Qualla: July 2025 Central Texas Floods

July 2025 Central Texas Floods: Introduction

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0. At 4:22 on the morning of July 4, 2025, an Ingram firefighter radioed a Kerr County dispatcher: "The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on State Highway 39. Is there any way we can send a CodeRED out to our Hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?" The dispatcher said they had to get supervisor approval. The first alert did not go out for another ninety minutes. By then the Guadalupe River had already risen over 26 feet in 45 minutes, shattering every recorded gauge at Hunt before the instruments themselves were swept away. In the span of a few pre-dawn hours, four months' worth of rain fell across the Texas Hill Country. At least 135 people died -- 117 of them in Kerr County alone -- making it the deadliest inland flood in the United States since the 1976 Big Thompson River disaster in Colorado.

Image: Larry D. Moore | CC BY 4.0

July 2025 Central Texas Floods: Flash Flood Alley

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit World Central Kitchen, CC BY 4.0. The Texas Hill Country sits atop a geological trap. Shallow soil overlays steep limestone hillsides that shed water rather than absorb it. The Guadalupe River and its tributaries have flooded with deadly regularity: 10 teenagers drowned during a church camp evacuation near Comfor...

Image: World Central Kitchen | CC BY 4.0

July 2025 Central Texas Floods: A Wall of Water Before Dawn

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0. Late on July 3, a mid-level atmospheric trough over the Southwest, already laden with tropical Pacific moisture, spawned thunderstorms that stalled directly over Central Texas. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch that afternoon and began escalating warnings through ...

Image: Larry D. Moore | CC BY 4.0

July 2025 Central Texas Floods: A Nation Responds

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Geissinger, Public domain. Search and rescue operations began on July 4, with 237 people pulled from floodwaters by day's end -- 167 of them lifted from trees and rooftops by helicopter. Over 2,000 volunteers descended on Kerr County. Task forces arrived from across the country: Arkansas National Guard hel...

Image: Mike Geissinger | Public domain

July 2025 Central Texas Floods: Warnings That Never Came

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Buffs, CC BY 4.0. The flood exposed years of missed chances to build a warning system in Kerr County. After the 1987 floods, Camp Mystic's owner proposed an automatic alert system, which was eventually installed. A third-party contractor managed it until going out of business in 1998; the river au...

Image: Buffs | CC BY 4.0

July 2025 Central Texas Floods: Reckoning on the Guadalupe

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photolitherland Chris Litherland, CC BY-SA 3.0. The disaster forced a reckoning on multiple fronts. FEMA's flood maps came under scrutiny: Camp Mystic had at least eight buildings inside a designated floodway, yet between 2011 and 2020, the agency had redrawn the 100-year flood boundary multiple times following camp appeals, r...

Image: Photolitherland Chris Litherland | CC BY-SA 3.0