Two young camp counselors from Mexico helped the 20 girls in their charge survive last week’s devastating flash floods in Kerr County, Texas, by keeping their heads amid the chaos and keeping the girls entertained.
Heavy rains that hit Hill Country in central Texas starting July 3 caused severe flooding that has claimed the lives of more than 100 people.
María Paula Zárate and Silvana Garza Valdez, both 19, were counselors at a Christian camp for girls in Kerr County on July 4. Zárate and Garza were in charge of 20 girls when torrential rain began around 1 a.m., keeping them awake.
“At 3 a.m., the power went out in all the cabins, and that’s when the storm started really hard. The windows were shaking from the thunder and lightning,” Garza said in Spanish in an interview with Televisa’s Mexican news program NMás on July 7.
“It was a storm like in a scary movie. The thunder was incredibly loud. You felt like the lightning was striking right next to you because it lit up all the cabins, and the cabins were big,” she added.
At dawn and after breakfast, Garza said they tried to keep the girls in their care entertained, and at that point, no one knew about the damage caused by the rains.
The young woman said that it was around 12:30 p.m. on Friday that camp officials held a meeting with the counselors outside the cabins, where they told them what had happened at the other camp.
“The original camp, which is the one in Guadalupe, was almost a total loss,” she added.
“They explained that all the girls who survived the camp were in our dining hall.”
Garza said they were sent food and told that they would begin to evacuate. Once both women reentered the camp with the girls, they had to hide the extent of the damage.
“So we started writing our names on our skin, where they could see them,” she continued. “We started writing the girls’ names wherever we could. We put their ID tags on them, their names, and told them to pack a bag with their things and get ready to evacuate.”
Later, Garza said that emergency services began evacuating the girls by helicopter.
“It’s a horrible situation, really. It was very ugly,” Garza added. “I thought I was in a dream. I didn’t think it was real. I never understood the seriousness of the situation until we saw it when we got out of the Army trucks.”
She said the impact of learning about the destruction of the other cabin was hard on both of them, as they had been sleeping in that cabin, which was near the Guadalupe River, just a week earlier.
The century-old Camp Mystic girls’ camp, one of the places hardest hit by the weekend’s flooding, confirmed on Monday the deaths of 27 campers and counselors.
Severe flooding swept through the Texas Hill Country on Friday, after torrential rains caused the Guadalupe River to rise to 26 feet in less than an hour.
Savannah Hulsey Pointer contributed to this report.
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