Monday Musings #26: Tropical Storm Amelia Hits the Texas Hill Country

Two weeks ago, I informed readers (and promised myself) that I would be taking a hiatus from this weekly newsletter for the month of July while traveling on a book project and enjoying some personal time. The horrific events of the week in the Texas Hill Country are front page news around the world, and people here in England, where I am now, are going out of their way to express their sympathies and concern when they learn I am from San Antonio.

This Monday, I would like to add my voice to the conversation as a journalist with a long history in the state and the Hill Country. Time and experience have given me an appreciation for the importance of institutional memory and the lessons we should have learned. With the decline of daily newspapers and the loss of thousands of experienced journalists in Texas over the years, there are fewer and fewer people in my business doing more than reporting the body count and the human dimension of the terrible losses that families and communities – and really, all of us – are enduring.

There are hard questions that need to be asked, and that is also part of the media’s job.

Disasters, both natural and man-made, bring out the best in people as all other differences are set aside as individuals gather to search for survivors, give comfort and sustenance to the afflicted, and undertake the grim work of recovering the victims. The latter work is especially challenging in the case of flash floods when riverbanks remain dangerous, difficult to navigate, and search and recovery crews face the unspoken possibility that some of the dead will never be found and returned to their loved ones. It’s especially crushing to recover dead children.

Yet even as the death count has climbed to 79 people with dozens more still missing, the leaders we look to protect us from disaster and to respond with all available resources, are already starting to engage in finger-pointing. 

Please don’t tell me state and local authorities were helpless to prevent such terrible loss of life in the face of such “acts of God,” which are infrequent yet cyclical acts of nature, as predictable as tornadoes in Kansas or hurricanes along the Gulf Coast.

My introduction to the Texas Hill Country came amid one such natural disaster in 1978 when Tropical Storm Amelia made landfall in Corpus Christi on July 31, where I worked as a young reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the city’s morning newspaper. I had been hired eight months earlier after working for one year at the Brownsville Herald, where I had covered Hurricane Allen in 1977, which appeared to be heading straight toward the Rio Grande Valley until it veered south to strike the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Still, the high winds and heavy rains battered Port Isabel as I weathered the storm inside the Yacht Club, a landmark hotel with thick walls. Alas, that landmark is long gone. 

Editors in Corpus sent me back to Brownsville to await Amelia, which failed to develop into a hurricane. As it came ashore along Padre Island and then made landfall in Corpus Christi, it quickly dissipated with weakening winds, light rainfall, and minimal impact. It was, literally, anticlimactic.

Then Amelia did what no one predicted it would do. It began to gather strength and reform as a dangerous storm system as it slowed to a crawl on its westward path. By the time it reached the Hill Country, it had stalled entirely, unleashing record rainfall over the headwaters of the Medina and Guadalupe rivers.

The town of Medina recorded at least 48 inches of rainfall in a two-day period, making Amelia the wettest tropical cyclone on record in both Texas and the continental United States until Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Twenty-seven people died as a result of the floodwaters across Kendall, Kerr, and Bandera counties, while hundreds more saw their homes and businesses damaged or destroyed.

And yes, some of those victims were young campers.

Editors had ordered me back to Corpus Christi to join a team racing to the Hill Country. That was the golden era of newspapering. We not only blanketed the region with reporters and photographers, the newspaper published a special tabloid section, every page devoted to the disaster and its aftermath.

The media memory is short-lived. We read now – at least in the local media covering this week’s epic tragedy – that events conjure memories of the 1987 flash flood when 10 young campers at a Christian youth camp died after the bus evacuating them was caught in flood waters and capsized. Those children were swept away as they attempted to wade through rushing waters in a human daisy chain to safety.

A terrible tragedy, indeed, but the natural disaster that hit the Hill Country on Aug. 3, 1978, was far, far worse. I’ve yet to see one word of it in print now. I now ask myself: Have we learned anything from these cyclical flash floods in the Hill Country? The state of Texas is awash in billions of dollars in windfall revenues. The so-called Rainy Day Fund now holds more than $23 billion, so why can’t the state give Kerr County and other counties located along Hill Country rivers the funds to build an emergency alert system?

Texas counties do not have the same zoning and land use authorities granted to home rule cities, but Gov. Greg Abbott has it in his power to do more than ask legislators to meet in special session to address the need to help rural counties build a reliable early warning system. He can also ask lawmakers to make sure counties have the authority to order property owners to move all commercial facilities, including youth camp cabins, well above the historic floodplain line to ensure that youngsters are never again swept away by flash floods in the middle of the night.

Those young campers spend their summers in cabins with young counselors, many of whom are here on guest visas. They lack the training and experience to act decisively in emergencies. Many surely acted heroically, but we should not depend on counselors to be prepared for flash floods.

Why, if the National Weather Service issued heavy rain and flash flood warnings on Wednesday and Thursday, did state and local officials fail to issue mandatory evacuation orders for all those in harm’s way, particularly the highly vulnerable juvenile populations at the summer camps along the river? 

Here is my remembrance of the 1978 disaster published in the Rivard Report in 2017 if you want to read more about that record Hill Country flash flood. More than three times as many people died in 1978 as died in the 1987 flash floods. Now, sadly, the 2025 Hill Country floods will take their place as the worst in our state’s history.

Will we take action to ensure it never happens again? Flash floods are inevitable. Death on the present scale is not.