In late September 2000, longtime Kerr County, Texas, resident W. Thornton Secor Jr. sat down with an oral historian to tell his story. Like many of the residents recorded as part of a decades-long effort by the Kerr County Historical Commission to document the community’s history, Secor had a lot to say about the area’s floods.
“It always seems to happen at night too,” Secor said of local floods he and his family had experienced. “Can’t see most of it.”
Secor, who died in 2022, was a third-generation manager of a lodge that still operates along the Guadalupe River. His oral history shares family memories of floods going back to 1932 — like the time a flood that year washed away most of the cabins his grandfather built.
Now, Secor’s daughter, Mandi Secor Lipscomb, is left considering the future of the lodge in the aftermath of another devastating flood, on July 4. Secor Lipscomb is the fourth-generation owner and operator of the same lodge, Waltonia on the River.
Often when I try to understand a place or process a big news event, I look for records kept by local historical societies and libraries. In archived documents, preserved photographs and oral history collections, one can start to see how a community understands itself. So, as news reports about the floods in the Central Texas Hill Country poured in throughout the week, I went looking for historical context. What local knowledge is held by people who live, or have lived, in what’s repeatedly described as “Flash Flood Alley”? How have people in Kerr County’s past contended with floods of their own time?
A trove of more than 70 oral histories recorded by the Kerr County Historical Commission begins to answer those questions. The recordings document memories of floods going back to 1900, but oral histories alone rarely tell a full or accurate story. Still, there’s at least one conclusion to draw: Everything has a history. The flood that killed more than 130 people in the Kerr County area this month is not the first time a flash flood on the Guadalupe River took lives of people, including children.
I keep this history in mind when I hear local and state officials say no one could have seen this coming. Take this exchange between a reporter and Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly:
Reporter: Why weren’t these camps evacuated?
Kelly: I can’t answer that. I don’t know.
Reporter: Well you’re the judge. I mean you’re the top official here in this county. Why can’t you answer that? There are kids missing. These camps were in harm’s way. We knew this flood was coming.
Kelly: We didn’t know this flood was coming. Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming. We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States. And we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was gonna be anything like what’s happened here. None whatsoever.
My colleague Jennifer Berry Hawes wrote last week about the uncanny similarities between the Texas floods and Hurricane Helene, which struck North Carolina last year. In both disasters, weather forecasts predicted the potential devastation, yet people were left in harm’s way.
And as another colleague, ProPublica editor Abrahm Lustgarten, pointed out in a piece about how climate change is making disasters like the flood in Texas more common, “there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss” in the weeks to come.
“Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding?” Lustgarten wrote. “Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity?”
As we wait for answers — or as journalists dig for them — the oral histories show Kerr County residents have warned one another, as well as newcomers and out-of-towners, about flooding for a long time. In his 2000 oral history, Secor said he remembered a time in the spring of 1959 when his father tried to warn one new-to-town woman about building a house so close to the river.
“He took her out and showed her the watermarks on the trees in front of our house and all,” Secor said, likely referring to the watermarks from the flood of 1932, which a local newspaper described at the time as “the most disastrous flood that ever swept the upper Guadalupe Valley.” The flood killed at least seven people.
“‘Oh,’ she says, ‘that will never happen again,’” Secor recalled.
He said her body was found in a tree a few months later after a flood swept her and the roof she stood on away.
“It’s going to surprise newcomers when we get another flood like the ’32 flood,” Secor said in 2000.
“It’ll get us again someday.”
As the Guadalupe River rose over the July 4 weekend, the 16-cabin lodge his daughter owns was sold out and full of guests. All of them escaped the floods, said Secor Lipscomb. They ran, some barefoot in the mud, up a steep hill beyond the property’s retaining wall. They took shelter in a barn.
Later, Secor Lipscomb assessed the damage to her family property. What she saw left her in tears: Four cabins had water up to the ceiling. Another two had flooded about 5 feet. But among the wreckage was a crew of nearly 40 volunteers, ready to help with the cleanup.
By the time I reached out to her to ask her about her father’s oral history, six cabins and the main camp office were already demolished.
The cabin her great-grandfather and grandfather built together more than 100 years ago still stood. But it won’t for much longer. It is so damaged with water that it, too, will have to go.
“This is our family history, our family legacy,” Secor Lipscomb told me. “Of course we’re going to rebuild.”
When they do, their customers will be ready. Many of the families who survived the flood already told her they’ll be first in line to book for the next available July 4.