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Camp Mystic’s owner warned of floods for decades. Then the river killed him

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CNN
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Dick Eastland warned for decades about the hidden dangers of the beautiful but volatile Guadalupe River, a peril he saw firsthand while running his family’s youth camp alongside its banks.

Eastland saw floods damage Camp Mystic again and again – and his pregnant wife was even airlifted to a hospital while the camp in central Texas was cut off by floodwaters.

He successfully pushed for a new flood warning system after 10 children at a nearby camp were swept to their deaths in 1987, and in recent years served on the board of the local river authority as it supported renewed efforts to improve warnings on the Guadalupe.

“The river is beautiful,” Eastland told the Austin American-Statesman in 1990. “But you have to respect it.”

But after 27 people were killed at Camp Mystic in last week’s cataclysmic flooding – along with Eastland himself, who died while trying to rescue his young campers – the scale of the tragedy highlights potential missed opportunities by Camp Mystic’s owners and government officials to better mitigate those risks.

About a decade after it was installed, the warning system Eastland had championed in the late ‘80s became antiquated and broken. The river authority ultimately shut it down in 1999, saying it was “unreliable with some of the system’s stations not reporting information,” according to an article in the Kerrville Daily Times.

Yet periodic attempts to adopt a more modern flood-monitoring system, including one with warning sirens that might have alerted campers last week, repeatedly failed to gain traction – stalled by low budgets, some local opposition and a lack of state support.

At Camp Mystic, meanwhile, several of the cabins that were hit hardest in the flooding were in an area identified by the federal government as the highest-risk location for inundations from the Guadalupe. Even as the camp built new cabins in a less-risky flood zone elsewhere on its property, nothing was done to relocate the buildings in the most danger.

“Camp officials might have not been aware of flood risk when they first built the cabins,” before the county even had flood maps, said Anna Serra-Llobet, a University of California-Berkeley researcher who studies flood risk. But after the recent construction, she said, officials should have realized they were in an area of “severe hazard.”

Eastland has been praised as a hero for his efforts to save campers on Friday and remembered as a beloved figure by generations who spent their summers in the idyllic riverside refuge. His legacy is less clear as a public steward of the sometimes deadly river that ultimately took his life.

“If he wasn’t going to die of natural causes, this was the only other way—saving the girls that he so loved and cared for,” his grandson George Eastland wrote in an Instagram tribute. “Although he no longer walks this earth, his impact will never fade in the lives he touched.”

Camp Mystic did not respond to a request for comment.

Camp Mystic has a long history with flooding, going back to just a few years after it was established 99 years ago.

In 1932, flood waters “swept away” several cabins at the camp and led campers to evacuate across the river by canoe, according to an article in the Abilene Daily Reporter. A counselor told the Austin American-Statesman at the time that campers might “have drowned if we had gone out the front door and walked face-into a sheet of water!”

In 1978, an article in the Kerrville Mountain Sun reported that Camp Mystic was “the most severely damaged” of local summer camps affected by a flood that year. A separate article reported that five Camp Mystic counselors “had their automobiles swept into the Guadalupe River” by flood waters that year.

And in 1985, Eastland’s wife Tweety, then pregnant with their fourth child, had to be airlifted from Camp Mystic to a hospital due to floodwaters, local news reported.

A volunteer holds a Camp Mystic t-shirt and pink backpack in Comfort, Texas, as search and rescue efforts continued on July 6.

One of the region’s most devastating floods – until last week’s Fourth of July disaster – came in 1987, when 10 children attending a different camp in the area were killed by floodwaters during a rushed evacuation.

Eastland, who at the time was serving on the board of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which manages the river, pushed for a new flood warning system. In newspaper articles, he described a computer-powered system that would lead to automatic alerts if water levels on the Guadalupe rose beyond a set limit.

The proposal was delayed, but officials eventually created a system of 21 gauges up and down the Guadalupe and its tributaries.

Even as Eastland voiced pride in the new system, he was quick to remind the public of the Guadalupe’s deadly power.

“I’m sure there will be other drownings,” Eastland said in a 1990 interview with the Austin American-Statesman. “People don’t heed the warnings.”

In the following years, the early flood warning system that Eastland advocated for – and was once considered state-of-the-art – started to suffer problems. In April 1998, the company that maintained the system “closed its doors without notice,” and the gauge system soon stopped functioning because of lack of maintenance, the Kerrville Daily Times reported.

In February 1999, the river authority shut the system down because it had become “unreliable with some of the system’s stations not reporting information,” and board members worried about “liability concerns that the system would send ‘false signals,’” according to an article in the Times.

A handful of river gauges remain in service on the Guadalupe today, but the county lacks a full-scale warning system to broadcast public alerts when floodwaters rise.

Kerr County officials, along with the river authority that Eastland periodically served on, worked to change that over the last decade, searching for funding for a flood warning system that included more river gauges and a network of sirens.

But they found themselves struggling to overcome funding deficits and opposition from some skeptical residents.

Grant applications for the system were denied by the state in 2016 and 2017, and the authority later decided not to pursue a separate grant after realizing that it would only cover five percent of the system’s cost.

Around the same time, Camp Mystic was embarking on an expansion project. As the number of girls attending the camp grew over the years – leading to waitlists to get in each summer – the camp built more than a dozen new cabins farther south of the Guadalupe River alongside the smaller Cypress Creek.

Some of those cabins were located in an area that the federal government has determined has a 1% chance of flooding each year, which would have required officials to get special approval from the county government to build there.

But the risk was even higher at some of Camp Mystic’s cabins closest to the Guadalupe, several of which are located inside the river’s “regulatory floodways” – the areas that flood first and are most dangerous – according to federal flood maps. Those cabins have been around for decades, historical aerial photos show, apparently before the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s first floodzone maps were developed.

Dealing with preexisting structures like these inside risky floodzones is especially challenging, said Serra-Llobet, the UC Berkeley flood expert.

“When they did the construction of the recent buildings, they should have seen the FEMA maps,” Serra-Llobet said. That, she said, was a “window of opportunity” where camp officials could have realized their decades-old dorms were in a high-hazard zone and acted to address it. Camp Mystic could have relocated the buildings to higher ground, or just turned them into structures for recreational activities and made sure that campers were sleeping in safer areas, she said.

Still, Serra-Llobet argued that Kerr County should move past the “blame game” that comes after any disaster and focus on the lessons that could be learned for protecting people from floods going forward.

It’s not clear whether Eastland personally grappled with the high-risk flood zone running through his own campground. But in recent years, he was part of continued efforts for an improved flood warning system for the region.

Eastland returned to the river authority’s board in 2022 after being appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. After the previous setbacks, the board this year moved forward with a proposal to create a new “centralized dashboard” of rainfall, river depth and other data sources “to support local flood monitoring and emergency response,” according to the county government.

In April, the river authority voted to hire a firm to develop the data system and had planned to begin work this month. That was postponed after last week’s disastrous flooding.

After Eastland was found dead, tributes have rolled in from his colleagues, community members and former campers whose lives he touched over the decades at Camp Mystic.

“Although I am devastated, I can’t say I’m surprised that you sacrificed your life with the hopes of someone else’s being saved,” Eastland’s grandson wrote in his Instagram post.

April Ancira spent summers from the age of 8 to 14 at Camp Mystic. In an interview, she remembered Eastland helping her catch a big fish – and being just as thrilled as she was when she successfully reeled it in.

“My memories of him wrapping his arms around so many campers and being so excited to see them excel is incredible,” she said.

Austin Dickson, who served on the river authority board along with Eastland and sat next to him at board meetings, remembered him as a “pillar in our county and our community” who had championed a recent effort to create a new park along the river.

“So many people say, ‘Mystic is my heaven,’ or ‘Mystic is a dreamland,’ and I think that’s true,” he said. “That’s Dick and Tweety’s life’s work to make that true.”

CNN’s Allison Gordon and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed reporting.





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Trump lands in Texas after floods kill 120 and leave 160 missing – live updates

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Kerr County officials were told flooding began an hour before they sent first alertpublished at 15:31 British Summer Time

Brandon Drenon
Reporting from Washington DC

A Texas firefighter located upstream of the deadly floods in Kerr County asked if emergency flood alerts could be sent to residents about an hour before the first warnings were received, audio reveals.

In the recording, obtained by US outlets, the firefighter asks at 04:22 on 4 July if a CodeRED alert can be issued. The dispatcher replies that a supervisor needs to approve the request.

Residents didn’t begin receiving the alert until an hour later – for some it took up to six hours, according to reports.

In the recording of the firefighter’s dispatch call, the emergency responder can be heard saying: “The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on State Highway 39.

“Is there any way we can send a CodeRED out to our Hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?”

“Stand by, we have to get that approved with our supervisor,” the dispatcher replied.

Local officials are now facing mounting questions over when Kerrville’s residents were notified about deadly flash floods that killed 96 in Kerr County alone, with over 160 others still missing.

Asked about a possible police radio failure at a press conference on Thursday – almost a week after 4 July flooding – Kerrville Police community services officer Jonathan Lamb said, “I don’t have any information to that point.”

The questioning followed a tense exchange the day before when reporters asked officials repeatedly about a possible lag in emergency communications.

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha earlier this week declined to offer specifics about timing, saying that officials were instead focused on rescue and recovery efforts.

Leitha said he was first notified around the “four to five area”, and told local media, “we’re in the process of trying to put a timeline” about what exactly happened in the pre-dawn hours.

“That’s going to take a little bit of time,” he told them. “That is not my priority this time.”



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Immigration raid at cannabis farm leads to chaos, one farmworker reportedly suffers grave injuries

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Federal immigration agents carried out immigration sweeps at two Southern California cannabis farms on Thursday, prompting a heated standoff between authorities and several hundred protesters at a Ventura County site and reports of a farm worker gravely injured in a fall.

Videos shared on social media showed nearly a dozen agents using less-lethal ammunition on a crowd that had gathered near Glass House Farms, a large, licensed cannabis greenhouse in Camarillo. Meanwhile, 35 miles up the coast in Carpinteria, federal agents entered another Glass House Farms growing site, where a smaller crowd gathered around the perimeter.

The United Farm Workers union said they were told one worker fell several stories from a greenhouse. UFW official Liz Strater said the person was taken from a Ventura County farm by ambulance. Strater said the person suffered catastrophic injuries and is not expected to survive. The worker’s name was not released, and local law enforcement officials could not immediate provide any details.

Eight people with injuries were transported from in and around Camarillo facility Thursday afternoon to local hospitals, according to Andrew Dowd, a spokesperson for the Ventura County Fire Department. He said he did not know the extent of those injuries or their current status. Dowd said an additional four people were treated at the scene for minor injuries and did not need hospital care.

U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli confirmed in a statement on X that federal agents had executed a search warrant at a marijuana farm. He said they arrested several individuals on suspicion of impeding the operation and warned that people who continued to interfere would be arrested and charged with a federal offense.

A spokesperson for the FBI said the agency was investigating a shooting that occurred during the operation in Camarillo. Video captured by ABC7 News appeared to show a protester opening fire at federal immigration agents after smoke canisters were thrown to disperse the crowd.

Ten minors without documentation were found at the farm during the raid, eight of whom were unaccompanied, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said in a statement on X. The facility is now under investigation for child labor violations, he said.

Cesar Ortiz, 24, told a Times photographer in Spanish that his brother works at the farm and was detained and being held in a hot container without air conditioning.

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“They are taking everyone and the truth is it’s not right because these people come to work, struggle every day, to earn for bread every day,” he said. “It feels like they are against us but there are no narcos here, no one is armed here and they come fully armed, full of military personnel.”

The Ventura County Fire Department was dispatched around 12:15 p.m. to provide medical aid as a result of federal enforcement activity along Laguna Road in Camarillo, according to agency spokesperson Andrew Dowd. Five patients were transported to hospitals for treatment and four were treated on the scene.

Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the area to assist with traffic control but were not involved in any way with the federal operation, he said. Dowd also noted that the Fire Department has no connection with any federal immigration enforcement actions and will never ask for a patient’s immigration status.

“There’s so many family and friends who work here at the Glass House Factory, it’s a huge factory. … We were notified that the people working inside were all being detained, whether they were U.S. citizens or not,” said Angelmarie Taylor, who is with the 805 Immigration Coalition, a volunteer organization that tracks immigration activity by federal agents.

About 500 people gathered near the farm to protest during the day, according to Taylor. As of around 6:30 p.m. Thursday, about 200 protesters remained at the site where around 40 troops, some holding shields, and agents made a stand.

Marc Cohodes, an investor and famed short-seller who has invested in Glass House, called the raid “beyond outrageous.”

“The government is aware of cartels, illicit crime, the whole thing and yet, and yet, they decide to spend their resources going after a total legal company that pays the state of California hundreds of millions of dollars excise tax,” he said.

He added that Glass House is “the largest cannabis cultivator in the world” and “a highly regulated business fully licensed by the state of California,” with a site in Ventura County and another in Santa Barbara County. “It’s run by a guy named Kyle Kazan, who is an ex-cop who plays by the rules and does things by the book.” Kazan, he added, is also a supporter of President Trump.

Ortiz, whose brother was detained Thursday, said he had a message for Trump: “We all have a right to come here and work. Here, we all have a dream, we have to give it our all.”

Farther north in Carpinteria, U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara) attempted to enter the marijuana farm after hearing reports of an immigration operation but was not let past the masked federal agents agents who formed a perimeter along the road about 75 yards from the raid.

“It was disproportionate, overkill,” Carbajal said. “These tactics are creating an incendiary, hostile environment the way they are being deployed, which could lead to, regrettably, violence in the future.”

He identified himself as a Congress member conducting oversight but said he was told to contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and was turned away. A crowd had gathered around the perimeter, but he said they dispersed after agents wrapped up and boarded a military-style vehicle.

Aerial views of the scene in Camarillo taken by news helicopters showed dozens of workers sitting in the shade alongside a warehouse, with federal agents standing guard.

Protesters blocked the roads in and out, and at one point federal agents drove their vehicles through the fields. Multiple ambulances had gone in and out of the facility, Taylor said.

Sarah Armstrong, outreach chair with Americans for Safe Access, said it appeared that Homeland Security and the U.S. National Guard were at the location firing tear gas and rubber bullets at the Camarillo protesters.

Lucas Zucker, co-executive director of Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, or CAUSE, said Thursday that the organization had staffers on the ground after reports of a raid at Glass House, but he asked them to leave once federal agents started deploying tear gas.

The vast area is largely remote farmland, Zucker said, and the use of rubber bullets and tear gas on a small crowd was “pretty unusual.”

“I don’t think there’s any credible case that they were under threat,” he said, describing the scene as “a small crowd of community members … in pretty remote agricultural areas.”

He added that Glass House had been targeted by immigration authorities in the past couple of months, including when federal agents began conducting workplace raids in the region in June. Numerous videos on social media showed agents chasing after farmworkers and making mass arrests at farms.

Glass House Farms said in a post on X that the company was “visited today by ICE officials” and “fully complied with agent search warrants.” The statement said nothing else, except to add that the company would “provide further updates if necessary.”

Zucker said Ventura County saw a drop in worksite raids after an intense week in June, when community members mobilized to the fields and began patrolling farmlands. For the last few weeks, he said, they’ve received reports of raids in more suburban areas, including Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks. This raid represented the first major workplace raid in the region since then.

In a social media post, Oxnard Mayor Luis McArthur said he was “in communication with emergency services to ensure that safety personnel are on standby and ready to provide immediate assistance if necessary.”

“While this matter is taking place outside the jurisdiction of Oxnard, I am increasingly mindful that many of the facility’s employees are likely from Oxnard and are seeking refuge in their vehicles amid the high temperatures, raising concerns about the safety and well-being of those individuals,” he said.

He then commented on the broader strategy apparent from the raids across the Southland.

“It is becoming increasingly apparent that the actions taken by ICE are bold and aggressive, demonstrating insensitivity toward the direct impact on our community. These actions are causing unnecessary distress and harm. I remain committed to working alongside our Attorney General and the Governor’s office to explore potential legal avenues to address these activities.”

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, criticized the protests.

“What happened in California is just another example of protesters becoming criminals, and they’ve been emboldened by even members of Congress who compare ICE to Nazis and racists and terrorists,” Homan told Fox News.

Freelance photographer Julie Leopo and staff writer Grace Toohey contributed to this report.





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Wimbledon men’s semifinals: Live updates, highlights as Carlos Alcaraz beats Taylor Fritz, Jannik Sinner, Novak Djokovic look to advance

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World No. 1 Jannik Sinner and No. 2 Carlos Alcaraz are each one win away from meeting in the Wimbledon final, just over a month after their legendary duel at Roland-Garros crown in June. However, they have No. 6 Novak Djokovic and No. 5 Taylor Fritz, respectively, standing in their way in the semifinals on Friday.

While Fritz provided a strong threat, Alcaraz was able to knock him off 6-4, 5-7, 6-3, 7-6 on Friday. The win pushed Alcaraz into the Wimbledon final for the third-straight year. Alcaraz has won the event the last two years, and will be looking for a third-consecutive Wimbledon title Sunday, where he’ll face the winner of Sinner and Djokovic.

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Sinner and Djokovic will face each other in the semifinals again after the top-seeded Italian eliminated the 24-time Grand Slam winner in three sets at the French Open. Sinner has yet to drop a set at Wimbledon as he looks to avenge his championship loss to Alcaraz last month. Djokovic, 38, continues to age like fine wine as he scraped his way to the semifinal over the last week and a half.

Djokovic has won six of the last 10 Wimbledon men’s singles titles, while Alcaraz emerged victorious each of the past two years, beating the Serbian veteran both times.

How to watch the Wimbledon men’s singles semifinals

Date: Friday, July 11

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Carlos Alcaraz-Taylor Fritz start time: 8:30 a.m. ET

Jannik Sinner-Novak Djokovic start time: 10:10 a.m. ET

Location: Center Court | All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Wimbledon, London

TV channel: ESPN | ESPN+ | Disney+

Follow along with Yahoo Sports for live updates, highlights and more from the Wimbledon men’s singles semifinals:



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