This is one of the best pithy summations I’ve seen.
We had a weather radio in the past, but ended up turning it off because it went off all the time. I don’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night because there’s a thunderstorm miles away. If they had radios which could be geo-coded so that you only got alerts for weather that affected you and was very serious, then it would be useful. But as it is, the alerts will be for a lot of weather that isn’t all that all that concerning. The cell phone notification system seems like a better severe weather alert tool since the alerts are more localized to the small area around the tower. If you get a flood alert on your cell phone, it means there’s flooding risk in your area rather than some place that’s 30 miles away.
Weather radios in each cabin would seem to be a no brainer instead of million dollar sirens.
Later Apple iphones can contact satellites directly…you’d think a camp that size would have an intraNet. Still pissed those girls died.
cuz stoopid adults.
I have one, but, to be fair, I am pretty obsessive about following the weather, and I’m pretty much always aware of when severe weather is in the forecast. I only turn my radio onto “alert mode” when I know that severe storms are in the forecast overnight for my area.
Exactly how I was told to do it.
Schools have them. This camp should have.
Criminal, IMO, if they didn’t.
From the article posted by @Johanna:
The teenage Mexican counselors moved the girls to the highest cabin area,…
I assume ICE will be investigating these two foreigners for immigration status.
I wish I were joking.
Absolutely. Plus, I heard they engaged in human trafficking. Transporting a bunch of innocent little girls to a cabin in the woods in the dead of night!
Pretty dark humor, but sadly you are likely correct.
First comes the scapegoating.
Obviously, they were at fault for the flooding. /s
Well, we are about due for a witch trial. It’s been, what, 70 years?
I just looked at the link. It’s a Hispanic-oriented website.
My first thought too, sorry to say.
What a goddamned awful thing to happen, I am so sorry…it’s still headline news here in Aus as well.
I don’t doubt its veracity.
I saw one of the counselors pictured on a news story telling the same thing.
still 160 missing 
The thing is, cell towers aren’t universal. They’re limited to urban or semi-urban areas. I think the max range is typically 25 miles and less in hills - and the terrain in that part of Texas has hills. They’re only placed where profitable for the owning company(s). Apparently most of Camp Mystic was without cell service anyway, there were simply no nearby cell towers.
Also, people, folks camped before cell phones existed, they aren’t a magic device. Two-way radios for camp staff and someone up on the ridge with a cell phone signal booster might have been what was needed. Or satellite cell system. Or Starlink. Yeah, NOAA weather radios give you more weather reports than you need but have one of the camp staff monitoring one anyone, along with that boosted/satellite cell phone and two-way radio to alert folks to a problem that would affect the camp might have gone a long way to improving the situation.
Or just, you know, don’t have sleeping cabins on the flood plain. That would have required constructing cabins on higher ground but after the flood in 1987 (I think I got the year right) it should have been done. They had 40 years to make that change. It could have been done. It should have been done. But it wasn’t.
That only works if you have a cell tower in range. Which, apparently, Camp Mystic does not, nor do the other camps and campsites scattered around the Guadalupe River.
You don’t have to go that far out of town in semi-rural/semi-wild areas to lose cell coverage. Where I go camping in the Michigan UP I can get cell service at the ferry dock on the west side of the island, or roaming from Canada on the east shore of the island. That’s it. Our campsite has a cell signal booster but it’s far from perfect. So when we’re there we utilize pre-cell phone techniques for communication and safety. This isn’t rocket science.
You can also get satellite service (although my phone is too old for that one of our regulars has a phone that can do that. If we’re not under the forest canopy, she has to walk to a clearing to get a signal even in clear weather). You can get two-way radios although the greater the range the more they cost. Etc., etc.
Why?
The kids aren’t there to be on social media. In fact, the lack of it is probably advertised as a feature and not a bug. The point being to get kids to interact with each other and the environment in real life.
Kerr County actually did price out warning sirens. They’re about $40,000 each to install in their county. It would have been theoretically possible for Camp Mystic, which clearly has some money and is patronized by the wealthy and powerful, to purchase a dedicated siren for the camp. Which may have been of limited utility if there wasn’t a county-wide system, but if there had been a county siren system the camp could have been made part of it relatively easily. IF county Kerr gets such a system then tying the camp into it actually would make a lot of sense, and it would cost the camp (if not the county) much, much less than a million dollars. Recent expansion of the camp since 2020 probably cost a LOT more than 40k for something that can be “sold” to parents as a safety feature for their children.
But you know what the camp could have been doing all along? A “safety morning” where the staff and campers go over safety drills and first aid. You can actually make this fun for the kids if you do it right. Someone awake 24/7 at the camp office monitoring weather and just general conditions (because all sorts of emergencies can occur, not just weather ones) with equipment like 2-way radios to alert others as needed. Back when I was kid camping 50 years ago, long before cell phones existed, they also had an awake adult at night at each building and cluster of tents doing exactly that.
Maybe they had some of that. I don’t know. You don’t know. I do wonder, though.
you’d think a camp that size would have an intraNet.
Why?
The kids aren’t there to be on social media. In fact, the lack of it is probably advertised as a feature and not a bug. The point being to get kids to interact with each other and the environment in real life.
IntraNet
- a local or restricted communications network, especially a private network created using World Wide Web software.
It’s big camp and an intranet would save a lot of running hither and yon and allow one central command to be in instant touch with all dwellings and facilities and staff to monitor emergency channels.
It has nothing to do with social media…it’s a local communication network for exactly this kind of scenario and it is not expensive to implement
An emergency pager network for even less.
Emergency pager networks are still used by many organizations, including emergency services, hospitals, and businesses, for reliable and cost-effective communication, especially in situations where traditional cellular networks may be unreliable or unavailable. These systems use specialized radio frequencies and transmitters to send messages to individual pagers or groups of pagers, ensuring that critical information reaches the intended recipients quickly and efficiently.
Key features and benefits of emergency pager networks:
- Reliability:
Paging systems offer reliable communication, especially in areas with limited or unreliable cellular coverage, during natural disasters, or in large facilities where signal penetration can be an issue.
This is really the ONLY issue.
It was utterly negligent to have cabins in the flood plain. All else is modern high-tech band-aids.
It should have been illegal to put them there. it should also have been beyond common sense for whoever did the site planning. And the people doing the construction. And the people working there every year since.
Not all disasters are flood related…a major issue is lack of timely information and cutting off key staff
- ie counselors from communication tools.
It’s not high tech by any means.
Hell a big fire bell would work.
Or even an old-fashioned “emergency bell”. Look, I like my modern tech as much as anyone else. I enjoy “living in the future”. But high-tech and powered systems aren’t always the best choice. Old fashioned pagers, or fire bells, don’t require as much maintenance or power. A “fire bell” doesn’t even require electricity to be working and maintenance is minimal - maybe you replace the rope every few years.
There’s a lot to be said for “Cheap, effective, and time-tested”
And sure, add a pager system/intranet on top of that if you want and can afford it, but not at the expense of overlooking back-ups that don’t require power.
Apparently neither the State of Texas nor Kerr County have any laws regulating building on flood plains. Free-dumb and all that. Even if they had, Camp Mystic has been there long enough the floodplain cabins might have been grandfathered in as so often happens when such laws are passed after structures are already built. I just don’t have that information but it’s a possibility.
Want less government “interference” and regulation? Then you’ll have situations like this happen during disasters. It’s consequence of the locals wanting more freedom to make their own decisions. Fine - but that also requires more personal responsibility or you wind up with people, including kids, dying when that could have been potentially avoided.
You won’t eliminate all deaths during natural disasters but you can certainly reduce the numbers. We have the knowledge and technology to do that. And probably 80-90% of reducing natural disaster deaths comes down to using knowledge to mitigate potential damage, injury, and deaths.
How could you omit the NEXT step:
After the inevitable occurs: “Gimmee gimmee! The government is to blame!”