Hundreds of 911 calls from the catastrophic July 4 flash floods in Texas — which claimed the lives of dozens of young girls at the historic Camp Mystic — have been made public, revealing harrowing details of the disaster and the victims’ final moments.
The recordings capture panic, fear, and desperation as callers pleaded for help while floodwaters rapidly engulfed homes, camps, and roads. In several calls, children can be heard screaming in the background as adults, their voices trembling, begged dispatchers for rescue.
Some of the calls document the final moments of first responders who were themselves overwhelmed by the rising waters. Firefighter Bradly Perry called dispatchers while clinging to a tree as floodwaters surged around him.
“The tree I’m in is starting to lean, and it’s going to fall. Is there a helicopter close?” Perry said. “I’ve probably got maybe five minutes left.”
No helicopter arrived in time. Perry was later confirmed among the 137 people who died statewide in the flooding.
The calls were among more than 400 emergency recordings released Friday by Kerr County and Texas officials. According to the audio, only two dispatchers were handling the avalanche of emergency calls in the early hours of the holiday morning. As the situation worsened, dispatchers were forced to cut calls short to answer others, often with devastating consequences.
Several of the most disturbing calls came from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp for girls along the Guadalupe River. The camp suffered 27 deaths when flash floods tore through the area.
“There is water everywhere. We cannot move,” one woman told a dispatcher. “We are upstairs in a room, and the water is rising.”
In a later call, still without help, she asked, “How do we get to the roof if the water is so high? Can you send someone here — with boats?”
The overwhelmed dispatcher could offer no solution. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” the operator replied.
Another call came from a woman who lived downstream from the camp and had rescued two young girls swept away by the floodwaters.
“We’re okay, but we live a mile down the road from Camp Mystic,” she said, audibly shaken. “Two little girls came down the river, and we got to them. I just don’t know how many others are out there.”
Ultimately, 25 campers and three staff members from Camp Mystic were killed.
The camp — where Laura Bush once worked as a counselor — was one of many camps and RV parks lining the Guadalupe River that were destroyed by the fast-moving floodwaters.
In another call, a counselor from a nearby camp described being trapped inside a cabin as water surged inside.
“There’s water filling up super fast. We can’t get out of our cabin,” the counselor said, with children screaming in the background. “How do we get to the boats?”
The recordings also show just how quickly conditions deteriorated. Many callers phoned dispatchers multiple times in a short span, describing frantic moves from ground floors to upper levels, then to attics and rooftops — all within 30 to 40 minutes.
In several cases, tragedy unfolded in real time. In one call, a woman relayed information to dispatchers from an elderly friend whose home was flooded nearly to his head. Mid-call, the man stopped responding after his phone went dead.
The audio offers a chilling, firsthand account of a disaster that unfolded faster than emergency services could possibly respond — and of lives lost while help was desperately sought but never reached.