Kylie Nidever was excited about the Fourth of July weekend last year. She and her mother added movies to their Netflix watchlist and picked up groceries for the three-day weekend. The forecast called for rain but that was typical in Nidever’s hometown of Hunt, Texas, where she’s lived all of her 36 years.
Around 3:30 a.m. on Friday, July 4, the power was out in the Bumble Bee Hills neighborhood where Nidever lives with her mom and sister. It was hot, and the white noise machine that she uses to sleep had switched off.
“My bedroom faces the street. By 4:30, I started hearing voices,” Nidever recalls. “There were headlights outside my window. A neighbor was idling his truck, pointing it into the neighborhood to give light to our neighbors. I saw water in the road and it was pouring and storming and there were no streetlights, so all I could see was this glassy surface of water.”
She woke up her mother and, guided by the flashlights on their iPhones, they went across the street to check on her grandparents. When the sun came up, Nidever surveyed the neighborhood and could see water lines on some of the homes up to 8 ½ feet.
Of the 33 homes in Bumble Bee Hills, 28 flooded.
“It was a miracle that we all survived,” Nidever says. “Walking the neighborhood after the storm, I was thinking that just a few hours earlier, I would have been drowning. There were dead fish everywhere.”
In the days after the flood, rescue crews recovered 138 bodies in Kerr County and the surrounding area, including 25 campers and two counselors at the Christian all-girls Camp Mystic along the Guadalupe River in Hunt. An 8-year-old child, Cile Steward, remains missing.
Reporters from across the country descended on Hunt, mostly covering the Camp Mystic tragedy and criticizing the lack of warning and delayed response efforts. The Texas Legislature was in session at the time and the story quickly became political. People wanted someone to blame and they wanted action taken to ensure that a plan is in place to prevent deaths when the next severe weather event occurs.
But Nidever says that some people forgot — or never cared in the first place — about the community of Hunt, an unincorporated town with a school and a general store but no city council to offer leadership during a tragedy. Kerr County’s population is about 53,000, and roughly half of those residents live in Kerrville.
Nidever acknowledges that Camp Mystic, Camp La Junta and more than a dozen other summer retreats are the fabric of the community, but she didn’t attend any as a child.
“My impression is that Camp Mystic is for rich people,” she says. “If you are living in Hunt, for the most part, we are working class. There are some wealthy people who live here, but a lot of them are here for their retirement.”
Amid struggles with her mental health, Nidever lost her job as a preschool teacher about a month after the flood. Heartbroken by the destruction of her hometown, Nidever put on her rain boots and set out on a course of action: mucking out homes, helping seniors apply for disaster assistance, speaking on severe weather survivors panels across the country and meeting with legislators.
“They forgot about us,” she says. “They forgot about Hunt. Nothing substantial has changed for our community — for the people who actually live here — over the past year. The camps have gotten so much deserved attention but it overshadows the other lives that were lost.”
From Heartbreak to Healing
Around midday on July 4, Nidever and her mom walked to Highway 39 near the river. No vehicles were on the flooded road but people were standing around “just trying to comprehend what was going on.”
Nidever says a DPS officer approached her while she was staring at the water and asked if she was OK. He then said, “Are you keeping an eye out for people?”
“It didn’t hit us until a while later — the gravity and the reality of what he was saying — the water was moving so fast that I don’t know what we would have done if we had seen someone in it,” she says.
Nidever’s neighbors got help during the aftermath of the flood, but it wasn’t from the state or federal government. RV parks and “glamping” sites that weren’t damaged opened up for guests, and churches and charities made sure people had food and clothing. Some survivors, however, are still waiting to hear back from FEMA, Nidever says.
“In the days after the flood, I think I saw one official from the Department of Agriculture who was walking around taking measurements of water lines,” Nidever says. “That was literally the only public official I ever saw in my neighborhood. If you live in the area that was impacted, you’re eligible for $700 from FEMA if you lost work or were impacted in any way. We lost power and couldn’t work for a couple of weeks. My mom applied for it and was denied. My neighborhood would not be where it is if it weren’t for all the volunteers.”
Nidever created a Facebook page for Bumble Bee Hills so the residents could connect with each other, and she got to work “mucking out,” or removing mud, water-damaged materials and contaminated debris from her neighbors’ homes. She and her mom and sister helped neighbors whose vehicles had been destroyed and couldn’t find their purses or cell phones. Among the debris, Nidever found a trunk lid that belonged to a Camp Mystic camper and was able to return it to the family.
A few weeks after the flood, Nidever was contacted by officials with the national advocacy group Extreme Weather Survivors, which offered therapy via Zoom, referrals to support services and connections to other people who have been through fires, floods and other deadly events. Nidever joined the group in testifying before the state legislature’s Select Committee on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding.
There she met and befriended Keli Rabon of Houston, whose children went to Camp La Junta in Hunt. “It was a moving experience and started my whole activism process,” Nidever says. “It’s the club nobody ever wanted to be a part of.”
“In the early days, I didn’t feel like a flood survivor because our house didn’t flood,” she says. “It took me months before I claimed that title. I’ve struggled with clinical depression since I was a teenager so I’m no stranger to therapy. Shortly after the flood, I resumed my therapy. I acknowledge that I am doing this for the people who don’t have the bandwidth or the desire to speak out.”
She served on a panel in Houston called the “People’s Hearing on Extreme Weather” in May and joined disaster survivors last week in Washington, D.C., to speak to lawmakers.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” she says of the July 4 floods. “It was the perfect storm. There’s no one person or entity that you can blame for the people who died. There were things that our county and our state could have done differently prior that would have made an impact. I think we need to make those changes. My goal is to get changes made so when it inevitably floods again, we don’t have the huge loss of life that we had.”
For example, she says, Kendall County no longer allows temporary camping on the banks of the Guadalupe but Kerr County doesn’t have any such regulations. Because Hunt is unincorporated, the residents don’t have a clear leader beyond the county judge and commissioners court, Nidever says. During the aftermath of the floods, Hunt residents relied heavily on Volunteer Fire Department Chief Lee Pool, who is also an assistant principal at Ingram High School, for information.
Through Extreme Weather Survivors, Nidever met Houston businessman Richard Zdunkewicz, whose wife’s family has spent summers on the South Fork of the Guadalupe River for more than 80 years. Their family cabin is downriver from Camp Mystic and they were there on July 4, 2025.
Zdunkewicz, who spoke at the people’s hearing in Houston last month, says that just before 3 a.m., he woke up to “raging floodwaters rising fast. The river was normally about 30 feet below the house, but that morning, as I looked toward the river, the water was only a few feet from us.”
“I woke my wife and daughter and told them to pack a bag, that we probably needed to leave immediately because the water was rising so quickly,” he says. “Between 3:30 and 5:15 a.m., everything changed. We climbed up trees to survive the floodwaters.”
Their cars were swept away as they held onto the trees for more than two hours. When the water receded and the street became walkable again, they climbed down and waited on the road until two women they’d never met before picked them up and drove them to a Methodist church.
“There was no other path to safety,” Zdunkewicz says. “Those trees were our only refuge.” One of their neighbors survived by swimming up to the rafters of his home.
“We also lost friends in the flooding just a couple of miles downriver from us,” Zdunkewicz says. “One of their guests survived but his wife did not. These floods changed lives and families forever. Rural communities need much better flood warning systems, better evacuation routes, better planning and obviously safer building practices, so people are not caught off guard trying to survive something like this with only minutes to react.”
Kerr County residents were told that sirens would be installed and got a notification that the system would be tested, but no one in Nidever’s neighborhood heard the sirens on testing day. “One of my neighbors sent me a map and said it looks like we’re in between the sound range of two of the sirens, partly because they focus the sirens at the camps. Right now, we don’t have a flood warning siren that we can hear,” she says.
A Ripple Effect for Texas Camps
Parents of the campers and counselors who died at Camp Mystic sued the camp’s owners, claiming that no evacuation plan was provided and that multiple flood warnings were ignored. The camp was not accredited by the American Camp Association, which recommends that campers and staff be trained to respond to natural disasters.
Camp Mystic withdrew its application for an operating license in April and announced it wouldn’t reopen this summer. Last week, the camp filed for bankruptcy in an effort, some say, to avoid litigation.
The “Heaven’s 27” parents had asked for a public trial, while camp administrators sought to handle the matter privately through arbitration. A district judge was expected to rule on the matter next month, but the lawsuits are now on hold because of the bankruptcy filing. The parents were, however, successful in getting a slate of camp safety measures passed through the Texas Legislature.
Following the tragedy at Camp Mystic and ensuing lawsuits, public hearings and investigations, about 66 of the 300-plus Texas summer camps closed their doors for good, unable to keep up with new safety requirements, weather warning systems and thousands of dollars in licensing fees. Some have changed their programming or reverted from a “sleepaway” venue to a day camp to avoid the fees.
Nineteen camps sued the state in April over a requirement to install fiber optic Internet, arguing that it doesn’t make their properties safer and threatens their ability to operate, and the state agreed to withdraw the requirement for now.
Nidever says she believes all the summer camps in Texas should have taken this summer off, whether they flooded or not.
Hunt’s Camp La Junta, where Nidever’s friend’s son had to climb into the rafters to avoid drowning, is up and running. “Honestly, Camp La Junta just got lucky,” Nidever says. “They would have had dead kids if their cabin that flooded didn’t have vaulted ceilings.”
It’s hard for Nidever to understand why anyone would send their children to a camp on the Guadalupe River after what happened last summer, but then again, Nidever doesn’t know what it’s like to grow up spending months away at camp. Raised by a single, working-class mom, her family could never afford it.
The closest she got to a camp experience was in fifth grade when one of the low-water crossings flooded and her mother wasn’t able to get to the school to pick her up. “I spent the night at the school,” she says. “Someone from one of the nearby camps brought pillows and blankets for those of us who were stuck there.”
“Flooding is not something we’re unfamiliar with, but in my lifetime, no homes in our neighborhood had ever flooded. The water had never even reached Highway 39 before,” she says.
Nidever is now a full-time caregiver for her grandmother and is thriving in her advocacy work. When asked if there’s a silver lining or a sense of community resiliency comparable to the “Houston Strong” effort after Hurricane Harvey, she says simply, “No.”
“The government response was nonexistent,” she says. “I think individuals like me are hoping to make changes. The Heaven’s 27 group getting the legislation passed for camp safety is so impressive, but part of the reason they were able to make the impact they have is that they have money and they’re lawyers. They have the connections.”
“Hopefully,” she says, “Kerr County will be used as an example of what not to do in the future.”
