HUNT, Texas — As the United States marked its 250th anniversary with fireworks and parades on Friday, the small Hill Country community of Hunt, Texas, and its surrounding towns observed a far more somber occasion: the first anniversary of catastrophic flooding along the Guadalupe River that killed 139 people, devastated entire neighborhoods, and exposed a cascade of institutional failures that continue to reverberate through the region’s recovery.
“For me it’s hard to celebrate,” said Cynthia Vlasek, 63, a retired nurse and flood survivor who stood at the river’s edge on Tuesday morning, eyeing the placid water with a mixture of reverence and grief. “If you are a local, it’s sacred.”
The floods, which struck on July 4, 2025, killed 119 people in Kerr County alone — the county that encompasses both Hunt and the larger city of Kerrville — including 25 young campers at Camp Mystic, two counselors, and the camp’s co-owner and executive director. Homes, businesses and RV parks were swept away or reduced to concrete slabs. In Hunt itself, most of the town was ravaged, with debris lodged in tree branches and heaps of waterlogged wreckage blocking stretches of Highway 39, the main road running along the Guadalupe.
A Community Still Rebuilding, Physically and Emotionally
Twelve months on, recovery has been steady but painfully slow. Many properties along the river remain empty or under construction. The Hunt Store — for generations the figurative heart of this tight-knit community — has been shuttered since the disaster, with locals still relying on a mobile post office to collect their mail and check on their neighbors. “The store was the heart of our community,” Vlasek said. “We have missed it. It’s not the same.”
Vlasek recalled how the floodwaters came perilously close to her own property, washing away the road to her house and leaving her, her then-pregnant daughter, and a young grandchild effectively stranded — without electricity, running water, or cellphone service — until the waters receded. Her 12-year-old granddaughter, staying with a family friend on higher ground, later learned she had lost a friend. “We all know somebody who died,” Vlasek said quietly.
Jacque White, a divorced mother of five whose small cabin in Kerr County was destroyed, has since relocated to Fredericksburg, twenty miles away. “My youngest is still traumatized and afraid to go near water,” she said. “We wanted to start fresh somewhere else.”
Joe Herring Jr., the mayor of Kerrville — a city of 24,000 and the county’s largest — described the city as roughly “half-done” with recovery efforts, noting significant damage to water treatment plants, sewage infrastructure, and riverside parks. Precise costs remain difficult to quantify, though Herring said he expects continued funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal grants to carry the work forward. “This river that runs through our town, that we all connected to, it’s a beautiful thing, a source of life, but also the source of tragedy,” he said.
To mark the anniversary, area leaders organized a series of events beginning Friday, including mental health counseling services and an unveiling ceremony for a 20-foot white steel memorial cross inscribed with the words “River of Angels”, erected in a park overlooking the Guadalupe. “We feel the morning of July 4 will be the most appropriate time for us to pause and reflect — exactly one year after the July 4, 2025, Guadalupe River flooding disaster,” said Rich Paces, a Kerr County commissioner who organized the event.
Camp Mystic and the Weight of Institutional Failure
Much of the national attention in the months leading up to this anniversary has focused on Camp Mystic, where the scale of preventable loss has drawn sustained scrutiny from state legislators and law enforcement alike. Investigations revealed that as floodwaters overtook cabins housing the youngest campers, rescue efforts fell to just three individuals — the camp’s owner, his son, and a security guard — while at least 39 other adults on the grounds remained unaware of the danger and unprepared to assist. A state legislative committee further found that Camp Mystic had no written emergency plan for flooding. A criminal investigation by the Texas State Police is pending.
The Eastland family, which has managed the camp since 1939, has maintained that the speed and scale of the floodwaters far exceeded anything in the camp’s history. That explanation has provided little comfort to the families of victims, who have pursued lawsuits against the operators. The camp’s operator filed for bankruptcy protection late last month, and plans to reopen at a nearby site for what would have been the camp’s 100th summer collapsed after the operators encountered licensing barriers and mounting legal pressure.
In the broader region, officials are now rolling out upgraded flood warning infrastructure, including new rain gauges, emergency sirens, and mobile alert systems, coordinated through Kerr County and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority. The state has allocated millions of dollars to help local governments acquire flood warning systems and fund infrastructure repairs — steps that, for many residents, arrive a year too late.
In the nearby town of Ingram, Steve Edelstein, 67, was putting finishing touches on the Ingram Dam Center, a strip of seven commercial units that the floods had gutted entirely. Electrical work, plumbing, carpentry — all of it had to be rebuilt from scratch. He surveyed the still-empty lot beside the river, adjacent to a sign reading “We Endure, We Rise.” “We still got to redo the parking lot; we’ve got to redo all our fencing,” he said. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done.”
The Hill Country’s rugged beauty — its rolling limestone landscape, its bluebonnet-covered roadsides in spring, its deep and layered history — endures. But for the people who call it home, the Guadalupe River is no longer simply a backdrop to summer leisure. It is, as Mayor Herring put it, both a source of life and the source of tragedy, and the line between those two things collapsed without warning one year ago today.