A 20-foot-tall white cross still stands in front of the Center Point, Texas, fire station, the words “Letters to Heaven” written just above a mail slot at its base to accept notes addressed to campers and counselors killed in the flood at Camp Mystic last July.
A year ago, volunteer firefighter Razor Dobbs scoured the Texas Hill Country region for victims of a devastating early morning flood. Around 3 a.m. Thursday (July 16), he found himself in a similar situation: standing before an elderly couple reluctant to evacuate their Center Point-area home as rain pounded, thunder crashed and the Guadalupe River inched closer to their back door.
RELATED: Check out more stories on Texas flooding and Disaster Relief efforts.
Dobbs, familiar with the damage floodwater can inflict on the human body, refused to allow the couple to share the fate of the more than 130 people who were killed in deadly floods a year ago. He threw open their back door and pointed: “That’s the river.”
“The fear that came over me,” he recounted later, thinking of the couple who eventually heeded his advice to flee. “I know what y’all are going to look like if you don’t get out of here. I’ve seen what all of y’all are going to look like.”
Renewed trauma
Two destructive floods only 12 months apart inflicted renewed trauma on first responders, volunteers and residents in and around Kerr County as rivers and creeks quickly rose, in some places to all-time high levels. Even after the water subsided, what remained — strewn debris, damaged roads, destroyed buildings — took them back to 2025 and made clear that processing this year’s flood will be impossible without processing last year’s, too.
Some, like Dobbs, have relied on their faith to cope.
“If it’s a fire, I pray that the fire’s out, that nobody gets hurt,” Dobbs said. “It’s just automatic. I pray for strength.”
Two chaplains from Warriors Sworn to the Cross, a Christian nonprofit that specializes in first responder trauma, have been stationed at the Center Point fire station since Friday.
“I think for most of us, when we got up early Thursday morning, and we’re evacuating residents and clearing out our station, we were all thinking to ourselves this is déjà vu,” Tye Turman, chaplain and president of the Center Point Volunteer Fire Department, told RNS on Monday (July 20). “Is it really happening, and can I deal with it?”
Thankful for therapy
Turman said that each morning, he has made it a point to gather the firefighters to say a prayer before getting started for the day. He also pulls his people aside to ask how they’re doing and search their eyes for signs of pain and grief.
“It is traumatic,” Darcy Hasty, another Center Point volunteer firefighter, said from a displacement shelter emergency officials opened in the Center Point Middle School gym. “I mean, thank God for therapy, right?”
Hasty added, “We’re all able to lean on our faith, as well as on each other.”
“I gave myself 10 minutes to grieve”
Angie Walters, case manager for Southern Oaks Church, a nondenominational church in Kerrville, sees reliance on faith — and the organizing and emotional support that faith communities provide — as integral to moving through tragedies like this one.
“Every time a storm comes, I stop and pray now, and I find it very difficult to sleep,” she said.
When a 2025 flood survivor texted Walters at 2:30 a.m. Thursday that water was once again in her home, Walters could not help but cry.
“I gave myself 10 minutes to grieve in that moment,” Walters said, “and then I said, ‘OK, it’s time.’”
Southern Oaks has been helping survivors and local businesses “walk the process” of recovery for the past year, providing financial and emotional support for individuals and communities dealing with heartbreak and loss, Walters said.
“We’ve had our shepherds who have reached out to their people, prayed with them, loved on them, given resources when resources have been available,” she said. “We are God’s community. We are His hands and feet, and we will work towards making everybody whole again.”
First response, in a second year
The call for the Center Point Volunteer Fire Department to mobilize came around 2:40 a.m. Thursday, and Hasty was soon driving from her home in Bandera to the fire station in Center Point, about 20 miles away, and wondering: “Are people going to listen when we tell them to get out?”
Hasty recalled encountering a woman who had ignored barricades on the RM 480 bridge for a better view of the flowing Guadalupe River.
“I told her, ‘Ma’am, we really need to get off the bridge. There’s another wall of water coming.’ She looks at me and goes, ‘I will,’” Hasty said.
The lack of urgency was frustrating.
“I’m just … people died last year, what did she expect?” Hasty said. “Even if she didn’t die, you’re still going to become somebody else that we have to go save, and what if I lose one of my brothers or sisters trying to save her? Or does she not consider the fact that I may have to watch her get washed away?”
Last year, after the Guadalupe River rose a staggering 29 feet in three hours — killing 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic, a non-denominational girls’ Christian camp about 30 miles upstream — Center Point Fire Chief Charles Holt made therapy mandatory for first responders. Members of the department expect similar mental health check-ins to be made available in the coming weeks and months.
Hardest part
“People don’t consider the things that we see … what I see in my brothers’ and sisters’ faces when they get back from pulling bodies out of the river,” Hasty said.
That was the hardest part of last year’s floods for Hasty — watching the faces of fellow first responders when body bags ran out or having to sort the personal belongings of kids from Camp Mystic, knowing “the last kind thing I could do for the parents was to love those items.”
“And then for that lady not to care enough about our family, to just want pictures or a video of a disaster,” Hasty said, recalling the woman on the bridge.
“Just get off the bridge,” she said. “It’s a picture.”
“We are mourning with one another”
Dobbs, sitting on the back of a muddied work truck with the cross over his left shoulder, was asked what it had been like watching the river rise to the same height as a year earlier.
“I haven’t even dealt with the flood from last year,” he said.
After a month spent recovering bodies in summer 2025, Dobbs learned his wife was diagnosed with stage four cancer, and he focused on taking care of her until she died in December.
“I just went straight into her mode (as) caretaker,” Dobbs said. “And then we had a bunch of really bad car wrecks before the flood, too, with a lot of deaths. It was just a bad year for us. There was a lot of trauma, a lot of debriefing.”
Though there were significantly fewer casualties in the flood this year, property damage was widespread.
Focusing on the moment
Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday that 135 homes in Kerr County were destroyed or severely damaged by the floods, with almost 600 other homes and businesses sustaining damage. The Center Point fire station, which had recently finished repairs from last year’s flood, was hit with 6 to 7 feet of Guadalupe River water, undoing virtually all of the repairs and damaging much of the station’s new equipment.
Turman, the Center Point fire department chaplain and president, said when the floods came, “everyone fully dropped into their roles.”
“We have things to do,” Turman said. “We can’t worry about last year. We have to focus on the moment. And I think everyone did an extraordinary job.”
The vigilance of the first responders was one of many reasons this year’s storms brought fewer human casualties than last year. But the preparation and quick response was tinged with sadness — knowing what to do this time around was a stark reminder that last year caught so many by surprise.
“We know what to do, but it doesn’t make it any better — if anything, it almost makes it worse. I don’t want to know how to do this,” said Heather Joas, who lived in Bergheim during last year’s floods and applied her search-and-rescue experience in the aftermath alongside the Center Point fire department.
“This is devastating, and we’re mourning, but the subtle mercy we are receiving is that we are mourning with one another,” Joas added.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by By Ellie Ashby and originally published through a collaboration between Religion News Service and The Texas Tribune.
