On July 3rd, Lee Pool, the chief of the Hunt Volunteer Fire Department, was heading home to Texas from a vacation in Colorado with his family when his wife, Stephanie, showed him the weather forecast. Severe storms were predicted in the Hill Country that night. Pool warned the members of the department to stay alert. Like many people in the area, Pool wears many hats. Besides being the chief of the fire department—an unpaid position—he’s also the vice-principal at the high school and, during the summers, he works nighttime security at Camp Mystic, a summer camp for girls. When his flight home was delayed, Pool asked a colleague to cover his shift at the camp.
That night, after Pool and his family made it back to Hunt, the rain was relentless. Around 3 A.M., Pool’s fire-department radio went off. The river was rising, and the situation was quickly developing into an emergency; Hunt, a town of about thirteen hundred people along the banks of the Guadalupe River, sits in what’s known as Texas’s flash-flood alley. Pool was alarmed but not panicked as he threw on his clothes and headed to the station. The drive should have taken less than ten minutes, but the water was already all over the road. When he reached Schumacher Crossing, just before the street that leads to the fire station, a low bridge over the river was underwater. By this point, the road behind him was impassable, too. He backed his pickup truck into a sloped driveway, seeking higher ground, and texted Stephanie: “I am stuck on Highway 39. I can’t go anywhere.”
In front of him, the highway was now a swift-moving river. When the flood reached the front of his truck, he got out, worried that he was about to be washed away. His radio was alive with more distress than he’d ever heard—reports of people stuck in trees and hanging onto roofs. “I mean, it’s just constant,” he said. “Just, help, help, help, help.” He thought about the children in the summer camps along the riverbanks, and about his colleague filling in for his security shift. It was the worst possible time for a disaster to strike: a summer weekend when, between the camps and the July 4th vacationers, the town might see roughly triple its usual population. Over the radio he counselled his fellow-firefighters, many of them similarly stranded, reminding them, If you can’t save yourself, you can’t save somebody else.
Then a pair of headlights cut through the night. It was a car with people in it, drifting through the flood. They saw the beam of his flashlight and called out to him. It was the most helpless he’d ever felt. “I think I just saw some people on their way to their death,” he texted Stephanie. “This is horrible. They are floating down the river and there’s nothing I can do.” He told me, “Having your hands bound, not being able to help people, especially when that’s in your heart, when what you want to do is serve—it kills you.” When the water finally began to ebb, hours later, it receded so quickly that it left fish flopping and gasping on the highway. Pool kicked them back into the water with his boot. “I’m, like, If I can’t save people now, I’ll save fish,” he said.
It was near dawn by the time he was able to make it to the station. Daylight revealed a transformed world—sodden mattresses dangling from the tops of trees, canoes crumpled like beer cans, houses sheared off their foundations. The Hunt Store, where half the town got their morning coffee and gossip, had been destroyed. Eventually, Pool would learn that his colleague at Camp Mystic had led dozens of girls to safety but that many others were still missing. He’d learn that the camp’s director, Dick Eastland, had died trying to rescue girls, and that the chief of a nearby volunteer fire department, in Marble Falls, had been swept away while responding to the flood.
But that would all come later. That morning, Pool assembled a team to go door to door to check on people. They found their first fatality shortly before 9 A.M. The water was threatening to rise again, so they wrapped up the body and moved it to higher ground. Then it was time to figure out what to do next.
Hunt, an unincorporated community a dozen miles west of Kerrville, is at the junction of the north and south forks of the Guadalupe River. The fire department covers a hundred-and-sixty-one-square-mile area and typically responds to some sixty calls a year, handling everything from brush fires to welfare checks and vehicle accidents. “A lot of motorcycle riders come out here,” Pool told me when we met up on Tuesday, a few days after the flood. “It’s a beautiful drive. Or, it used to be.”
Pool is a lanky, good-natured man who leads a team of three dozen volunteers, including a cosmetology instructor, a retired police officer, and a man who sells water tanks. When I asked about the average age of his firefighters, Pool smiled. “I don’t do the math on that, out of respect for our members,” he said. “I’m fifty-three, and I’m one of the younger ones.”
That morning, Hunt’s central fire station, a stone building perched on a hill, was bustling with activity: running water had finally been restored, and a group of people were busy in the kitchen, scooping barbecue into Styrofoam containers to feed search teams. The high-ceilinged bays where fire trucks would usually be parked were instead full of cases of water bottles and pallets stocked high with donated cleaning supplies. Two fire trucks had been destroyed in the flooding; others were mud-caked but potentially operable.
Pool and I sat in the dispatch room, where the air-conditioner worked hard to keep up with the heat. On the wall was a map of Hunt, the Guadalupe River a blue line snaking across it. Pool had been working non-stop since the flood, seeming to be powered by a mix of necessity and purpose. “This is a small town,” he said. “We don’t have a mayor, there’s no city government or anything like that. So the people currently keeping this town afloat are me, the superintendent of the school district, and the two pastors, Baptist and Methodist.” Someone interrupted to ask if it was possible to get a forklift to help unload supplies, and then someone else interrupted to ask how to handle cash donations. “Being in public education, they say you answer five thousand questions a day, so this is kind of my environment,” Pool said. “But it’s a lot.”
A firefighter poked his head into the office. “Chief, somebody’s calling you, priority,” he said. On the radio, a man’s garbled voice announced that he’d found a body part. Everyone in the room winced. “Watch your language over the radio,” the dispatcher cautioned. Pool stepped outside. “They’re constantly finding things,” he said, when he came back a moment later. “They just found somebody else.” Across the county, Pool explained, the human remains that searchers discovered were being stored in refrigerated trucks at fire stations until funeral homes could handle them. Then the radio crackled, and he excused himself again.
The July 4th floods are among America’s most deadly and damaging of the past century, with at least a hundred and twenty people confirmed dead as of Thursday, roughly a quarter of them from Camp Mystic. The state has deployed search-and-rescue teams to look for the people who remain unaccounted for—more than a hundred and sixty, at last count. While much of the focus, understandably, has been on Camp Mystic, the affected area is much broader, and some of the outlying communities, including Hunt, have had to make do with fewer official resources. In a disaster of this size, the Federal Emergency Management Agency typically deploys hundreds of people, including specialized search teams; by Monday evening, the embattled agency had reportedly sent only eighty-six, in part owing to cost-cutting processes put in place by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security. (By Tuesday night, FEMA had sent three hundred and eleven people to the area.) When searchers called in a discovery of human remains, it sometimes took more than two hours for state troopers to arrive. The Salvation Army has set up shop in Kerrville, the county seat, but one local speculated to me that people in Hunt may be too proud to call on outside resources. Instead, they reached out to the place they’d always reached out to for help: the fire department. “Realistically,” Pool told me, “we’re kind of on our own.”
The community was rallying to a degree that was heartening, if at times overwhelming: first the flood, now the flood of donations. I listened to a genial volunteer named Bobby manning the constantly ringing phone, with calls coming in from as far afield as New Hampshire and North Dakota. Callers offered energy drinks, grief counselling, heavy equipment, I.V.-hydration therapy, dry socks. It was difficult to find room to store everything, and people kept wanting to bring more. “Diapers, dog food—you name it, we’ve got it,” Bobby told a caller who asked what the community needed. “It’s like Walmart over here.”
