That's what I've seen but not sure what is fully factual. Right or wrong can be debated all day, but I would anticipate some coming after every party they can

Quote:

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Courts have interpreted this to include the following:

-- there must be a STRONG LIKELIHOOD of serious injury
-- actor's conduct must be unjustifiable
-- actor had a conscious knowledge of the harm but acted in a complete disregard for the danger

None of these are even arguable.

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I don't know man, you 100% sure?

Strong likelihood of injury
- "A Chronicle review of property records and federal flood maps found that many of these camps sit amid a patchwork of special hazard flood areas. Some even have parts of their grounds in a designated floodway the channel where water flows most forcefully during a flood, posing the greatest danger to anything in its path."
https://www.expressnews.com/projects/2025/texas-camp-mystic-guadalupe-fema-floodplains/

Unjustifiable conduct
- Using millions in renovation money on other items and leaving cabins unelevated in hazard zone
- No relocation of certain cabins after flood watch and escalating warnings

Disregard for danger
- Multiple prior floods, location between waterways
- Multiple watches and escalating warnings that night

Ultimately I would be shocked if some parents and lawyers do not come to the conclusion that there was a high-probability lethal risk + documented awareness + failure to act. A lot more would be found during discovery, included documented plans and timeline of what happened.

Note: I'm not saying I agree with suing the camp or that I would do so, I just think it is likely; you think an insurance company will let that go to jury?

Yeah, it absolutely is arguable and will be debated. And we're not talking any old floodplains, we're talking rivers where any flood will involve powerful rushing water with debris. All floodplains are not equal - odds are only one component

torrid said:

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CollieLover1138 said:

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I just don't see how these camps can carry liability insurance after what happened at Mystic.

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Oh Camp Mystic itself is out of business. The property was quite valuable, and even after what happened I'm sure it still is. They are going to get sued into oblivion, and will have no choice but to sell the property.

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Which is a travesty. I would not say the outcome is a foregone conclusion. If the case is filed in Kerr County, the Act of God defense will hold a lot of sway.

I am a lawyer but the jury will not be and will use common sense approach to legal terms. I practice criminal not civil law but have argued a bunch of cases to a jury verdict.

I have a hard time seeing them come to the conclusion that a once in 200 years event had a strong likelihood of happening.

Conversely, I have found that the more serious the crime, especially if someone dies, the jury tends to lower the burden of proof. You are far more likely for a jury to hold the state to its burden on a DWI than an aggravated robbery.

Whether it's 1 in 200 will be part of the debate. And along with those odds being debatable, how that event is likely to play out is part of it too - if that number comes up, it is highly likely to be rushing and extremely dangerous

Some will see it this way -> you assumed a 1 in 100 risk with my kid (or whatever number the experts argue that is) and should also have known that if that number came up, it would likely happen fast and be extremely dangerous. Some may not think that's fair, but that's how some will see it.

sellthefarm said:

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AgLiving06 said:

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Nowadays if you want to build in a flood zone, I believe you have to be 2 feet above the 500 year flood plain.

I'm sure there will be lawsuits. It's just such an awful thing to have to reexperience.

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Not necessarily true. In some cases it just changes the way you build. Many parks, sports fields etc are built in floodplains. I don't know about Houston but as another poster clarifies, it's the 100 not the 500.

Sports fields are an interesting comparison. You intentionally build them in the floodplain and then pack them with people. And I'd wager they don't clear them in all cases until right up when a flood might hit. Not at the first hint of rain.

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I think the issue is that it goes back to floodplains are determined for insurance purposes, not safety. Insurance doesn't care how fast your house floods, just that it does. So while a floodplain along the trinity in north Texas may flood, it may do so over hours or even a few days and rise relatively slowly from its banks. Along the Guadalupe it will happen in literal minutes as we saw from videos. For an insured structure that difference is irrelevant. A flood is a flood. For humans seeking safety it's completely different.

Teslag said:

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sellthefarm said:

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AgLiving06 said:

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Nowadays if you want to build in a flood zone, I believe you have to be 2 feet above the 500 year flood plain.

I'm sure there will be lawsuits. It's just such an awful thing to have to reexperience.

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Not necessarily true. In some cases it just changes the way you build. Many parks, sports fields etc are built in floodplains. I don't know about Houston but as another poster clarifies, it's the 100 not the 500.

Sports fields are an interesting comparison. You intentionally build them in the floodplain and then pack them with people. And I'd wager they don't clear them in all cases until right up when a flood might hit. Not at the first hint of rain.

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I think the issue is that it goes back to floodplains are determined for insurance purposes, not safety. Insurance doesn't care how fast your house floods, just that it does. So while a floodplain along the trinity in north Texas may flood, it may do so over hours or even a few days and rise relatively slowly from its banks. Along the Guadalupe it will happen in literal minutes as we saw from videos. For an insured structure that difference is irrelevant. A flood is a flood. For humans seeking safety it's completely different.

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I don't disagree. My main beef with the narrative is the presumption the cabins were in the floodway. Even the Saratonin post above cites an article that states that as of it's a fact and indisputable. I believe the cabins were not in the floodway and if everyone agrees with my onion this whole conversation is framed differently.

Well let's say they are in a floodway or floodplain. It's not illegal, and there's an argument to be made it's not even uncommon. Lots of habitable structures find themselves drawn into flood maps. I've thought about it some and whether it was in or out of the floodplain probably didn't matter a whole lot to the owners for safety reasons. They knew this river flooded quickly and dangerously. They had a plan, and they saved a lot of little girls with it. The only real critique is that they should have evacuated much sooner like other camps/parks did. But even that is hindsight being 20/20.

Were there no cabins at Mystic in floodways? Or you're just saying that the cabins impacted weren't the ones in the floodway?

"At Camp Mystic, NPR found at least eight buildings, including four cabins used to house younger campers, are located inside what FEMA designates a floodway, the most dangerous area of the floodplain where water is expected to move rapidly during a storm.

While many of the camp's cabins may date back nearly a century, FEMA imposes strict limits on development in these areas, and often outright prohibits it altogether.

"No one should be in a floodway," says Jim Blackburn, co-director of the Severe Storm Prevention, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center at Rice University in Houston. "Floodways are the most dangerous of a danger zone." "
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5460970/fema-texas-flooding-floodplain-camp-mystic

torrid said:

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Not sure if this is paywalled or not, but this is the firsthand account of one family. The locations sounds close to Camp Mystic near Hunt.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-flood-firsthand-account/

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Absolutely heart wrenching…..so freeking sad

There are some cabins in the floodway for sure, but those were evacuated first. The two cabins with the most victims, bubble inn and twins, don't appear to be. At least not from what sellthefarm postulated with lidar elevation data. If that lidar is accurate, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, they weren't in the floodplain or floodway even though the map shows them to be.

austinAG90 said:

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You know, a bunch of people lost their lives, including family members of posters on this site and you two clowns are talking about flood plains and arguing who's right or wrong. Personally I think you should call it a night before you piss the wrong people off.

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This has hit our family hard. We know two of the victims and I will leave it at that. Our family has cried multiple times daily.

My apologies if the conversation was disrespectful. That is not the intent but happy to drop it if it's upsetting.

YokelRidesAgain said:

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Ol_Ag_02 said:

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Not everything is someone's fault.

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I disagree. Almost any conceivable adverse outcome, to wit, "accident" involves fault by some individual or party (or multiple parties).

Although fault is not the same thing as blame, either legally or rationally.

I am firmly of the belief that commercial aviation is the only industry that gets safety right, fundamentally. (My own profession, medicine, is particularly terrible at analyzing the causes of adverse outcomes.) Every commercial air crash in the US has been analyzed completely and soberly, and the cause or causes identified. I cannot think of a single example in the last 50 years where the conclusion has been "well, bad things happen and sometimes there is just nothing you can do about it".

And as a result, commercial aircraft crashes in this country have become nearly non-existent.

Errors were made in this tragedy--I say that not because I think I know what they were, but because it is an inevitable truth--and deciding to assign the fault to "Mother Nature" would in the end simply ensure that given enough time, another similar disaster will happen.

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America's emergency-warning infrastructure still isn't getting enough people out of harm's way.

Federal, state and local authorities share responsibility for alerting citizens that they are in danger. But despite continued technological advances, the country's patchwork of digital and physical emergency-alert tools is often a step behind Mother Nature, with deadly consequences.

There were repeated flash flooding warnings in Kerr County, Texas, as rain moved in and the Guadalupe River surged at the start of the July 4 weekend. Those alerts never reached some of the campers and residents who lacked cellphone service, silenced notifications or didn't have phones with them, and outdoor sirens were considered but never built. More than 100 people died.

Earlier this year, some fire evacuation warnings in the Altadena neighborhood of Los Angeles arrived too late and 17 people lost their lives. Los Angeles County also mistakenly sent an evacuation warning to cellphones in the wrong areas during the January wildfires.

Across the Pacific, Maui's outdoor sirens never sounded two years ago when deadly wildfires approached the edge of the Hawaiian island. Local authorities realized too late that wireless alerts couldn't reach residents over cellphone networks that failed during the fast-moving blaze.

.S. authorities caution that too many warnings can cause cellphone users to shut off notifications that become bothersome or irrelevant. A menu of warnings for floods, fires, missing children and more have caused "alert fatigue" in some areas.

A 2024 RAND report found Texas cellphone users opted out of wireless emergency alerts at the highest rate. Nearly 30% of Texans chose to turn off at least one kind of wireless alert, a choice researchers partly attributed to exhaustion from the large number of statewide alerts.

Flash flooding is especially hard to predict and warnings often cover broad areas, said Upmanu Lall, director of water research centers at Columbia University and Arizona State University. Some people who have received repeated alerts but don't see hazardous conditions assume they are false alarms.

Why America Still Can't Get Disaster Alerts Right - WSJ

torrid said:

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Not sure if this is paywalled or not, but this is the firsthand account of one family. The locations sounds close to Camp Mystic near Hunt.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-flood-firsthand-account/

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Heartbreaking. RIP Clay.

YokelRidesAgain said:

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Errors were made in this tragedy--I say that not because I think I know what they were, but because it is an inevitable truth--and deciding to assign the fault to "Mother Nature" would in the end simply ensure that given enough time, another similar disaster will happen.

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Pretty reasonable point. I wish the "now is not the time" camp would wise up. I dont know who would want a root cause analysis done more than grieving parents. Not for retribution, but for closure and preventive action to ensure their kids lives weren't lost in vain.

FobTies said:

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YokelRidesAgain said:

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Errors were made in this tragedy--I say that not because I think I know what they were, but because it is an inevitable truth--and deciding to assign the fault to "Mother Nature" would in the end simply ensure that given enough time, another similar disaster will happen.

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Pretty reasonable point. I wish the "now is not the time" camp would wise up. I dont know who would want a root cause analysis done more than grieving parents. Not for retribution, but for closure and preventive action to ensure their kids lives weren't lost in vain.

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Not that I 100% agree with them because I don't, but you literally just used the Dem response to school shootings.

"Now is not the time" means that it is time for other things. Shouldn't be hard to understand.

TA-OP said:

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FobTies said:

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YokelRidesAgain said:

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Errors were made in this tragedy--I say that not because I think I know what they were, but because it is an inevitable truth--and deciding to assign the fault to "Mother Nature" would in the end simply ensure that given enough time, another similar disaster will happen.

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Pretty reasonable point. I wish the "now is not the time" camp would wise up. I dont know who would want a root cause analysis done more than grieving parents. Not for retribution, but for closure and preventive action to ensure their kids lives weren't lost in vain.

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Not that I 100% agree with them because I don't, but you literally just used the Dem response to school shootings.

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Nope. The dems blame guns, like many here blame mother nature. Im not advocating for banning river camps, but instead a fail proof system to ensure proper timely evacuation. At a minimum, we know relying on SMS or random good Samaritans is insufficient.

We dont need to witchunt and punish people. But talking about what went wrong and how it can fixed shouldn't be a touchy subject we have to wait to hash out. It might be as simple as implementing a river version of tsunami sirens, not manually operated, but by real time sensors/gauges.

FobTies said:

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TA-OP said:

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FobTies said:

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YokelRidesAgain said:

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Errors were made in this tragedy--I say that not because I think I know what they were, but because it is an inevitable truth--and deciding to assign the fault to "Mother Nature" would in the end simply ensure that given enough time, another similar disaster will happen.

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Pretty reasonable point. I wish the "now is not the time" camp would wise up. I dont know who would want a root cause analysis done more than grieving parents. Not for retribution, but for closure and preventive action to ensure their kids lives weren't lost in vain.

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Not that I 100% agree with them because I don't, but you literally just used the Dem response to school shootings.

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Nope. The dems blame guns, like many here blame mother nature. Im not advocating for banning river camps, but instead a fail proof systems to ensure proper timely evacuation.

We dont need to witchunt and punish people. But talking about what went wrong and how it can fixed shouldn't be a touchy subject we have to wait to hash out.

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I see and understand your point, just don't agree with assessment. Regardless, "now is not the time" is foolish.

Are you advocating for banning all summer camps everywhere? Or just ones located next to water or other potentially hazardous areas?

Because that is also the equivalent dem talking point on guns

Serotonin said:

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Were there no cabins at Mystic in floodways? Or you're just saying that the cabins impacted weren't the ones in the floodway?

"At Camp Mystic, NPR found at least eight buildings, including four cabins used to house younger campers, are located inside what FEMA designates a floodway, the most dangerous area of the floodplain where water is expected to move rapidly during a storm.

While many of the camp's cabins may date back nearly a century, FEMA imposes strict limits on development in these areas, and often outright prohibits it altogether.

"No one should be in a floodway," says Jim Blackburn, co-director of the Severe Storm Prevention, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center at Rice University in Houston. "Floodways are the most dangerous of a danger zone." "
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5460970/fema-texas-flooding-floodplain-camp-mystic

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NPR has no idea if the cabins were in the floodway. Just because they write it doesn't make it true. Which is my point about this whole thing and I appreciate Tesla acknowledging that is a possibility as well.

I haven't researched the other camps that evacuated their cabins sooner. It's possible their cabins were actually in the floodway and that's why they evacuated sooner. In other words they might have done the same thing as Mystic if their cabins were where Mystics cabins were. None of these things are known for sure.

I would caution against using anything quoting Jim Blackburn also.

FobTies said:

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YokelRidesAgain said:

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Errors were made in this tragedy--I say that not because I think I know what they were, but because it is an inevitable truth--and deciding to assign the fault to "Mother Nature" would in the end simply ensure that given enough time, another similar disaster will happen.

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Pretty reasonable point. I wish the "now is not the time" camp would wise up. I dont know who would want a root cause analysis done more than grieving parents. Not for retribution, but for closure and preventive action to ensure their kids lives weren't lost in vain.

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I agree and I'm advocating for a root cause analysis that considers all possible causes, not just the easy "well they should have moved them sooner", "we need better warnings", etc.

It's possible (and IMO likely) that Mystic presumed Twins, Bubble, etc. were safe and did not require evacuation. If that is true, all the warning sirens in the world would not have changed the outcome. I'm interested in why the presumed safe cabins were not actually safe. But that question leaves open the possibility that Mystic didn't do anything wrong - which no one will be satisfied with.

"I haven't researched the other camps that evacuated their cabins sooner. It's possible their cabins were actually in the floodway and that's why they evacuated sooner. In other words they might have done the same thing as Mystic if their cabins were where Mystics cabins were. None of these things are known for sure."

Some have stated that Mo-Ranch did evacuate earlier. But Mo is located on the North Fork of GR and somewhat further upstream. Mystic is located on the South Fork of GR close to the confluence of the North and South Fork. Different watersheds. Don't know if data exist for the northern tributary and it has been a long time since I was at Mo-Ranch, but Google indicates structures close to waterway.

And it also states Mo Ranch evacuated 70 adults/children in a building near the river. There are a lot more folks at Mo Ranch than that. Doesn't sound that different than what Mystic was doing. It's also been a very long time since I've been to Mo Ranch but they have spots much much closer to River than other camps.

How many cabins at Heart o' the Hills is in the floodway? Maybe the owner would have acted differently if camp was in session, but she was in bed when the water rose.

sellthefarm said:

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Serotonin said:

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Were there no cabins at Mystic in floodways? Or you're just saying that the cabins impacted weren't the ones in the floodway?

"At Camp Mystic, NPR found at least eight buildings, including four cabins used to house younger campers, are located inside what FEMA designates a floodway, the most dangerous area of the floodplain where water is expected to move rapidly during a storm.

While many of the camp's cabins may date back nearly a century, FEMA imposes strict limits on development in these areas, and often outright prohibits it altogether.

"No one should be in a floodway," says Jim Blackburn, co-director of the Severe Storm Prevention, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center at Rice University in Houston. "Floodways are the most dangerous of a danger zone." "
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5460970/fema-texas-flooding-floodplain-camp-mystic

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NPR has no idea if the cabins were in the floodway. Just because they write it doesn't make it true. Which is my point about this whole thing and I appreciate Tesla acknowledging that is a possibility as well.

I haven't researched the other camps that evacuated their cabins sooner. It's possible their cabins were actually in the floodway and that's why they evacuated sooner. In other words they might have done the same thing as Mystic if their cabins were where Mystics cabins were. None of these things are known for sure.

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if they are wrong, I saw a new York times article expressing this as well, are they opening themselves up to a libel suit?

Its pretty easy to look at flood maps and see if the structures are in the floodway.

I just looked it up and a large portion of Camp Mystic is.

https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search?AddressQuery=kerrville

By elevation the cabins are out of the floodway. The fema map isn't as granular thus it looks like they are in the floodway.

swimmerbabe11 said:

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sellthefarm said:

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Serotonin said:

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Were there no cabins at Mystic in floodways? Or you're just saying that the cabins impacted weren't the ones in the floodway?

"At Camp Mystic, NPR found at least eight buildings, including four cabins used to house younger campers, are located inside what FEMA designates a floodway, the most dangerous area of the floodplain where water is expected to move rapidly during a storm.

While many of the camp's cabins may date back nearly a century, FEMA imposes strict limits on development in these areas, and often outright prohibits it altogether.

"No one should be in a floodway," says Jim Blackburn, co-director of the Severe Storm Prevention, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center at Rice University in Houston. "Floodways are the most dangerous of a danger zone." "
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5460970/fema-texas-flooding-floodplain-camp-mystic

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NPR has no idea if the cabins were in the floodway. Just because they write it doesn't make it true. Which is my point about this whole thing and I appreciate Tesla acknowledging that is a possibility as well.

I haven't researched the other camps that evacuated their cabins sooner. It's possible their cabins were actually in the floodway and that's why they evacuated sooner. In other words they might have done the same thing as Mystic if their cabins were where Mystics cabins were. None of these things are known for sure.

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if they are wrong, I saw a new York times article expressing this as well, are they opening themselves up to a libel suit?

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No. They aren't libeling anyone, just stating an area is in a floodplain. It's an opinion, and can be wrong, or simply be misinformed and ignorant. There's not malice or intent. Libel woudl be saying something like "You can easily see this is in a floodplain and the owner's didn't care. They did this to save money and purposely put those kid's lives at risk". That's malice, wreckless, and probably libel.