Some places are already redrawing the 100- and 500-year flood plain lines.
That article has a link to an article from 2011 about Camp Mystic:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/the-not-so-happy-campers/
A stay cost $4,375 in 2011. All the coverage before now has characterized it as a Christian camp, but from the article it seems to be a snooty Rich Person Socialite camp.
I guess the upper crust hoi polloi could be Christians too.
Well we have 2 sirens in our town. With the tv on I can hear it loud and clear from 1/4 mile away. I guess it depends on what siren you get.
New report indicates that the owners of Camp Mystic appealed to FEMA to reclassify the camp as not bring in high-risk flood zone, probably to reduce flood insurance costs and allow building expansions.
Yeah, that sounds about right. And I’m thinking that, plus this…
…is a more accurate depiction of what was really going on with the owner/director than this:
Not that he didn’t really die trying to save his campers (whose rich parents would undoubtedly sue the snot out of him if the children died—and probably still will sue his estate in death), just that you’d think someone who (1) charges probably hundreds (thousands?) of families several thousand dollars a pop, year after year and (2) is painfully aware there is a flood danger would either (a) take care to move cabins to higher ground over time—he had something like half a century to do it—or (b) maybe take some of his (just doing some quick napkin math) millions of dollar in revenue each year, oh, I don’t know… pay to install his own damn warning system!?
Because what it really sounds like—and what possibly the less well-off residents of Kerr county intrinsically understood—is that some county-level-oligarch who ran a camp for wealthy kids (or at least comfortably middle class kids—but then again, so was I, and I cannot imagine my parents spending thousands of dollars to send me to summer camp, so “wealthy” might just be it) and managed to buy his way into a county government position of influence (he served on the local river authority) was trying to get the county to cover the cost of a warning system that would stand to benefit him and his property interests disproportionately, and probably more so than any other individual property owner.
And maybe the real reason he wanted a warning system was because that, too, might cut down on his insurance cost (as a mitigation measure that would reduce the risk to people staying on the property, if not to the property itself). Because, again, if it was all just about safety, he had decades to take more definitive steps to protect campers by gradually phasing out cabins in the flood plain or moving them to high ground. But then I can imagine that might have cut down on how many kids he could cram into his camp each summer, and by extension his profits, if he limited the living areas to what he could fit on elevated terrain outside the flood plain.
The Captain of the Titanic should not be lauded for going down with his ship, he should be lambasted for plowing at high speed through a known ice field on a moonless night.
The above is a snip from NP’s cite to that AP article, not his own words.
It is unsurprising to me that vastly more amendments would be requested by wealthier, more administratively capable people. Which in turn correlates with whiter. It would further not surprise me that poorer less white people would be more likely to be renters with no standing to even request an amendment.
What I wonder about is whether there’s any significant bias in the approval rates, not in the number of requests or awards.
People gaming the system is eternal, and wealthier folks tend to be both more skilled, and more motivated, to play those games. But if the government is biased in how it adjudicates these requests, that’s a very different, and (in a sane government) very actionable issue.
In this case getting what you want - property re-classified as “not high risk flood zone” when no actual change has been made - works against you in the long term. A different classification on paper doesn’t change the reality on the ground. I think Mystic wound up being one of the highest death tolls (there’s an RV park that might rival them) so in the end their wealth didn’t protect them. Meanwhile, less wealthy people couldn’t get re-classifications so were discouraged from building/living on high risk areas.
It’s not that poor people didn’t suffer and die - some definitely did - but rather that in this particular case their lack of privilege and influence might have worked somewhat in their favor.
Not that I have a definitive answer on that, just pondering the question.
Yeah, it’s a little bit of karma in action, here. It’s sort of like, around here, there are a number of houses built right next to the tops of cliffs (either on the lakeshore, or along the Rocky River). You’d have to pay me a lot of money to want a house like that, but all of those houses are very pricy and prized.
Though, of course, when erosion does inevitably happen, all of those people expect government handouts to pay for the mitigation measures.
This article from the same site praising the camp said that it appealed to “a certain kind of Texas woman” and “a certain type of Texas woman”. It appears to have taken for granted that you know what kind of Texas woman it is.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/dick-tweety-eastland-camp-mystic-legacy/
There seems to have been a longrunning legal dispute among the heirs of the original Mystic owners about who was owed how much yearly, and when, which has probably paralysed any major infrastructure changes on the site for years.
Indeed; the implication being that if you don’t know, then you (or your wife, or your daughter) aren’t that kind.
The article mentions some of the indicators, however: a family with a certain level of wealth, being a member of a sorority when you attend the University of Texas, being a member of the Junior League, etc.
And yet… the camp underwent a major expansion starting in 2020, called “Mystic Cypress Lake” to distinguish it from the original “Mystic Guadalupe” which is the one that went under water. It’s all the same corporation (or whatever the business details are) and property. So they could build new. The problem was not retiring the old, low-lying cabins.
The current prices for Camp Mystic seem to be super secret, but here’s one interesting PDF Google found. (Not damning, just interesting.)
While exact figures are often shrouded in a veil of “inquire for details,” investigative projections based on past trends and industry benchmarks suggest a baseline tuition for a standard four-week session approaches an unprecedented $12,000.
A comprehensive breakdown reveals a labyrinth of additional expenses: specialized activity fees (equestrian programs, advanced robotics, wilderness survival, each potentially adding hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars), mandatory high-end gear packages, premium transportation services from major urban centers, and a robust “camp store” credit for incidentals and souvenirs. When aggregated, the true cost for a single camper can easily eclipse $15,000 to $20,000 for a summer.
Surely anyone can afford such modest fees? At least if she is “a certain type of Texas woman”.
That does explain a vaguely remembered scandal from my youth about development along a creek in my city north of Austin. The houses that were built kept flooding, and it turned out that the developer had gotten the flood zones redrawn, so that they were allowed to build in the area. Rewriting the label on a map obviously doesn’t do a single thing to change where creek water goes every time there is heavy rain.
That does not seem outrageous to me for a 30 day sleep-away camp. Some examples, the half-day sports camp at my nearby elementary school is $300 per week, and the public school sponsored 3-day, 2-night camp is $255.
I’m not saying it’s cheap, or something even middle income families are going to be able to afford, just that the price is inline with what I would expect.
When we had the St. Vrain flooding, the flood warnings were not ignored but many of us were nowhere near the river. There reached a point after a couple of days that those of us in the city were like “Oh shit. This is shelter-in-place time.” So flood warning are not necessarily for everyone until they are.
Based on what you quoted, it seems fair to conclude that the cost per camper per session (and, based on what @Darren_Garrison linked, it seems the sessions were only two weeks each, not thirty days as @echoreply surmised) was at least $10k per. Another article I read indicates that there were 557 campers enrolled at the time of the flood.
So we’re talking well in excess of $5,000,000 for a single 2-week term, and there were at least 3 terms (or more? still, let’s go with 3) per summer. Well in excess of $15,000,000 in revenue to this camp that apparently had plenty of money to expand, but somehow needed the county (whose residents, I suspect, were not the same people with Camp Mystic money for their kids) to fork over a million dollars? So that the wealthy kids could continue to camp out, but at a lower insurance premium for the owner?
Obviously more people than just the children of Mr. and Mrs. Money Bags would have benefited from such a system, but I think it’s important to highlight just how obscene of a contrast it is, that this man who owned and operated a camp for disproportionately wealthy children and raked in probably millions of dollars each year for himself somehow needed the county to foot the bill to make his camp less of a death trap than it predictably became for so many children.
I’m looking at the Camp Mystic web site. It appears there are 30-day sessions at the ‘original’ camp, and shorter sessions at another location.
The Texas Monthly article says the price is for 30 days:
For the current fee of $4,375 for a thirty-day session, Mystic girls learn to shoot rifles, ride horses, catch bass, hike in the August sun without complaint, and face down a rattlesnake or two.
That is in 2011, so I expect the price now is higher now.
Food for the people and horses, bullets, and pay for the staff are going to take a big chunk out of whatever the cost currently is. I’m not sure owning a camp is a sure path to riches, but the point is well taken, there seems to be plenty of revenue, and some of that could have been allocated towards flood mitigation.