‘Everyone Called Each Other Buddy’: Texas Floods Wipe Out RV Communities

KERRVILLE, Texas—Two decades ago, Hurricane Rita destroyed Keith and Karel Halbert’s house in Silsbee, Texas. They moved about 300 miles west to Texas Hill country, thinking it was safer ground.

“That’s what brought us to Kerrville, the hurricanes,” said Keith Halbert, a 59-year-old mechanic. They lived just outside town in a 24-foot recreational vehicle, a common sight in a community packed with RVs. Full-time residents, retirees, vacationers, traveling nurses and pipeline workers formed their own communities in RV parks alongside the Guadalupe River.

On July 4, the Halberts awoke in the early morning hours to the local fire department ordering an evacuation as flash flooding swept through. They escaped with their dog, Chico, but once again lost their home.

Many others parked near the river didn’t get away, and an unknown number are among the more than 120 dead and 160 recently missing after the floods.

“It happened so fast,” Keith Halbert said. The fire department gave them four minutes to leave, and within “3½ minutes [the water] was in the park.”

Texas is still taking stock of staggering losses that include the deaths of dozens of children. The floods have also hollowed out a year-round community parked on the riverbank in mobile homes and RVs.

Survivors are left with little beyond the belongings they grabbed on the way out. Many RV and mobile home owners say they have little or no insurance coverage for floods.

Search teams clear a destroyed RV trailer at Blue Oak RV Park in Kerrville, Texas.

Blue Oak RV Park owner Lorena Guillen (wearing pink cap) gets a hug from Julia Hatfield, one of the park’s residents.

The Halberts lived in an RV park filled with retirees in the tiny town of Ingram, Texas. The storm also flooded out the nearby HTR TX Hill Country, another RV park, in Kerrville. Guests at the Blue Oak RV Park watched powerlessly as raging waters swallowed more than two-dozen recreational vehicles.

They described the park as akin to a neighborhood. Many were long-term residents.

“They’re my family. I mean, I saw them every single day,” said Lorena Guillen, who owns the Blue Oak and adjacent Howdy’s Restaurant. “Joke around, celebrate their birthdays together—they used to come to the restaurant, eat all the time, breakfast, have a cold beer on a hot day.”

Jake Richards, 29, and wife Julia Hatfield, 27, parked their RV near a big pecan tree at Blue Oak in April. They loved taking their green kayak out on the river and singing karaoke with other RV residents at Howdy’s. Hatfield, a singer, was set to perform there on Independence Day.

The couple managed to flee in their SUV that morning, but their RV was swept away with their gear, clothing and a cherished golf ball from Richards’s grandfather. They have been staying at an Airbnb in another town while helping with the recovery effort, including helping to recover two bodies.

Richards said they consider themselves lucky. “There’s so many people who can’t replace family members, you can’t replace pets.”

The storms hit a population that is both vulnerable to disasters and prevalent in Texas. About one to two million Americans live in RVs full-time and an additional million or so part-time, according to Andrew Rumbach, senior fellow at the Urban Institute. Of that, some 200,000 to 300,000 are in Texas, a state flush with RV parks thanks to warm weather and relatively relaxed land-use regulations.

Losing a full-time home on wheels can mean losing stability, with no land on which to rebuild, especially for more vulnerable seniors and low-income residents.

“All of those things combine where you have this sort of nexus of vulnerability,” said Rumbach. “You see a big variation there between folks who are relatively well-to-do retirees who live in really nice RVs, versus those who it was a sort of ‘last rung before homelessness’ kind of RV.”

The loss was compounded by the fact that Kerrville typically attracts some 20,000 visitors over the July 4 weekend, dramatically swelling its normal population of about 24,000, according to local officials.

Tommy Ireland, groundskeeper at a local lodge, was sleeping in his 39-foot RV there when a neighbor roused him by banging on his door. The 70-year-old scrambled out and managed to help others escape their vehicles, but “I lost my smoker, lost my pickup, my house, all my clothes,” he said.

Ireland, a former welder from Dumas, Texas, moved into the RV full-time about seven months ago, after his wife died. He said the motor home lacked insurance coverage, and he doubts he can replace the vehicle.

The night of the flood, “all you could hear was just people screaming and crying out for help, that water was just so high,” Ireland said.

HTR TX Hill Country was among several RV parks and campgrounds along the Guadalupe River wiped out by the flooding.

Like the summer camps dotting the waterways, the RV crowd is drawn to the Guadalupe. On hot days, people float by in inflatable tubes as the river bends past lounging vacationers and teens flinging themselves off ropes into the cool water. But that lure also meant risk as rain hammered the flood-prone region.

“Most all of the RV parks, at least the nice ones, were right on the banks of the river,” said Jakoby Moore, general manager of the McClain’s RV dealership in Kerrville.

Adrian Garcia, a 31-year-old pipeline inspector, set up his 40-foot, $50,000 camper at Blue Oak in June. He loved being able to fish after work and chit-chatting with other residents.

“I can’t even tell you their name because everyone called each other ‘buddy,’” he said.

He was with family 300 miles away in McAllen, Texas, when the storm struck. He learned via phone that his RV was destroyed. He moved to a motel temporarily afterward.

“You can’t think too much about it,” Garcia said, drinking a beer at Howdy’s. “You gotta keep on moving.”

An ‘X’ was painted on a motor home in Center Point, Texas, to indicate it has been checked by search-and-rescue teams.

The Halberts, who lost one home to Hurricane Rita and another to the Hill Country flooding, moved temporarily into a Kerrville motel. The few clothes they could salvage were stored in three black containers in their room.

They’re not giving up on RV living. Keith Halbert said the couple plans to buy another RV “and stay far away from the river as I can.”