Many of the stories about July 4th flooding in the Texas Hill Country have been rightly focused on the devastation, the loss and the enormous tragedy. But there are also stories of rescue, of escape and of survival.
Presidio County Commissioner David Beebe and his family are grateful to be among that group. They were gathered at a home on the North Fork of the Guadalupe River when the flooding began. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: David, how are you and your family doing today?
David Beebe: Well, we're doing fine. We're really glad to be home. We are really glad that we're safe, but we did see the devastation as we came out there.
I mean, we knew it was going to be bad because of all the RV parks that we know exist and what we saw even before we evacuated the high ground was severe.
Can you tell me about the trip you had planned? You were celebrating your birthday, along with Independence Day, at a home you'd visited many times before – a home your family built?
Yes. Well, my wife's family built this home in 2012. It's on the North Fork of the river up past Hunt around the Boy Scout camp. And, because the house was built after 2000, it's built up on stilts like a beach house and it was built actually higher than required because of the knowledge that there was going to be a flood someday.
We were with friends. And we have a two-year-old daughter. So our friends came down from Austin and we were hanging out, just ate some dinner, had some wine and stuff and went to bed.
And, fortunately, my buddy, who was staying in the other room with his wife and child, couldn't sleep well because the rain was so severe. And then, finally he looked outside and he was like, "this is not right." So he woke us up at about 3:45 or something and was like, "we got to get out of here."
And my wife was like "well, we can't go anywhere because if we go sideways, it gets worse, you know, you have low water crossings." But we know that the Boy Scout camp is up high on a hill.
Once it was determined that that's what we're going to do with getting our cars and go up to high ground, we did that. And then we sat in our cars up on the top of the hill for, I don't know, 30 or 45 minutes.
And then somebody, a gentleman who is a ranch manager of a ranch up the hill who also is a member of the Hunt Volunteer Fire Department – he was out and he was aware there was an emergency. He saw us and was like, "are y'all okay?" And we were like, "yeah, we're okay." And so he's like, "well, y'all should come up and stay at the ranch."
So, fortunately, we knew where higher ground was. And I think that's part of the problem with being a tourist in that area, is you might not know where high ground is. And in fact, if we had moved laterally on the road to – quote unquote – "get out of there," we probably would have hit flooding.
We had the advantage of knowledge of the area, so we're just really, really lucky.
Were you expecting a dangerous situation at all when you went to sleep on Thursday?
Absolutely not.
We knew there was going to be some rain. I mean, we were looking at the forecast because we were trying to see if we could go swimming. It had already rained a little bit that evening and it started raining kind of hard. I saw two to three inches and then some forecasts, I remember saying it could be up to five or something like that. But there was no indication that there would be anything out of the ordinary.
We have a landline at that place. If there had been a reverse 911 system, they would have called. Everybody's second guessing what could have happened. Now I know we didn't receive any notification. So it's just a real wake-up call for everybody as far as like, you know, these – quote unquote – "500-year floods" are going to happen more than every 500 years.
I don't want to make you relive this, but could you tell me just a little bit of what you saw when you were leaving?
Well, we came down and we were able to get back into our house to just get some of our effects and survey the damage before we left.
We consulted with our hosts and they were on the radios. They knew that you could go, kind of either direction was okay, but they recommended we head to the East, which was going through Hunt and Ingram.
The Hunt store was completely obliterated. There's houses there with large rock walls. The walls had fallen down. The houses were marked with X's, kind of like what you saw in Katrina, meaning that, you know, there's no bodies inside.
I mean, kudos to all the first responders. There were all kinds of people there from all over the place.
But the worst devastation was where the RV parks were, which there are multiple on the river between Hunt and Ingram. There's just nothing. Like there was no RVs, there were no hookups, there were no trees, there's just… and you know that people were in those RVs.
And this is before we even knew, really, about the extent of the [Camp] Mystic damage. You know, we were getting the news as it was coming. The RV parks are just completely gone and there are no traces of the RVs.
So I just, I can't help but think that this could be – the fatalities could be in the hundreds. So we're all shell-shocked.
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Marfa Public Radio editor's note: David Beebe is a volunteer music program host at Marfa Public Radio.