Texans clung to debris and fought to stay alive as floodwaters raged

KERRVILLE, Texas — The rain began as Stephanie Rodriguez started her nightly rounds as a security guard at Camp La Junta, an all-boys camp on the Guadalupe River. Within a few hours, it was pooling across the grounds and starting to rise.

She called her wife at about 1:30 a.m. and her boss about 45 minutes later to report the water was closing in on the campus. Rodriguez sought refuge on the second floor of the cafeteria building, she later recalled.

But the water kept coming and was soon rushing through the building’s doors. Before long, Rodriguez said objects in the room below her were floating, including the kitchen’s large gas oven, which had dislodged from its fuel line with a hiss. Water started rising up the staircase, step by step.

The building began to creak. The water below had merged with the river, she saw, its swift current whisking everything in its path out the back door, including the stairs. Within seconds, the walls of the building began to cave, and the second floor where she stood began to buckle.

“I just said, ‘God I’m going to die,’” Rodriguez, 30, recalled, her voice cracking and her eyes swelling with tears. “I went in.” Swallowed up, she fought to stay above the water, grasping for something to keep her afloat.

Aware she was being sucked into the river, Rodriguez finally grabbed a large orange water cooler, her body tumbling as she dodged cars, boats, tables, doors, trees, and jagged pieces of broken fence that shot through the water like deadly spears. She feared she might not see her wife and children again.

“I just said, ‘God please … God please give me my family back,’” she recalled.

Rodriguez fought to keep her head above water. At one point, she became lodged in a fence, where she “held for my life.” She screamed for help, but there was no one, she said. After a bit, the water somehow started to subside. Exhausted, Rodriguez was able to trudge out and seek help.

Texans clung to debris and fought to stay alive as floodwaters raged

Scott Fineske, an owner and director at Camp La Junta, said when he and Rodriguez spoke, there was “nothing to suggest that anyone in our camp was in danger.” That was at about 3:45 a.m., Rodriguez said. By about 4:45 a.m., Fineske said, counselors “woke each cabin, led boys to higher ground, and repeated head-counts until all campers and staff were confirmed safe.” When they were accounting for staff, Fineske confirmed Rodriguez was safe, he said.

At least 120 people are known to have been killed in the devastating flash floods that erupted across Texas’s scenic Hill Country a week ago. More than 160 people are still missing here in Kerr County alone. Of the 96 people killed in this county, three dozen were children, authorities said Thursday.

Astonishing stories of survival have emerged, too. In just a few minutes, dozens of campers, tourists and residents found themselves facing life-or-death decisions in the swirl of a river that for generations has served as a cool refuge from the unrelenting furnace of a hot Texas summer, but also has seen dangerous floods that have earned the area the nickname “Flash Flood Alley.”

A few miles upriver from Camp La Junta, it had been a fitful night for Joan Connor, 81, and her 98-year-old husband, David Stearns, inside the ranch house they share.

Joan Connor, 81, looks at her waterlogged belongings on her back patio. Connor and Stearns, who had recently had a pacemaker implanted and knee surgery, swam out of their home into their truck where they sat as floodwaters continued to rise.

The lightning had flashed, and the thunder had been relentless, the soundtrack of a stronger-than-usual summer Texas thunderstorm. Sometime in the early morning hours, Stearns got out of bed, only to find he was standing in six inches of water. “Joan, it’s flooding,” the World War II veteran called out to his wife.

Connor leaped up and went to the kitchen to grab a flashlight and move things higher. As always, their dog Ava — a husky and collie mix — followed. Before she knew it, the dining room table was floating in water that was growing deeper by the second. “I just remember this huge surge of water. It gives me goose bumps now because I can still see it,” she recalled days later. “It came so fast.”

Connor cried out to her husband, urging him “Come now!” In the other room, the door had caved in, and Stearns found himself dodging a floating chest of drawers. The couple, with their dog, swam toward their front deck, seeking refuge atop a bar counter. But the water kept rising.

“Where do we go from here?” Connor asked her husband, who suggested they might have to climb on the roof.

Flood related destruction in a bedroom in the home of Connor and Stearns, 98.

The couple never had to find out. The water slowly began to recede. A neighbor, who had taken refuge in a nearby tree with his wife, swam over to check on the couple. He took an American flag that had been hanging nearby and used it to wrap up Stearns, who was unclothed and shivering. Soon, the neighbor helped them to their one of their pickup trucks, flooded out and unusable, where the couple waited in stunned silence as the dawn arrived.

“I can’t tell you how long we sat there,” Connor recalled. They had lost nearly everything but had somehow survived a night unlike any other in their decades on earth. Days later, she wrestled with the sadness of seeing the community they loved be destroyed and with the question of why so many people, including children, had perished while others like her and her husband were spared.

“You question God: How this could happen to these babies?” she said. “My spirituality is kind of hazy right now.”

Dave Stearns, 98, left, speaks with neighbor Rick Johnson, right, as they survey the damage of their homes.

Across the area, survivors spoke in similar stunned voices of how a river that had so often been a comfort and an object of natural beauty had risen so quickly and turned so ugly.

James Wright, 69, lives about a mile from Camp Mystic, where 27 campers and counselors were killed. His house sits on a bluff about 40 feet above the south fork of the river, high enough that he had never even thought about water reaching his home.

But at about 2 a.m. Friday, Wright was awakened by a flash flood alert blaring from his cellphone. He heard the sound of the rain pounding on his roof. Initially, he and his wife, Donna, 69, ignored the alert — one of many they had received over the years.

“Typically, when we get flash flood warnings, we don’t think, ‘Water in our house,’” Wright said. “We think, ‘Oh, upstream and downstream we may not be able to get through low-water crossings,’ so it doesn’t scare us very much.”

But after listening to the pounding rain for another 15 minutes, Wright got up to peek outside. He was stunned by what he saw. “The river was already at my house,” he recalled, describing how waves of water were lapping at his back porch.

Water flows behind a tree stump damaged in the Central Texas floods along the Guadalupe River.

The couple raced to put clothes on, while Wright grabbed the keys to his Chevy Tahoe. By the time they made it outside, it was too late to get away. The water “was just rushing in a raging torrent,” he recalled, and the couple waded to their garage, where they sought refuge in an elevated loft. He grabbed two life preservers hanging near his kayaks, hoping they wouldn’t have to use them.

For the next 45 minutes, they watched the water surge within feet of the loft’s support beam. If the water gets higher, he warned his wife, they might have to swim. But luckily it never came to that. The water began to recede, and the couple was able to climb down safely.

Wright, a heart transplant patient, emerged and went to help a neighbor, who had survived by climbing a tree. “We got lucky,” Wright said. “There were all of these people who literally were asleep in their house and didn’t know about it, and then ‘boom.’ They are gone.”

Mud lines from the flood mark the highest water levels in a home in Ingram, Texas.

Spencer Offenbacker had fallen asleep in his living room that night. His wife woke him up just after 4 a.m. to say they needed to get to higher ground.

By the time he gathered their two children and headed out the back door of their home in Ingram, the water was already at his waist. He remembered the ladder out back, the one he had used to trim a tree days earlier. The family soon used it to climb to the roof, where they watched the water rise and rage.

A neighbor screamed for help, he said, and Offenbacker swam through the backyard to help her back to the roof. “I don’t want to die,” his 8-year-old boy kept saying.

The group watched helplessly as the water climbed higher. They stayed there until sunrise, when the water began to retreat.

He is grateful that his family survived but worries about what his children had to witness. He also wonders what will become of the once-tranquil spot he loved along the river that now “looks like a war zone.”

In Kerrville, a few days after the flood, Rodriguez struggled to comprehend what had happened to her. Her body was battered and bruised. She had lost a fingernail. Physically she was okay, but she knew there was emotional trauma to overcome.

“I close my eyes and I see water covering my face every day, every second,” she said.

She had taken life for granted before, but she wouldn’t do so again, Rodriguez said. In the mirror, she examined a cross-shaped cut below her chin.

“God, I know you brought me out,” she said. “He marked me.”

Dennis reported from Ingram, Texas. Craig reported from Hunt, Texas. Bailey reported from Atlanta. Danielle Villasana in Ingram contributed to this report.