DON GONYEA, HOST:
Just over a year ago, 911 operators in Central Texas started answering calls like these.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: The flood is up to our house right now. We're OK, but we live about a mile down the road from Camp Mystic. And we've already got two little girls who have come down the river.
GONYEA: Within hours, it would become one of the deadliest flash floods in modern American history. More than 130 people died. Many of them were children at Camp Mystic, a summer camp for girls. A new podcast from The Texas Newsroom and PBS FRONTLINE tells the story of Matthew and Wendie Childress. Their 18-year-old daughter, Chloe, was working as a counselor at Camp Mystic. When they heard there had been flooding, the Childresses raced across Texas believing they could still find her.
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MATTHEW CHILDRESS: I was definitely driving faster than I probably should have been driving on the freeway. All I could do was get there as quickly as I could to try to contribute something to help and find the girls.
GONYEA: After the Flood follows the Childress family after they lost Chloe and through the year they spent looking for answers. And it asked what went wrong and whether Texas is any better prepared today. Dominic Anthony Walsh is the lead reporter and host of After the Flood. He's based at Houston Public Media, one of the NPR stations in The Texas Newsroom. Dominic, thanks for joining me.
DOMINIC ANTHONY WALSH, BYLINE: Thanks for having me.
GONYEA: Your podcast opens with those 911 calls from Central Texas. But then, almost immediately, we're with Matthew and Wendie Childress in Houston. Their daughter, Chloe, is away, working as a counselor at Camp Mystic. It's about four hours away from their home. Before we talk about the flood, introduce us to this family and take us back to that morning through their eyes.
WALSH: Yeah. So Chloe was 18 years old and just weeks away from starting her freshman year at the University of Texas. She wanted to become a doctor. But before she left for college, she wanted to revisit one of the most important places of her childhood, Camp Mystic. Camp Mystic was a big part of her family's story. Matthew's mother went there, so did his sister, Chloe's aunt. So there's this immense contrast between those happy memories in this special, beautiful part of the Hill Country and the incredible anxiety her parents felt when they got the call that their daughter was unaccounted for as they drove as fast as they could towards Camp Mystic.
GONYEA: So as Matthew and Wendie Childress are racing toward Camp Mystic in Hill Country, what was unfolding there?
WALSH: They had no idea how bad it already was. Up to 11" of water fell in just a few hours over the Texas Hill Country in Central Texas. The Guadalupe River rose as much as 38 feet above its banks in some areas. That was a record high. The floodwaters came at night between 3 and 5 o'clock in the morning while it was still dark out and people were asleep. The worst devastation was in Kerr County where at least 119 people died.
GONYEA: Podcast follows a lot of people - survivors, emergency responders, local officials. But at the center of it all is Matthew Childress. Why did his story become the thread that ties the whole series together?
WALSH: Matthew's story gave us a way to tell the much bigger story of the grief families across Texas were grappling with last year. You know, I'm so grateful to Matthew for how open he was about his experience, which I'll warn listeners is tough to hear at times. One moment that stayed with me was when Matthew told me about the last time he saw Chloe alive in Houston just before she left for Camp Mystic.
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CHILDRESS: She gave me a big hug and kiss. I told her 17 kisses, which is our way of saying goodbye and good night to one another for her entire life. And then she said, don't worry about, Dad. I'll see you soon.
WALSH: And then he tells us about identifying her body in a Kerr County funeral home about a week later.
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CHILDRESS: It was absolutely terrible. I wish that upon no man or woman. But the same time, as I had said goodbye to her a week earlier and gave her 17 kisses, I went back in and gave her 17 kisses before we said goodbye 'cause that's how we said goodbye, good night every night.
WALSH: The series doesn't stop with his grief. It follows what he and other camp mystic families did with their grief. Together, they pressed for court hearings and an investigation that uncovered a lot of details about issues on the ground at the camp on the morning of July Fourth, and they successfully advocated for new camp safety laws, like requiring camps to evacuate when there's a flash flood warning. And those policies are starting to spread beyond Texas.
GONYEA: People in Central Texas know that floods happen. In fact, that part of the state is known as Flash Flood Alley. So the question that hangs over this entire series is - how were so many people still caught by surprise?
WALSH: Floods aren't unusual here, but major flooding like what we saw last year is. The Hill Country is what it sounds like - rolling hills that stretch for hundreds of miles. And these hills are not grassy or marshy. They're limestone. So the rainwater doesn't soak into the ground. It rushes downhill into rivers and creeks, and it can be incredibly destructive if you have too much rainfall all at once, like it did in July of last year. The area has seen deadly floods before. In the podcast, we look back at big floods in 1978 and 1987. Now, after the 1987 disaster, local leaders decided to install a flood alert system. But over time, it fell into disrepair. And without a working local warning system, many people just did not realize how catastrophic the flooding had become until it was already underway.
GONYEA: So a year has passed now. There are new laws. There are some new warning systems being built. What is still unfinished as it relates to all this?
WALSH: Across much of the state, people are still allowed to camp, park RVs or build in floodplains and even floodways. We spent time in one tiny town called Ingram, where local leaders tried to change those rules and ban RVs from the floodway. But the blowback was immediate. Many people in the area saw it as an issue of personal freedom and the government telling them what they could do with their own property. So one year later, the debate isn't just about warning systems anymore. It's about how much risk we're willing to accept and who gets to decide.
GONYEA: You spent a year with Matthew and Wendie Childress and other families who lost everything. I'm wondering what has stayed with you.
WALSH: What stayed with me is how these families have turned their grief into action. Matthew, Wendie and other families who lost their children at Camp Mystic helped pass new camp safety laws in Texas. They also pushed for a new law in Alabama, where one of the campers who died was from, and they're pursuing wrongful death lawsuits against Camp Mystic, which filed for bankruptcy in June. So they're still dealing with this immense loss and turning it into action.
GONYEA: That's Houston Public Media's Dominic Anthony Walsh, host of the new podcast After the Flood, from The Texas Newsroom and PBS FRONTLINE. Dominic, thank you for talking to me.
WALSH: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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