids by the end of the month.

Reportg for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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