Deadly Texas Christian Children's Camp Mystic Sought Exemptions From Flood Regulations To Allow Building More Cabins In Hazardous Flood Zone
(Caption: AP Photo/Eli Hartman)
I thought I understood this story. Not even close.
As cynical and skeptical as my assumptions were, the reality now has outstripped them, as more and more facts emerge.
What began as a story about a tragedy at an historic mom and pop camp built before modern science of flood risk, and then devolved into a story about greed in flouting flood risks, has now become a story about knowing avoidance of flood risks to avoid regulation and allow more development in flood risk zones.
In an absolutely devastating story, the Associated Press reported:
FEMA exempted buildings at old and new sites
In response to an appeal, FEMA in 2013 amended the county’s flood map to remove 15 of the camp’s buildings from the hazard area. Records show that those buildings were part of the 99-year-old Camp Mystic Guadalupe, which was devastated by last week’s flood.
After further appeals, FEMA removed 15 more Camp Mystic structures in 2019 and 2020 from the designation. Those buildings were located on nearby Camp Mystic Cypress Lake, a sister site that opened to campers in 2020 as part of a major expansion and suffered less damage in the flood.
Campers have said the cabins at Cypress Lake withstood significant damage, but those nicknamed “the flats” at the Guadalupe River camp were inundated.
Experts say Camp Mystic’s requests to amend the FEMA map could have been an attempt to avoid the requirement to carry flood insurance, to lower the camp’s insurance premiums or to pave the way for renovating or adding new structures under less costly regulations.
Regardless of FEMA’s determinations, the risk was obvious.
Here's the money quote:
Syracuse University associate professor Sarah Pralle, who has extensively studied FEMA’s flood map determinations, said it was “particularly disturbing” that a camp in charge of the safety of so many young people would receive exemptions from basic flood regulation.
“It’s a mystery to me why they weren’t taking proactive steps to move structures away from the risk, let alone challenging what seems like a very reasonable map that shows these structures were in the 100-year flood zone,” she said.
And here is the corrupt game that FEMA is playing:
Pralle, who reviewed the amendments for AP ... said her research shows that FEMA approves about 90% of map amendment requests, and the process may favor the wealthy and well-connected.
A study she published in 2021 with researcher Devin Lea analyzed more than 20,000 buildings that had been removed from FEMA flood maps. It found that the amendments occurred more often in places where property values were higher, more white people lived and buildings were newer.
As corrupt as that is, never mind that FEMA granted the exemptions - why on God's green earth would Christian Camp Mystic seek regulatory exemptions in order to put even more children at deadly flood risks?
At $4,300 per month per camper, we're now in the territory of evil.
I really don't know how else to describe this moral outrage.
Ignorance of flood risk is one thing. Arrogant denial of flood risk is worse.
But knowing avoidance of flood risk to secure exemptions from flood regulations in order to build more cabins to make more money - while putting children at deadly risks - is an abomination. Evil.
And these people purport to be Christians that inculcate Christian values in their campers.
No words.
No matter how many words- they would altogether fail to express the lack of human decency. Yet that is the present day society in which we find ourselves. Evil is not just abetted; but in many cases invited.
I've been planning to write about it, but holding off to see what else is uncovered. What you found Bill is not surprising but still shocking over whom it left at greater risk.
Is it fair to say that Texas Capitalist culture, and perhaps LBJ as deeply part of that, has been the leader in the rise of the American Right since before Reagan? Ferocious in their opposition to the federal government, taxes, regulations, even as the state prospered with federal projects starting with those LBJ levered as a very junior Congressman in the New Deal: rural electrification for the HIll Country, water projects, dams, and military bases galore, later NASA.... Yet even the Baker Institute for Public Policy took a long look at "Houston Flooding 3.5 years after Harvey" - that's hurricane Harvey which landfalled on Aug. 8, 2017, dropped an incredible 48" of rain over four days, was a 1 in 50,000 storm, caused 103 deaths and flooded 160,000 homes in Houston and Harris Counties. The cost of the damage was estimated at $125 billion. And there were even closer calamitious rainfalls from storms in the mountains of NC and vicinity and back to back catastrophes in Vermont. Do Texas eyes take any of that in? How do you shove all of this out of your mind and the very practical considerations, implications, for the Hill Country, so painstakingly described in the very first volume of Robert Caro's majestic four volume biography of LBJ (four out, one being written - on the Vietnam era): "The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Means of Ascent" (1982)? One of the ironies now is how Caro says the poverty of the Hill Country and LBJ's family drove him relentlessly towards personal wealth and political ambition, the two much more closely aligned than most realized during his political glamour days.
Of course Texas political culture the dominant Republican brand, does not believe in global warming, but still, whatever the causal reasons for the intensity and frequency of "Biblical" rainfalls and floods, you would think they would see the writing on the ground in the Guadalupe watershed. The revisions to FEMA maps around the country were long hinted at...well, here's the documentation. Floodplains are special terrains, and habitats, but of course they are also buildable real estate. Which perspective wins? Sometimes only the repeated costs of rebuild do, as in the defeat of the structural proposal - the Passaic River Tunnel in NJ - in favor of the less expensive buyout of repeat flooded properties. Texas is a different universe of ideological intensity though. Religious level intensity.