Camp Mystic owner denies seeing flood alerts as parents fight reopening – National

The director of Camp Mystic, the Texas camp where 27 children and counsellors died during flash flooding last July, testified on Monday that he was unaware of official flood alerts from the day before the storm hit as parents of victims fight to preserve evidence and halt the reopening of the camp this summer.

Over hours of testimony at a Travis County, Texas, court hearing attended by families of campers who were killed, Edward Eastland provided a detailed description of how staff responded as the banks of the Guadalupe River rose, trapping children and counsellors in their cabins and washing them away.

“I wish we had never had camp that summer,” Eastland — whose family has owned the camp since the 1980s — said, before acknowledging that lives could have been saved if staff had taken action sooner or the camp had an established emergency evacuation plan, but insisted they could not have anticipated the severity of the storm.

He also acknowledged that more campers and his father, Richard Eastland, who died while trying to evacuate children under his care, would have survived if he and the camp operator had made quicker decisions to evacuate the girls.

By the time they did, at around 3 a.m., the waters were so high and so fast that rapids had begun to swirl around some cabins, he said.

The night of the flooding, Eastland said he went to bed at about 11 p.m. and slept through several emergency alerts, including a CodeRED text at about 1:15 a.m. warning of a flood event that could last several hours.

His father called him on a walkie-talkie shortly before 2 a.m., alerting him to heavy rain and the need to move canoes and water equipment off the riverfront. They did not move to evacuate cabins at that point.

Eastland also admitted that counsellors failed to employ basic safety measures, such as using loudspeakers to alert campers to the impending storm and direct them to take refuge on higher ground.

The hearing comes amid a lawsuit brought by a victim’s family against the camp’s owners over their decision to reopen this summer, despite parents’ wishes to preserve the site’s surviving infrastructure as evidence.

CiCi Steward, the mother of nine-year-old Cecile Steward, a camper whose body was never found, said during Monday’s hearing that state authorities should deny the camp’s request to reopen this summer.

Cecile’s parents, Will and CiCi, sued the Eastland family in February over their handling of the flooding and its move to reopen.

The camp plans to welcome children back under its care in less than two months and has appealed to state regulators for permission to house campers on elevated ground that did not flood.

Nearly 900 girls are expected to attend, according to its operators.

“It is so clear they are incapable of keeping children safe,” CiCi Steward said.

On Wednesday, the camp’s security officer, Glenn Juenke, told the courtroom at the end of the three-day hearing that an early evacuation order could have saved lives, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Juenke, who helped move some campers into a two-storey building and saved another group of girls by telling them to run to higher ground before he himself became trapped in a cabin, said it was his decision to evacuate the girls and that he did not receive orders from camp operators.

No emergency evacuation training was provided to him or the girls, he testified.

Lawyers for families of victims introduced a signed statement from a camp counsellor who described the night’s events. She recalled waking up during the storm and seeing girls running for shelter.

“The water was rising faster than anything I have ever witnessed,” the counsellor wrote.

She said Edward Eastland eventually approached the cabin in knee-deep water, told her it was too late to leave and they should ride out the storm there.

The counsellor said she tried to keep the children out of the rising water pouring in before she was eventually swept away herself.

The flooding killed at least 136 people.

Texas health regulators said last week that they are investigating hundreds of complaints filed against Camp Mystic’s owners.

The Texas Rangers are also investigating allegations of neglect, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

— With files from The Associated Press

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