Local boy describes Texas flood
By John Gregory
Cade McComic, 11, was one of two Scripps Ranch boys to survive the tragic floods of July 4 while attending Camp La Junta in Texas. Fortunately, all those attending the camp survived, thanks to the heroic efforts of the camp counselors.
The downpour on the night of July 3 through July 4 quickly made water levels along the Guadalupe River rise, flooding large swaths of the Texas Hill Country, causing widespread devastation and death.
Susanne McComic, Cade’s mother, has roots in Texas and said all three of her children have attended summer camps in the area. Her uncle also attended Camp La Junta.
“It’s a multi-generational experience for our family,” she said.
Susanne drove to Texas and took Cade to Camp La Junta where he settled into his cabin on July 2. Most of the cabins housed about 20 campers each, divided by age groups. This was going to be Cade’s fifth year attending the camp and he was looking forward to spending about a month there. The camp offers an abundance of activities such as horseback riding; archery; canoeing; kayaking; fishing; adventure sports; riflery and hunter safety; and water games such as a water slide and rope swing.
It was sunny throughout most of the next day, July 3, and clouds only began to form after dinner was served. There was no real indication of what was about to occur.
“It was very lightly sprinkling when we went to bed (at 10 p.m.). I slept for a little and then I was up at 3 a.m. or 3:30 looking out the window,” Cade said. “I was lying on my bed, so I couldn’t see all the water that was down below. … My cabin was up on a hill, so there wasn’t any water in our cabin.”
He was on the bottom part of a bunk bed, looking out a window toward the sky.
“I woke up because the thunder and lightning was so loud. You could hear the rain hitting the metal roof. But I didn’t think anything of it until I heard one of the counselors yell, ‘It’s flooding! Get out of the cabin!’” Cade said. “I was so confused because my cabin is completely dry, and then I look out my window and see the cabin below us – like halfway under water.”
He said the water level was above that cabin’s door.
Everyone in his cabin put their shoes on and put on a sweatshirt if they had one. They were still wearing their pajamas, but they had to leave quickly.
The boys hurried up a few steps from their cabin to follow a back lane, which is a fire road leading up a hill.
“We stayed up there for about 3 to 3 ½ hours,” Cade said.
All 300 of the campers eventually gathered on that hill, getting pelted by the pouring rain, enduring lightning and thunder. The youngsters and their counselors witnessed a spectacular ball of lightning crash, creating a huge flash.
“At one point, there was a ball of lightning. … It looked like daylight for a second or two and you could see the entire field covered in water,” Cade said. “There were all these trees floating by and just the water rushing through.”
The younger children sheltering on the hill did not have much on because their cabins were flooded when they were rescued.
“The counselors went through the water, the heavy current, and they grabbed the kids. … They swam out with the kids on their backs,” Cade said.
The camp counselors were heroes, rescuing children from three flooded cabins, each housing about 20 campers for a total of 60 kids. Some of those cabins had 7-year-olds, and the water was high-
er than the windows. The windows crumbled from the pressure in at least one of the cabins, Cade said.
“All at once, all the windows shattered together and let tons of water in,” he said.
The young campers had to climb up to the rafters to survive, and camp counselors rescued them by swimming underwater to help them out through the broken windows.
The boys witnessed numerous frightening events during the night.
“We were up on the back road and we hear kind of a crash … and then we saw a cabin floating away,” Cade said.
He saw his favorite counselor on the front porch of that cabin, and others were inside. He thought the building crumbled when it floated into a tree.
“But a couple of minutes later, they all started walking up the hill and we could see them, and they were all okay,” he said.
Members of the entire camp were stuck on the hill for the rest of night with not much to keep them warm and dry as the rain continued to fall. They had to stand the entire time because the ground was saturated. Some of the campers who had families nearby in the Texas Hill Country became a little upset because they didn’t know if they were safe, Cade explained. Others had sisters attending the hard hit Camp Mystic for Girls along the river.
The boys huddling on the hill at Camp La Junta did what they could to keep their spirits up.
“It was the craziest mix of emotions ever. At one point, we all started chanting USA for some reason. I have no idea why,” Cade said.
The sky began to lighten at about 6:30 a.m. and the campers were told to walk down to the camp’s business office porch, which was safe. They stayed there for another three hours.
The camp director’s wife arranged for school buses to pick up all the children later. The main gate was flooded, so the campers eventually left the camp through a back exit, riding on a flatbed trailer towed by a truck to get to the buses waiting at a church.
The campers viewed the destruction brought by the flooding as they evacuated.
“There was a house I saw on the way in. It wasn’t there on the way out. Gone. A big, big house,” Cade said.
Meanwhile, Cade’s mother was in new Mexico on her way back to San Diego when she was alerted about the flood at the camp. She booked a hotel in nearby Kerrville, Texas, and turned back to pick up her son and the other Camp La Junta attendee from Scripps Ranch, since she was the parent nearest the area at the time.
“There were a lot of unknowns … We really didn’t know, so it was really a scary time,” Susanne said.
She arrived at about 6:30 p.m. July 4. The boys were at the church in Kerrville by 7:45 p.m. and Susanne picked them up.
“It was really, really scary. Really emotional,” she said.
The two boys were able to get hot showers at the hotel, and they all ate a warm dinner at a local restaurant.
They left for San Diego the next day, but still had one day reserved at the hotel in Kerrville, where many families were still missing loved ones in the flood. Some families had girls at Camp Mystic.
“Seeing that firsthand made it very real and very devastating,” Susanne said.
So, she gave her reserved hotel room to another family for that night.
The well-known camps in Texas are a longstanding summer tradition for many families and their children. Their histories date back 90 to 100 years.
“The independence and the self-confidence and the things those boys get by going away every summer is rare in this world, and we would hate to lose that,” Susanne said.
“So many people lost their homes and these camps that the kids look forward to go to every year are struggling a lot and they could use help,” Cade said.
A GoFundMe has been set up at bit.ly/3ING16E.