Learning from Camp Mystic: Six Lessons for Outdoor Programs
Lessons from the official investigation and how programs should prepare differently in the 2020s.
I attended summer camp in East Texas growing up. I have fond memories of summer trips and programs backpacking and rock climbing around the state, canoeing in Minnesota and climbing mountains in Colorado. These summer experiences had a tremendous impact on my life and were integral to shaping my perspectives on myself and the world as a young adult. Today, I help outdoor programs assess and improve their risk management, so that many others can have similar, life-shaping experiences.
In 2024, I was part of a research team that published a study on climate change and its effects on outdoor programs and organizations, including the fears and questions of the practitioners who run them. A year later, a summer camp in central Texas lost twenty-seven young campers and counselors in a record-breaking flood. I've been following the case closely to find the relevant learnings that so many respondents to our survey were looking for, and that other camps and programs can use in their own planning.
This post draws from the official investigation into the Camp Mystic tragedy and distills takeaways for all outdoor program operators who recognize that climate hazards are changing and increasingly reshaping safety practices and programming. Note: I am not affiliated with Camp Mystic and was not involved in the events or the investigation. This analysis relies entirely on the published report and other public sources.
Camps and outdoor programs remain some of the most valuable experiences society can offer young people. In my experience, the people who run them are among the most careful and devoted anywhere. This analysis seeks to honor the care and diligence of the central Texas camp community and the global sector of outdoor and off-campus programs.
Overview of the Incident
The following is a brief overview of the incident, as described in the official investigation.
In the early hours of July 4, 2025, after a night of heavy rain, the Guadalupe River rose from about ten feet to a crest of more than 37 feet, breaking a record set in 1932. The water reached the cabins nearest the river while the camp slept. The National Weather Service had issued a flood watch the previous afternoon and upgraded to a flash flood warning at 1:14 that morning, but an evacuation of the camp didn’t begin until after 3:00 a.m., by which point little time remained.
The young girls and counselors lost that night are called Heaven’s 27 by their families.
The report also describes great courage. In the dark and amid rising waters, some counselors made their own decisions and moved their campers to higher ground, saving lives. Dick Eastland, the camp's longtime co-executive director, his son, a co-camp director, and the camp's night watchman went cabin to cabin to move campers to safety. Dick died while trying to evacuate a group of young campers and their counselors. Tragically, everyone in the group also perished. At a nearby cabin, the watchman kept a group of campers alive by floating them on mattresses up into the rafters. Simultaneously at another cabin, campers clung to the co-director, who braced himself in the cabin’s doorframe.
The report's official findings point to a phenomenon many risk managers call a systems-level event. Contributory factors spanned every level of the system, from decisions in the field, to the camp's planning and leadership, and to county and state oversight. In other words, no single actor caused the outcome alone. I've written about the leading framework adopted by scientists and professionals for accident causation, called the systems-thinking approach (Rasmussen, 1997; Salmon et al., 2010), in my two-part series, here (1) and here (2), and in other analyses such as the Mangatepopo tragedy in New Zealand.
A few weeks after the flood, the New York Times published an article asking whether summer camps are still safe. It’s a fair question, and one on many parents' minds. For those of us in the industry, however, a more useful question is what lessons Camp Mystic can offer as more severe storms and weather events become more frequent.
After reading the report, six lessons stand out.
Plan for the Unprecedented
In the days after the flood, officials called it unprecedented. The County Judge described the area as "the most dangerous river valley in the United States," and noted that it flooded regularly. "We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what's happened here," he told reporters, "none whatsoever."
The river had reached the camp before, three times in fact, over the past century. Yet no one had anticipated this particular storm would break the record. The camp's own emergency plan claimed the riverside cabins were in "high, safe locations," and thus campers were sleeping in them when the water arrived (report p. 69).
In the 2020s, there is a new reality and a new normal the sector must contend with. While we’ve always planned for adverse weather, the scale of these events is moving beyond what local programs typically believe are possible and plan for; see my post about Hurricane Helene and wildfires in Canada and Australia, for example. In our 2024 survey, more than nine in ten outdoor organizations had to revise their plans for extreme weather in a single year. A risk assessment conducted once, at the start of a season and based on hazards the program already knows, is no longer enough. Moving forward, the task is to identify which hazards are intensifying and which hazards are new.
Not only should we be planning for the improbable; we should also be planning for the impossible.
Pre-determine Triggers to Act
Deciding to evacuate in the middle of a storm is one of the hardest calls a program can face. It comes in the dark, with incomplete information, and under time, business, and operational pressures. Real danger is easy to misjudge. At Camp Mystic, the decision came down to making sense of rising water as it happened. At first, it seemed to be runoff from the hillside rather than the rising river, and campers were sent back to their cabins (report p. 72-79; 81).
Trigger policies remove the reliance on individual sensemaking and judgment in the moment. Written before the season, triggers serve as pre-made decisions based on pre-determined criteria. For example, if the temperature reaches 100°F, students will not hike or do strenuous activity. If the Air Quality Index reads 150 PM or higher, outdoor activities will not occur.
The Central Texas region already had such guidance. Local flood-awareness materials warned that three inches of rain in a short time could bring serious flooding. Codifying public safety guidance into operational policy ensures that hard or uncomfortable decisions are made objectively, and as markers to enact contingency or emergency plans.
In the 2020s, more and more programs are relying on trigger-based decisions to manage new and intensifying environmental hazards.
Reduce Single-Person Dependencies
A single-person dependency exists when only one person can perform a critical task. At Camp Mystic, the dependencies were written into the crisis management plan. The plan named Dick Eastland the camp's sole spokesperson and placed the crisis headquarters in his office, and most of its remaining duties belonged to him or his wife (report pp. 97-98). Investigators noted that the plan presumed the couple's active involvement and lacked any provision for their absence (report p. 99). The camp operated the same way on the night of the flood. As the storm approached, Dick and the night watchman were the only people at the camp awake and monitoring the weather (report pp. 36-37), and the decision to initiate the emergency response plan was Dick’s alone.
Emergency information was dependent on a singular person and was restricted to a single communication channel. Counselors were not allowed to have their phones while on duty, and only senior staff carried radios (report p. 67, 76). This meant that on the night of the flood, counselors were solely dependent on the main office to relay vital weather warnings. In the report’s words, one cabin counselor was effectively cut off from the rest of the camp.
Redundancy is one of the oldest controls in risk management. Yet the outdoor programming sector comprises many small, resource-constrained organizations that depend on capable individuals. It’s a people-centered field, and the people who work in it often make the difference between a meaningful, impactful summer program experience and an average class field trip. Seasonal programs are especially susceptible to person dependencies because they have high annual turnover and are led by a few, senior and dedicated leaders. Each year institutional knowledge leaves, and each new cohort of counselors and staff need foundational onboarding and training.
A program reduces dependencies by confirming before the season that a second person is named and trained for every safety-critical duty in its operational, emergency, and crisis management plans. Staff should also have multiple ways to directly receive emergency communications. The adults nearest the hazard need a communications device of their own, so a warning can arrive without passing through the office or headquarters.
Give Everyone a Role
Other than the teenage counselors living with the campers, at least 39 adults were on the grounds that night. The investigation found that each of them could have been tasked with assisting in an orderly evacuation (report pp. 37, 64). Few had been given any role in the emergency response plan. Camp culture also kept many of the adults apart from the girls. During normal operations, the kitchen staff was instructed to keep a detached relationship with campers, and the grounds crew was told to remain "invisible" (report p. 62). The report finds that the adults' resulting detachment left them unaware of the crisis the campers were experiencing, and without direction on how to help (report p. 64).
An emergency response plan should assign a role to every capable adult on the property, in writing, before the season begins. An org chart is not an emergency plan; for instance, a chart tells everyone their job on an ordinary day, whereas a role in an emergency is a specific task a person performs when a state of emergency is declared. It can be as simple as waking a set of cabins or counting heads at a rally point. Participants can have roles, too. Even students and young campers can learn where the rally point is and who leads them there. Without a specific directive and task to perform in an emergency, otherwise capable adults will either wait for individual direction, or otherwise improvise based on what they can see directly in front of them.
Permission to Act
Camp Mystic's written emergency plan directed campers and counselors to remain in their cabins during a flood "unless told otherwise by the office" (report p. 69). On the night of the flood, counselors and campers in four riverside cabins waited for instructions, as the plan required (report p. 38). By the time the three-person evacuation effort reached those cabins, the water was too high to move the campers on foot. The counselors who broke protocol and acted on their own earlier in the night saved their campers and themselves.
A crisis team needs minutes to assemble, gather information, make sense of it, and initiate an action plan. Until the team forms, the only viable responders are the staff already with the participants. Emergency plans should give those frontline staff explicit permission, in writing and in training, to move themselves and the people in their care to safety without waiting for external guidance.
In other words, every adult should be able to pull a fire alarm, start first aid, or call 911.
Practice the Plan
Camp Mystic had a written emergency plan and passed a state inspection two days before the flood (report pp. 70-71). The inspection noted that an emergency plan existed, was posted in every building, and that staff had been trained on it. However, investigators found those conclusions inaccurate, and the state had never evaluated whether the plan itself would work (report p. 71). The camp had never rehearsed an evacuation, and when counselors moved their groups that night, some became separated from their girls in the dark (report p. 64).
Reunification and recovery are important, late-stage phases of any crisis management plan. These plans were also untested, which is all too common among many schools and programs. The camp didn’t have an assigned spokesperson (its primary spokesperson was unavailable) or a protocol for communicating with parents. Local officials added to the confusion and chaos of the moment, and to families’ trauma. For instance, arriving families were directed to several locations before officials settled on a reunification center, and there wasn’t any single person or agency in charge there (report p. 101).
An emergency plan is only as good as it is practiced. A program should build the plan around its own site, hazards, and people, and rehearse it at least once a year with everyone who has a role. Reunification should be practiced, too, and rehearsals can include the local officials who will respond alongside the program. In a tabletop exercise, staff and any other relevant party walk through a scenario together in a meeting or virtual room, and everyone learns before the season who makes which decisions, how those decisions are communicated, who speaks for the program, and how each party will interface with families. In the 2020s, scenario planning and practice with local authorities and community partners are becoming more necessary as a baseline practice, as more disasters are overwhelming local response capacity and programs are having to fill the void and plan to be more sustainable on their own. The chance to improve plans comes as each plan is rehearsed and tested. All plans should be revised after every exercise and after every real incident.
What We Can Learn
A year after the flood, parents are still asking whether summer programs and camps are safe. The answer depends on the individual camp, and the questions in the FAQ below can help a family evaluate one.
For those of us who run and advise programs, the better question remains what we can learn. The six lessons in this post are all about the necessary preparations that can take place upstream, ahead of any storm or before a child steps foot into a cabin or in the field. A camp or program can complete all of these before a season begins.
Heaven’s twenty-seven were young girls and the young women responsible for them. Our field can honor them by reading the report and by preparing for the next storm.
FAQ
What happened at Camp Mystic?
In the early morning of July 4, 2025, the Guadalupe River in central Texas rose rapidly after extreme rainfall and flooded a girls' summer camp while campers slept. Twenty-seven campers and counselors died, along with the camp’s co-executive director. Texas legislative committees investigated and published their report in June 2026.
What can camps and outdoor programs learn from it?
The investigation points to preparation a program can complete in advance. Programs can plan for events beyond local experience, write trigger policies that make evacuation decisions ahead of time, train a second person for every critical duty, give every adult and participant an emergency role, tell staff plainly they must act to protect children and themselves, and rehearse the full plan every year, including later phases such as reunification and recovery.
What should parents ask a camp about emergencies and staying in touch?
Parents can ask how and when they should expect updates and communications from camp and organizational leaders before and after a serious storm, wildfire, or other emergency. Useful details include how updates will be sent, how often, by whom, and how soon to expect the first contact after the emergency. Parents can ask follow-up questions too, such as who to contact and how, if an update does not arrive when expected.
Did climate change cause the flood?
The official investigation did not investigate any links between the flood and climate change. Separately, in our 2024 survey, 79% of outdoor programming organizations reported new impacts from storm flooding, indicating camps are increasingly concerned and preparing for impacts from heavy rain events, whatever their cause.
Is it safe to send a child to summer camp?
Yes. Serious incidents at camps are rare, and camps across the country reviewed their procedures after the Texas flood. Families deciding on camps or other summer and youth service programs should be thoughtful about choosing the program, which includes asking what a particular organization does about its own risks, and what the family’s role is to help the child prepare for the program experience. The questions above are a place to start.
References
Bosman, J. (2025, July 12). "Is It Safe?" As Parents Weigh Risks of Summer Camps, Owners Review Safety Measures. The New York Times.
Jackson, J. S., Slay, S. L., & Tarter, S. L. (2024). Climate Change Impact on Outdoor Organizations Today. Wilderness & Environmental Medicine.https://doi.org/10.1177/10806032241296526
Kelly, R. (2025, July 4). Remarks at a Kerr County press conference, Kerrville, Texas, as reported by ABC News.
Rasmussen, J. (1997). Risk management in a dynamic society: A modelling problem. Safety Science, 27(2–3), 183–213.
Salmon, P. M., Williamson, A., Lenné, M., Mitsopoulos-Rubens, E., & Rudin-Brown, C. M. (2010). Systems-based accident analysis methods: A comparison of AcciMap, HFACS, and STAMP. Safety Science, 48(10), 1298–1306.
Senate and House General Investigating Committees on the July 2025 Flooding Events. (2026). Report on the Camp Mystic Flood Disaster. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28277527/20260618-final-report-camp-mystic-flood-disaster-of-july-4-2025.pdf
