After historic floods ravaged their RV park a year ago, Lorena Guillén and her husband had a difficult choice to make. Should they reopen the camp site, which they had once thought would fund their retirement? But that was before a family from Houston with two young boys who had been camping at Blue Oak RV park were swept away and killed.
Rebuilding and Recovery
Twenty-eight of the dead were at Camp Mystic, a Christian girls camp on the Guadalupe River that would become almost synonymous with the disaster over the past year of state investigations, family lawsuits and national media attention. For many others scarred by the ordeal – who lost homes, loved ones and livelihoods – it has sometimes been a challenge to capture public attention for what they endured and their ongoing struggle to recover.
Mike Little, who lives down the Guadalupe River from Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas, said, "I got to make people consider that there’s more to the story than Mystic. I didn’t want to diminish what those families are going through, but what about the rest of us?" Little rescued seven people from trees surrounding his home, all shoeless, some naked, including an 8-year-old boy.
Concrete slabs still line the banks of the Guadalupe where family cabins once stood, passed down through generations. Groves of ancient bald cypress have vanished, a riverside canopy washed away forever. The Hunt Store, a local landmark gutted by floodwaters, has yet to reopen.
Statistical Picture of Recovery
Of Texas flood survivors, nearly half faced a prolonged loss of electricity and clean water, 60 percent experienced financial hardship, and 20 percent are still displaced a year later, according to a survey released this week by nonprofit Extreme Weather Survivors.
Summer used to be their busiest season, but with many local camps still closed, Guillén said business has been reduced by half: "It’s been tough to survive because we are losing money." On July 4, she plans to open the island on her stretch of river to the public for the first time since the flood.
Original reporting: Texarkana Gazette — read the source article.
