GIRLS huddled inside their cabins as blood-curdling screams rang out in the dark – but they had no idea if the danger was real.
Campers had been assured that the youngest children had already been moved to safety.
In reality, the campers were battling for their lives, and at least 27 never made it out.
The disconnect was revealed by survivor Amelia Moore, 14, who said girls were told their friends were safe.
At Camp Mystic, some counselors, who aren’t significantly older than the campers, reassured the girls that their younger peers were just engaging in games while, in reality, rising floodwaters were carrying them away.
Deadly flooding tore through Camp Mystic in Kerr County, Texas, on the morning of July 4, striking far earlier than previously believed.
More than 650 girls and staff were sleeping when a flash-flood warning with “catastrophic” potential was issued at 1:14 am.
The water hit hard around 3:00 am, engulfing cabins in a low-lying area near the Guadalupe River known as the Flats.
Amelia was first jolted awake by thunder at 2:00 am and heard screams from younger girls below soon after, she told the Wall Street Journal.
But instead of being urged to run, Amelia said they were told the noise was nothing to worry about and to stay put.
“A lot of counselors had been here for so long they thought it was nothing,” she said.
“So they were like, ‘Just stay in the cabin.’”
But as more girls flooded into their cabin soaking wet and terrified, the truth of the situation became harder to ignore.
Amelia eventually fell back asleep, but woke at 7 am to find their hilltop cabin totally cut off by water and fallen trees.
With no food or phones, which are banned under camp rules, they were stranded for hours.
“We were starving,” Amelia said.
Gut-wrenching stories from the Texas floods
Piers and Ruffin Boyett
Meanwhile, two brave brothers were peacefully asleep in their cabin at Camp La Junta by the Guadalupe River when a sudden surge of water struck at 4 a.m. on July 4. The boys quickly realized they needed to swim to survive.
“The flood started getting bigger,” Piers explained to ABC affiliate KSAT-TV. “Our cabin had bunk beds, and [the water] was rising all the way to the top bunk, leaving us no option but to swim out.”
“I had a first-hand view of the flood,” Ruffin, the elder of the two, said. “The cabins were flooding and the walls, they broke down.
“All of the campers in those cabins had to go up on the rafters and wait there until they could swim out.”
Glen Juenke
Juenke, a security guard at Camp Mystic, described having to throw girls on top of floating mattresses to save them from drowning.
“Each of those sweet girls [were] cold, wet, and frightened, but they were also incredibly brave,” he told CNN. “They trusted me, and we leaned on each other through a long, harrowing night together inside their cabin.”
Julian Ryan
The 27-year-old father-of-two died after suffering a horrific gash to his arm while trying to save his family.
Ryan, a restaurant dishwasher, was asleep in his trailer home alongside his mother Marilyn, fiancée Christinia and 6-year-old and 13-month-old children when the floods hit.
“It just started pouring in, and we had to fight the door to get it closed to make sure not too much got in,” Christinia told The New York Times.
Christinia said her fiancé punched through a glass to save them, but the broken edges almost cut his arm clean off.
One of the last things Ryan told his family was, “I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it. I love y’all.”
“We were like, ‘Does anyone have food that they smuggled in? You won’t get in trouble. We just need food.’”
Throughout the morning, they were told the younger campers were fine.
However, the message may have been based on incomplete or outdated information.
“This is the part that makes me sick,” said Amelia.
“The whole time we were told the flats were safe and accounted for… playing games in Rec Hall and that they were perfectly fine.”
Campers from cabins like Chatterbox were climbing barefoot through windows and up steep rocky paths in pajamas as water rose behind them.
“We should have been a lot more panicked,” Amelia said. “But we genuinely didn’t know that anything was wrong.”
The first helicopter didn’t land until 3 pm, more than 12 hours after the flood began.
Camp Mystic was one of the areas hit the worst by flooding as it was located dangerously close to the flooding shores; as a result, the water rose 26 feet in 45 minutes.
Evacuation was painfully slow and, according to Amelia, there was no adult leadership.
“No one on that hill was over 21 years old,” she said.
Another camper, 16-year-old Callie McAlary, recalled the moment she knew the weather outside was not a normal thunderstorm.
“One minute you see lightning strike next to your cabin, and next to you, you hear water’s coming up,” she told Fox News.
“It was really bad thunder. We heard one of the campers run in and say, ‘Hey, our cabin is flooding.’
“I knew some girls slept on trunks that night, some girls had to share beds, some girls slept on floors because they couldn’t go back to their cabin because it was so flooded in three cabins,” she said.
So far, at least 120 people have been confirmed dead in the floods across Texas, including 95 in Kerr County alone.
All 14 girls and their counselors in the Bubble Inn cabin, which housed the youngest campers at ages 8 and 9, are either dead or still missing.
Camp director Dick Eastland, who had owned the camp since 1974, also perished while trying to rescue children from the water.
WHAT WAS LOST
Photos show the once-lush camp now buried in sludge and debris, with twisted cabins and overturned trunks scattered across the grounds.
More chilling photos of the aftermath in Camp Mystic show empty bunkbeds covered in layers of mud and sediment left behind by the raging water.
Camp security guard Glenn Juenke said he had been throwing girls on top of floating mattresses to prevent them from drowning.
“Each of those sweet girls [were] cold, wet, and frightened – but they were also incredibly brave,” he told CNN.
Another 173 people remain missing as search teams work through the rubble.
Critics say the camp failed to act despite warnings, while some blame federal staffing cuts for slow alerts from the National Weather Service.
The White House has slammed that claim as a “depraved lie.”
FEMA teams have been set up in nearby Center Point, using helicopters, boats, and cadaver dogs to comb through the wreckage.
Texas lawmakers are calling a special session to address emergency communication systems and flood response.
President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania visited the area on Friday.
