Grotesque incompetence, stupidity, money groveling by camp owners, by Texas, by the voters, by the Republicans who run the state.
Kerr County, Texas asked multiple times for state assistance for a $1 million flood notification and response project. The response from the legislature and administration? No.
Kerr County itself turned down the idea of sirens for notification. The first notice to the county last Friday morning of the rising, churning, killer river? About 1:30 a.m. What happened? Nothing. No response. No sirens. There were none. By 4 a.m., the water next time had become the historic flood this time.
Where was the governor? Sleeping. Where was the lieutenant governor? Sleeping.
After Uvalde the governor rushed to commend the local police, the Texas Rangers (state police). But it turned out they were incompetent, cowardly, derelict. It turned out Abbott was at best a cheerleader and at worst a fool and a liar. The latter is more likely the case.
Now the same governor, Abbot has rtushed in to commend all those same “heroes” again – and the camp owners and the like and guess what? Once again Abbot, who understands little or nothing except to be another cruel, ignorant Trump fan, is wrong again. All those people, starting with him, failed in every possible way.
No early warning siren system, no basic simple rule like a mandatory night-long camp flood watch akin to night-long fire watches in army barracks; incredibly, no state and local commutation systems in the most wired world there has ever been.
This is a case ripe not merely for civil lawsuits but in a better place than ignorant, red Texas, for serious criminal charges starting at least with manslaughter. The second largest state, 30 million people but not a grain of decent common sense where it matters.
The camps are an interesting look into white Christian Texas, its power structure and centers (LBJ’s daughters attended them back in the day). A session at Camp Mystic, one month, costs $4,300 (NY Times, July 10, 2025).Wonder how the well off parents of those children voted in 2024? I can guess.
That makes these camps probably $5 million to $10 million a year businesses, if not more but dependent on children and their lives. And they could not spend even de minimus ammuonts for watches on their own flood plain footprints supported by simple hand cranked, camp immediate sirens?
What would Camp Mystic have experienced if one counselor at a time had been woken to do a one-hour stint at flood watch with instructions to crank a siren local to just that camp on the first sign of a rising river or the first phone notification? How many little girls who are dead would be alive?. All of them?
This is far more than a river raging. It is a flood in and of red state, red-America ignorance, failure, denial and plain, miserly venality. It belongs in the criminal as well as the civil courts.
But these are not things all those little girls will ever know.
They died for Texas.
Peeling the Onion 