The raging Guadalupe River in Friday’s flash flood through a popular summer camp area in the Texas Hill Country region has left 20 children missing and taken the lives of at least 24 people at the time of publication, including the owner of one of the camps.
The Kerrville Daily Times has confirmed that camp director Jane Ragsdale at Heart O’ the Hills Camp in Hunt died in the flood that began at 4 a.m. Friday from a heavy overnight rain swell.
Hunt is located about 50 miles northwest of San Antonio where first responders continue to comb the areas along the river for survivors. Ragsdale appears to be the first publicly identified casualty in what may become a mounting death toll.
Nearby, Camp Mystic, a nearly 100-year-old Christian summer camp for girls, was housing 750 children this week, according to an NBC News report. The network reported:
The flash floods killed at least 24 people in Texas Hill Country. The identities of the deceased and missing have not yet been officially released, but dozens of families shared in local Facebook groups that they have received phone calls from safety officials saying their daughters had not yet been located.
Camp Mystic said in an email to parents of the roughly 750 campers that if they have not been contacted directly, their child is accounted for.
“This happened very quickly, over a very short period of time, that could not be predicted, even with the radar,” Dalton Rice, city manager for Kerrville, the county seat, told NBC. “This happened within less than a two-hour span.”
The Camp Mystic website, which crashed early Saturday from too many online inquiries, shows images of girls engaged in activities ranging from rowing boats to riding horses.
The camp has been a long-time favorite for the daughters of the Lone Star State’s political elite, the New York Post reported, including the daughters and granddaughters of former presidents George H.W. Bush and Lyndon B. Johnson.
As a college student, future first lady Laura Bush was a Camp Mystic counselor, years before she married George W. Bush, who first became governor of Texas and then president like his father, according to a Texas Monthly story cited by the Post.
Ragsdale, co-owner of Heart O’ the Hills, was described in a report by the Kerrville Daily Times as the “heart and soul” of that camp. She began as a camper and counselor in the early 1970s before becoming a co-owner in 1976 and then camp director in 1988.
In 2022, Ragsdale received the Speedy Altman Award, a national lifetime achievement award from the Camp Owners and Directors Association.
It’s not yet known whether Heart O’ the Hills was hosting young campers at the time of the flood or if children from there are among the missing.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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