Articles by Ruth Graham

World

One fatal hour: Camp owners squandered chance to save girls, families say

Dallas: As torrential floodwaters roared through Camp Mystic in the first dark hours of July 4, top leaders at the all-girls retreat in central Texas spent more than an hour securing the camp’s equipment instead of evacuating or even checking on campers, according to a lawsuit filed on Monday by the families of five campers and two counsellors who died that night. The suit, filed in a state court in Austin, Texas, names Camp Mystic and individual members of the Eastland family, who have owned and operated the Hill Country camp for generations, among the defendants. It portrays the family as overconfident and woefully unprepared for serious flooding, despite decades of experience and ample warnings. The suit claims that Dick Eastland, the camp’s executive director, and his son Edward, a director, squandered a crucial window of time following the National Weather Service’s warning about “life-threatening flash flooding” at 1.14am. The leadership dismissed camp counsellors’ early pleas for help, and then “made a hopeless ‘rescue’ effort from its self-created disaster” only when it was too late, the lawsuit says. Two counsellors and 25 young campers died at Camp Mystic that night, most of them from two cabins that housed the youngest girls. Dick Eastland, 70, also died. Other camps along the Guadalupe River had to evacuate and rescue campers from the flooding, but Camp Mystic was the only sleepaway camp where campers died.