Recover dead in flash lanes in Texas

On July 3, Hunter Volunteer Fire Chief Lee Pool returned to Texas on a vacation in Colorado with his family when his wife Stephanie showed him the weather forecast. It is expected that the storm on the mountain would happen that night. Pool warns members of the department to remain alert. Like many people in the area, the pool wore many hats. In addition to serving as the head of the fire department (unpaid position), he is also the vice principal of the high school, and in the summer he did night safety at Mystic Camp Mystic, a summer camp for girls. When his flight home was delayed, Poole asked a colleague to cover up his flight at the camp.

That night, Chi and his family returned to the hunting after the rain was unremitting. About 3 yesPool’s fire department radio went off. The river is rising and the situation is rapidly developing into an emergency. Hunt is a small town of about one million people along the Guadalupe River, nestled in the glitter alleys of Texas. The pool was shocked, but he didn’t panic when he threw his clothes and headed to the station. The drive should be less than ten minutes, but the water has arrived. When he reached Schumacher’s transit, just before the street leading to the fire department, a low bridge on the river was underwater. At this point, the road behind him was also unpassable. He leaned his pickup truck in the sloping driveway, seeking higher ground, and texted Stephanie: “I’m stuck on Highway 39. I can’t go anywhere.”

In front of him, the highway is now a rapidly moving river. When the flood reached the front of the truck, he came out, worried that he was about to be washed away. His radio is still alive with more pain than he hears – the person who reports is trapped in a tree and hung on the roof. “I mean, it’s just constant,” he said. “Just, help, help, help, help.” He thought of the kids at the bank summer camp in the River Bank, and his colleagues filling it for a safe transfer. It’s the worst time for disaster strikes: a summer weekend, summer, between campsites and July 4 holidaymakers, the town may see about three times its usual population. On the broadcast, he advises his fighters, many of whom are similarly stuck, reminding them that if you can’t save yourself, you can’t save others.

Then a pair of headlights are cut all night. This is a car with people drifting in the flood. They saw his flashlight and called him. This is the most helpless he has ever been. “I think I just saw some people dying,” he texted. “It’s so scary. They’re floating on the river and there’s nothing I can do.” He told me, “Having your hands can’t help people, especially when all you have to do is serve, it kills you.” A few hours later, when the water finally started to rise, it quickly retreated to the point where the fish emanated on the highway. The pool kicked them back into the water with his boots. He said, “I, if I can’t save someone now, I will save the fish.”

When he was able to reach the station, it was approaching. Sunlight reveals a world of change – the messy mattresses hanging from the top of trees, canoes crumpled like beer cans, and the house cuts the foundation. Half the town of Hunter’s store drank morning coffee and gossip and was destroyed. Eventually, Pool will learn that his colleagues at Mystic camp led dozens of girls to safety, but many other girls are still missing. He learned that Dick Eastland, the camp director, tried to rescue the girl and that the head of a nearby volunteer fire department was swept away at Marble Falls while responding to the flood.

But all this will come later. That morning, the pool formed a team to inspect people from door to door. They soon discovered their first death yes The water threatened to rise again, so they wrapped their bodies and moved them to higher ground. Then it’s time to figure out what to do next.

Hunt is an unincorporated community twelve miles west of Kerrville, located at the junction of the North and South Forks of the Guadalupe River. The fire department covers an area of ​​160 miles, usually responding to about sixty calls a year, handling everything from brush fires to welfare checks and car accidents. “A lot of motorcycle riders are here,” Poole told me when he met Tuesday a few days after the flood. “It’s a beautiful drive. Or, it used to be.”

The pool is a tall, kind man who leads a team of thirty volunteers, including a beauty coach, a retired policeman, and a man selling water tanks. Chi smiled when I asked his average age of firefighters. “I don’t do this out of respect for our members,” he said. “I am fifty-three, I am one of the young people.”

That morning, Hunt’s Central Fire Station, a stone building perched on the hill, was filled with activities: tap water was finally restored, and a group of people were busy in the kitchen scooping the barbecue into a foam container for the search team to feed the search team. The high ceiling bay where fire trucks are usually parked is filled with water bottles and pallets with donated cleaning supplies on it. Two fire trucks were destroyed in the flood. Others are muddy, but may be actionable.

The pool and I sat in the dispatch room where the air conditioner worked hard to keep up with the heat. On the wall is a hunting map, and a blue line of the Guadalupe River winds through it. The pool has been working continuously since the flood, and seems to be provided by a mix of necessary and purpose. “It’s a small town,” he said. “We don’t have a mayor, no city or something like that. So the people who are currently making this town are me, the head of the school district, two pastors, Baptist and Methodist.” Someone interrupted to ask if it’s possible to get a forklift to help unload, and then others disturbed to ask how to handle the cash donation. “After public education, they say you answer five thousand questions a day, so this is my environment,” Poole said. “But a lot.”

A firefighter poked his head into the office. “Chief, someone is calling you, priority.” On the radio, a man’s garbled voice announced that he had found a body part. Everyone in the room shrank for a moment. The dispatcher warned: “Watch your language via the radio.” The pool walked outside. “They were looking for things,” he said. “They just found other people.” Pool explained that throughout the county, human remains found by searchers were stored in fire station refrigerated trucks until funeral homes could be processed. Then the radio cracked and he forgives himself again.

The July 4 flood was the deadliest and devastating U.S. of the last century, with at least one hundred and twenty people dead as of Thursday, and about a quarter of them came from Mystic Camp. The state has deployed search and rescue teams to find those who are ongoing dissatisfaction, with the ending number exceeding one hundred and sixty. Although it is understandable that while most of the focus is focused on mysterious camps, the affected areas are much wider, and some peripheral communities, including Hunter, have had to do it with less official resources. In a disaster of this scale, the Federal Emergency Administration typically deploys hundreds of people, including professional search teams; by Monday night, the embattled agencies had reportedly sent Only eighty-sixpartly due to cost cuts by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. (Until Tuesday night, FEMA When the searchers summoned the discovery of human remains, they sent 311 people to the area. The Salvation Army has opened stores in the county town of Kerrville, but one local speculated to me that people in Hunt might be proud of calling for external resources. Instead, they reached out and kept reaching out: the fire department. “We’re kind of alone, actually,” Poole told me.

The gatherings in the community are inspiring to some extent, if sometimes overwhelming: first of all, now donated floods. I heard a passionate volunteer with a phone ringing constantly by Bobby Manning, from a distance to New Hampshire and North Dakota. Callers provide energy drinks, grief counseling, heavy equipment, intravenous therapy, dry socks. It’s hard to find space to store everything, and people have been wanting to bring more. “Diapers, dog food – your name, we already know it,” Bobby told the caller, who asked the community what it needed. “Like Walmart is here.”