Cindy Collier and her daughter hadn’t talked in a year, but as the water came up to her chest, she knew she had to make the call.
She left a message that said even though they hadn’t talked, she had loved her that whole year.
Moments before, the Colliers had felt a sinking certainty set in that they were about to die, and they decided it was time to call and say goodbye to their kids.
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It was the early hours of July 4, and they had been woken a few seconds before by their cat making noise outside. When Cindy opened the door to let her in, water from the Guadalupe River came rushing in instead.
The couple scrambled to figure out what to do, dodging floating furniture as the flood quickly rose.
Not willing to give up
“We went in the bathroom and shut the door and held hands and prayed to God,” Cindy said.
They called their son, and then their daughter. And when Cindy hung up the phone, she and Ken decided they were going to live.
“He got the curtain rod, we climbed up on the sink and started trying to break through the ceiling,” Cindy said. “And we broke and we broke, and I was choking — we had insulation all in our eyes.”
Ken said he wasn’t willing to give up, though.
“We had very limited options at that point,” he said. “I’ve been through several life-threatening situations in my life, but I never thought I was going to die. This time, I thought that was it.”
But then the water started receding, and they started flashing their flashlight in the tiny bathroom window. Rescuers nearby yelled from four wheelers that they saw them.
The Colliers had survived a devastating flood that had been deadly for many that day. Later when everything settled down, they would find out that 119 people lost their life in Kerr County, Texas, including 27 campers and counselors from Camp Mystic.
Even not knowing that, it was a surprise to the Colliers that they made it.
And they had another surprise too.
‘That was my whole life’
“We looked out across this field and our first reaction was all of our neighbors have been washed away,” Ken said. “And so in our mind we’re thinking all our neighbors are dead.”
What had happened instead was that their house had floated down the river while they prayed and made phone calls from the bathroom.
“All of our house got washed away … literally everything,” he said.
They had lived next to the river in a house with gardens and a dock, and all of it was destroyed.
Cindy said they had paid off everything and planned to retire in a couple of years, but now all that was gone.
“That was my whole life that got taken away,” she said. “All my girl friends lived there together right in a row. It’s hard to move forward because my friends are all displaced.”
But she’s grateful — they’re alive. And in addition to that, she and her daughter have a renewed relationship, and their church — Trinity Baptist in Kerrville, Texas — and others have helped them start to get back on their feet.
‘Little miracles’
And they’ve seen other “little miracles” along the way.
For one, Ken lost a pocketknife in the flood that his dad had made for him when he was 7 years old.
“I’d had that all my life,” he said. “When I realized that I had lost that knife, it made me sick.”
So for seven weeks he looked for that knife in the place where his house used to be and the place it had moved to.
“I would stop there every day. This went on for seven weeks, looking for that knife,” Ken said. “It was getting down to one of the last days we could go there, and I walked in there and that knife was sitting there.”
It was sitting on a shelf, and not a shelf that had come from their home. Ken said it was like God placed it there for him.
“I cried like a baby,” Ken said. “That was just a ‘wow’ moment in my life.”
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written from a video interview done by Marc Ira Hooks as part of Ground Level — Real People, Real Places, No Studio Required. To hear the Colliers tell their story of surviving the flood, click here. To hear Ken tell the story about his knife, click here.
