Gunny456 said:
This comparison is not the same. Hurricanes don't follow the same exact path every single time.
If every single hurricane that ever formed in the gulf followed one given path to hit the exact same spot along the coast ……and you had years of data that proved that….. then yes you are negligent for building something in that consistently given path.
A river does just that. The Guadalupe River valley was formed over thousands of years of the path of the Guadalupe eroding and forming it. The flood of 2025 happened sometime in the rivers history before. That was a given. It will happen again. That is a given as well.
It could happen again tomorrow, or this coming 4th of July again, or 80 years from now. Regardless we know it can happen.
Here's the deal though.
Every river floods. All of them. Some more frequent than others, but every single one in the history of the world has flooded and every single one will flood again. Up until this flood, which was an absolute freak of a weather event, for the entire life of Mystic and every other camp along the river, this had not happened.
But at some point you have to recognize that there are inherent dangers wherever you go. If you live in flood zones, it is inherent that at some point there will likely be a flood. If you live on the gulf coast or the east coast up to about DC, you are almost guaranteed to endure a tropical storm or hurricane at least once in your life. If you live in tornado alley, you are almost guaranteed to be affected by a tornado at some point in time. Up north it freezes every single year. It gets hot in the desert. Mountains have avalances and snow ins. Fire is always an inherent danger, even in the middle of the desert. Everywhere has a drought at some point. Everywhere has a flood at some point.
Danger is an absolute fact of life. We accept it daily. It isn't until something tragic happens that all of a sudden we get the "well they should have known!" armchair quarterbacking. Mystic had been around for [literally] 100 years. Up until last year there wasn't a need for contingency plans and having 47 people on staff who's entire job was to evacuate campers during a 500 year storm. It just had never really happened.
None of that takes away from the absolute tragedy of the situation - there is literally nothing that can be done with money or punishment or anything that will undo what nature did. What is happening now is little more than a pure vindictive need to blame somebody, anybody, and make a buck or two in the process. If the goal is to change early warning systems (which that county didn't have), then the focus should be on fixing that issue and not finding somebody to blame because they put their family first or didn't realize the gravity of the situation as the river rose 30+ feet in a matter of minutes like it did.
Now if you can show unequivocably that the owners of Mystic got warnings that told them the river was going to rise 30 feet in 20 minutes and prove they shrugged their shoulders and said "meh, whatever", then you have a different argument. But I have a hard time that particular sequence of events happened. There were plenty of others that died on the river that night other than the poor kids at Mystic as well. They all took a risk by camping on a literal riverbed in an area that, under the exact right freak set of circumstances, could produce deadly flash floods.
If the mentality is "can't ever build where it may flood, have fire, drought, etc." then we cannot build anything anywhere on this planet and you might as well wipe every single house in the hill country off the map. Which may not be a bad thing, but it is absolutely impractical.
