Rick Sralla, the principal of Tivy High School in Kerrville, Texas, woke up at the crack of dawn on July 4, intending to cook for his family on the holiday. “We knew that it had rained really hard,” he said. “We knew it was going to [continue to] rain.”
Undeterred, Sralla was heading to the store to pick up food at 5 a.m., when his wife stopped him. Reports of flash floods had started to come in. Sralla instead drove to the nearby Guadalupe River to see the rapidly rising water himself. It was a sight he had never seen before.
By the time Sralla got back to his house, more reports of the widespread destruction caused by the rain and flooding had started to roll in. The Guadalupe River, by some accounts, rose from 3 to 34 feet in a matter of hours.
The death toll from the floods has reached at least 136, including 37 children, and some people remain missing. Tivy’s soccer coach, Reece Zunker, and his wife, Paula, a former teacher at the school, are among the victims, along with their two children, ages 3 and 7.
Sralla said the Kerrville Independent school district swung into action quickly. Almost all the schools turned into staging areas for search and rescue teams or sites for donations for people who had lost their homes and belongings in the flood. Sralla was soon at his school, fixing showers and setting up Wi-Fi for the rescue teams that had made Tivy their base.
That wasn’t all he did on July 4, though. At 4:30 p.m., Sralla led a group of 10 school buses, with a crew of 12 volunteers, toward the site of two summer camps—Mystic and La Junta—to rescue the campers and counselors who were trapped by the rising water.
This is an account of what Sralla saw when he drove bus No. 8 toward the camps and how his community is dealing in the aftermath of the floods, in his own words. His account has been edited for length and clarity.
Getting the call
On July 4, around 4:35 in the afternoon, I got a call that I was needed to drive a school bus into the camps to get the kids. We were trying to get them out before the sun went down. I’m a principal now, but I used to be a coach and a teacher. I’ve kept up with my bus driving credentials. We assembled a crew of about a dozen people and set off in our buses to go grab these kids.
We live in a very beautiful part of the state. We were very fortunate to live next to a beautiful river like Guadalupe. And that day, it was just torn to shreds. I’ve lived here for 25 years, and I’ve never seen that river do that before in my life. The water rose so fast.
I drove to La Junta camp, which is a little bit in front of Camp Mystic on the Guadalupe. We took five buses and turned off to get to La Junta. The other buses went straight for another two or three miles toward Camp Mystic.
[Editor’s note: Camp Mystic’s cabins were devastated by the flood. At least 27 campers and counselors, including the camp’s director, died.]
It’s hard to put it into words what I saw that day. Along the river, we have these huge, 300-year-old cypress trees that are as big as a Volkswagen Bug. And they were sheared off, snapped and gone. The roots of these trees were exposed as they floated by. There were vehicles, pieces of houses, boats, everything just torn apart. Even the asphalt on the roads had all been removed by the river.
It was a sobering, very haunting drive.
I was driving the lead bus because I’ve been in this town for a long time. I decided to raise my family here. I’d been to La Junta many times over the years, so I knew how to get there. I wanted to be able to relay what the roads looked like to the drivers of the other buses.
When we arrived at the camp, they were in the process of driving the kids down to a main staging area, from where we loaded them up into our buses. They were all in their pajamas, holding their blankets above the water. The kids did not know the destruction that had happened. I don’t think they had really been able to see anything other than what was directly around them.
I warned the counselors. I told them, “Hey, you’re going to have to talk to these children, because what we’re about to drive through, it’s going to be an awesome sight.” The counselors did a great job. There were a few kids who were scared and crying, but for the most part, the kids were in good spirits. They did not know the magnitude of what had happened. I don’t think, honestly, any of us knew the magnitude of what had happened when we were there.
I warned them before we left: “Guys, you’re about to see something that you’ll never see probably in your life. You need to look at it. You need to remember this.”
The counselors, high school kids themselves, told me how the water came in, and how they had to find windows to get out of. They were telling me stories of what they had to do to get the camp kids to safety.
Turning the school into a flood-rescue site
I stayed at my school well past midnight that day, just helping people get settled. About 160 rescue operators were camping at our school. I had a wrench in my hand and I was fixing shower heads and making sure the gym floor didn’t get scratched. Showing people where the electrical breakers are, because these are little things that I know that other people don’t.
Our community is very tight-knit, and when these first responders got there, we wanted to do anything we could to get them out there and to find the people that we loved—make sure that they were getting the help that they needed to save the people that were missing. We spent three to four days nonstop doing this.
Whether it be federal agencies or state agencies, people were just pouring into our town. It was a very organized effort. The first people that came into help were the Texas A&M Task Force 1. They helped organize other first responders that were coming in from out of state. Responders from Arizona came in with a big group, as well as from Nebraska, Kansas, and California.
It was breathtaking to watch how many people showed up to help.
Every school in the district has some sort of donation site, and they’re just inundated with people wanting to serve food. Our 6th grade campus is doing nothing but counseling, trauma support, and providing social and emotional help that people need after such a traumatic experience.
Adjusting to a new normal
My staff here at the high school have experienced a tremendous loss of our dear colleague. We’ve huddled together. We’re very family-oriented, so we’re hurting.
Last week, we hosted a candlelight vigil for Coach Zunker and his wife, which was attended by all our staff. We created a little memorial. We went out to the soccer field and we just cried. We just held each other. We can’t put the Band-Aid on the wound yet. But I know whenever school starts, these teachers are not just teaching math and reading and science. They love and care for these kids, and I need to make sure that these teachers are ready.
They need to grieve; they need to mourn. They need to, as you say, put their oxygen mask on first before they can help anybody else.
All my teachers are now getting together and pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. I have assemblies planned for our students for the first week of school after the summer break.
I’m going to make sure that the students have what they need. We’ve got round-the-clock counseling available to all families, not just at our high school but all families in Kerr County. People are very aware of the mental aspect of this tragedy.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. This moment is hard to navigate as a principal. It’s a lot.
I’m a tough cookie, but I’m struggling with it, too. As any administrator knows, there’s a lot to starting the school year off: getting everybody motivated for a great year, making sure the curriculum is all there, etc. I also need to maintain the climate and culture on my campus and make sure we meet state criteria and accountability benchmarks. On top of that, I’m trying to make sure that people are OK. Are they mentally and physically able to come to work and care for the kids?
We operate on very little in public schools in Texas. We’re used to that. I have the counseling help I need. With this tragedy, we need to allot time to be with one another and make sure we’re building relationships with teachers. They’re not going to come to school after summer and feel like talking about tardy policies and dress code. They’re worried about caring for the kids first. It’s just a tough time and, sometimes, it’s hard to know what to ask for.
My focus is on trying to get these teachers to a point where they’re able to reach out and help the children that are coming back. Some of them were displaced because they lost their houses. Some of them lost loved ones like grandmothers and grandfathers.
Our counselors are amazing people, but it’s also the whole school community that’s helping. Everybody’s reaching out to me to ask how they can help. Even our custodians and food-service workers are donating their time. That’s what schools do. We’re very special organizations and we know that to make it work, we’ve got to do it together.
