AccuWeather's Jon Porter and Brett Anderson explain the key contributors that led to the horrific flooding that took place in Camp Mystic in Kerr County, Texas, over the Fourth of July weekend.
00:00The terrain and also the location of some of the cabins along with the type of soil really was a huge factor in the tragedy.
00:09Joining us right now to break this down and to add a little more explanation of what happened and why is our chief meteorologist, Jonathan Porter, and our climate expert, Brett Anderson, with a closer look at mystic cabins in Texas.
00:29All right, Bernie, thank you very much.
00:31Yeah, we wanted to look at some of the more specific details here that contributed to this horrible tragedy and we had, as we've been talking about here in the Texas Hill Country over the last several days, there was a focus of two to four inch per hour rain rates over the same area west of Kerrville near Hunt and Camp Mystic on arid soil and all that water ran off from the higher elevations into the lower elevations.
00:57And we want to zoom in here, Brett, into near the Camp Mystic area and, of course, this is the area where there was such a tremendous loss of life and we want to look at some of the factors that were involved here in creating this serious flooding.
01:09Yeah, we had, again, here's the river here coming this way, here's the camp over here and you can see here a very low-lying area here.
01:19This green area is a very low-lying area and then here's the cabins that were directly impacted by the flash flood here.
01:26But one thing that really sticks out here, John, is this looks like an earthen dam.
01:31And so when you have this wall of water coming in here very quickly, it's going to hit that earthen dam.
01:37On this side of the river, it's very high.
01:39So on this side, it's not quite as high.
01:41So it hits this dam and where is that, where is it going to go?
01:45Instead of going right down the river, it's going to be, a lot of it's going to be forced right down into this, what we call basically a floodway, a FEMA-designated floodway.
01:53Yeah, this is a FEMA-designated floodway, including much of this part of the camp.
01:58And a lot of this is based on our research and also reporting of some of the facts from the New York Times and the Washington Post on the ground.
02:05And notice, these were the cabins where some of the youngest campers were located, where that wall of water would have been coming at them.
02:13And some of the other cabins are located a bit high, in a higher elevation.
02:17And it's believed that many of the campers that thankfully were able to survive were able to move up this little hill here to get to a higher elevation.
02:27It was that close where there was a little bit higher elevation so they could escape that water that was pouring in.
02:32Yeah, and you had high elevation here, higher elevation here behind the cabins, higher elevation over here.
02:37So it's almost like a box canyon in a way.
02:39And the other thing we also have to think about, Cypress Creek running right through there.
02:42So another danger with more water coming in from another direction.
02:46Yeah, that was another tributary of the Guadalupe River, which again, right is up in here.
02:50This Cypress Creek, that could have been flooding.
02:52There's another earthen dam over here.
02:54That may have also been a factor.
02:56So essentially, we had water pouring into all of these directions.
03:01And that's why that problem was amplified in this particular part of the camp, when this camp had been along for quite a long time.
03:08And of course, those flash flood warnings issued by the government at 1.14 a.m. would have provided ample notice for evacuations and other activities to occur.
03:19The question is, what steps were taken at this camp and other locations?
03:23And of course, AccuWeather meteorologists had warned of the flash flooding 30 minutes before as well.
03:28So gentlemen, when you just break it all down and you add the weather into it, it was a recipe for a disaster.
03:35It seems that way, yeah.
03:36It was. It was all those factors conspiring together.
03:40AccuWeather chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter, along with climate expert Brett Anderson, thanks for the insight.
