Texas Flash Flood Devastation: Loss, Sorrow, And Heroism

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The death toll in Texas after the flash floods has now risen to at least 82 people.

While the political class pontificates, the reality on the ground is horrific. There have been so many precious lives swept away by the flood waters, and the recovery efforts are ongoing. There initially was a report that two little girls had been found alive clinging to a tree on Sunday. Sadly, the story was retracted hours later. Searchers are desperately hoping for a miracle, but the hope of finding more people alive grows dimmer with each passing day.

And as victims are identified, the stories become even more heartbreaking.

The most tragic of the losses are coming from Camp Mystic, a Christian girls’ camp where the flood took out whole cabins. There were around 750 kids at the camp when the flash flood hit, and the co-owner and camp director, Dick Eastland, was reportedly killed while trying to rescue campers in the cabins closest to the river.

The youngest girls at Camp Mystic in Texas were asleep in cabins as little as 225 feet from the river when flash flooding suddenly surged — causing the water to rise 20 feet above flood stage in just 90 minutes, starting around 4 a.m. on July 4.

At least five girls from the camp have been confirmed dead — all age 8 and 9 — and 11 others are still missing. The victims include a relative of the Kansas City Chiefs owners

The death toll from Friday morning’s horrific flooding rose to at least 80 across Texas on Sunday evening, with 68 of the deaths in Kerr County, where Camp Mystic is based.

In Kerr County, rescuers have found the bodies of at least 21 children — with 11 little girls still missing from Camp Mystic, along with one camp counselor.

One of the confirmed dead is Dick Eastland, the longtime owner of the Christian getaway — which has a storied history in Texas and counts ex First Lady Laura Bush as a former counselor.

Cabins at the site housing the youngest campers are situated on low-lying “flats” less than one football field away from the banks of the Guadalupe River, according to the New York Times and satellite analysis of the camp.

Most of the missing girls are from those cabins, the Times reported.

Clark Hunt, who owns the Kansas City Chiefs, did have his wife confirm on social media that they had lost a family member, nine year old Janie Hunt. Camp Mystic is well-known within Texas and politically connected – Representative August Pfluger of Texas and Representative Buddy Carter of Georgia both reported that they had family members at the camp who were safely rescued (though Carter reported that his granddaughters lost a cousin), and CNN reporter Pamela Brown attended the camp as a child.

And yet, in all the sorrow, there are stories of heroism emerging. There are many summer camps located along the Guadalupe River, but fortunately, many of them were between sessions and did not have campers on site. One that did was Camp La Junta, an all boys’ camp up the river from Camp Mystic, where the heroic efforts of camp counselors are credited with saving the lives of the campers.

And one positive story of heroism is coming from the efforts of a Coast Guard rescue swimmer, as he is credited with saving lives on his very first deployment.

“This is what it’s all about, right? Like, this is why we do the job,” said Scott Ruskan, 26, a New Jersey native and former KPMG accountant, to The Post after his work in central Texas.

“This is why we take those risks all time. This is why like Coast Guard men and women, are risking their lives every day,” said Petty Officer Ruskan — who was in charge of triage at Camp Mystic, the Christian girls’ summer camp that saw some of the worst of the flooding.

Raised in Oxford, NJ, Ruskan enlisted in the US Coast Guard in 2021, and after completing basic training, went to Aviation Survival Technician school in Petaluma, Calif., before being stationed in Corpus Christi, Texas.

He had been on call since November after completing all of his training, familiarizing himself with the Coast Guard’s iconic MH-65 helicopter and enrolling in additional rescue swimming classes as he waited to be called into action.

When the Coast Guard got the call to come help, Ruskan went. Their destination was Camp Mystic.

When the crew arrived, they were racing against sundown to rescue as many stranded flood victims as possible. All roads were impassable, and the currents were too strong for any boats to get in, leaving helicopter evacuation as the only hope for the nearly 200 survivors.

As the crews evaluated the operational logistics, their goal was to move as many people out of harm’s way as possible, but they were bound by the weight limits of the helicopters. During a briefing, they decided to leave Ruskan on the ground to triage the rescue mission.

“I was like, sweet, sounds great, I’ll be more helpful on the ground than I will be in the air right now, so that’s kind of what we went with,” he said.

The rescuers loaded the first four to five survivors into the MH-65, and Ruskan set out to take a closer look at the scene of the camp, which was on higher ground than the flood-ravaged surrounding areas, where trees were snapped like twigs and twisted metal of cars littered the muddy ground.

While on the ground, Ruskan tended to terrified and injured campers, many of them shoeless and still wearing pajamas from their mad dash out of their bunks in the middle of the night.

In between comforting the “cold, wet and miserable” survivors, both kids and adults, Ruskan directed Army Blackhawk 60s and MH-65s to pockets of survivors to begin painstakingly bringing them to safety.

Over the next several hours, Ruskan spearheaded a high-risk rescue mission under the worst possible environmental conditions, which in the end saw 165 brought to safety.

“So we basically got the majority of the people out of Camp Mystic, which is awesome. And I feel like we did a lot of good that day, but obviously it’s still super sad,” he said. “There’s still a lot of people missing and unaccounted for, so the mission’s not over yet. It’s not over for us.

“We’re back home and stuff, but there’s still so many crews, Coast Guard, Department of Public Safety, Air National Guard and those Task Force 1 guys, as well as other local agencies. They’re still out there,” Ruskan said, eager to share the credit for him and his crew’s heroics with the other agencies involved in the rescue.

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There will be so many tragic and heartbreaking stories of loss and grief, that being able to highlight those moments of heroism and survival is essential. Unfortunately, there is likely to be more sorrow in store for those who are still searching for loved ones. Pray for them, pray for Texas, and pray for those out there searching for a miracle.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click

The post Texas Flash Flood Devastation: Loss, Sorrow, And Heroism appeared first on Victory Girls Blog.



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