The central Texas floods were terrible, with the Camp Mystic events being particularly tragic. Having a guy like this on the ground at Camp Mystic, directing the rescue efforts, had to be a great comfort.
Scott Ruskan, a 26 year old rescue swimmer for the Coast Guard, is a hero, and sounds like one.
Honestly, I’m mostly just a dude. I’m just doing a job. This is what I signed up for…
Everybody needs to be like Ruskan. Not just rescuers, or athletes or people in the military. People who have a job to do, need to do it. The people in charge of Camp Mystic failed.
It’s tempting to blame someone else for a tragedy, and start looking for political advantage. The deaths at Camp Mystic didn’t happen because of climate change, President Trump, the National Weather Service, FEMA or the local planning commission. Shit can happen anywhere, and it isn’t possible to legislate your way out of that. Being alive is dangerous.
We don’t live a charmed life, where every danger can be mitigated. Life isn’t a fantasy where your feelings or self-esteem influence the physical world. It’s not God’s job to protect each of us from calamities. Read the Bible, we have free will.
Camp Mystic is in a flood zone.
Nobody needs FEMA to explain it. There is the Guadalupe River, a bunch of flat ground, bordered by higher terrain. The river is rising, we might want to go to higher ground, right behind the building.
There were flood maps and prior floods. The river didn’t rise as high, but it rose. The National Weather Service warned of the possibility, and issued dire warnings in the middle of the night.
Camp Mystic had 750 campers. Currently, 26 people from Camp Mystic are known to have died. Scott Ruskan helped evacuate 165 people. The people who died weren’t in the right place or didn’t do the right things, to remain amongst the living.
That’s a big camp. Upper management should have been up all night, monitoring the situation, with plans in place to accommodate a loss of power. Every camp counselor in a dorm should have had redundant means to communicate with upper management.
Management should have felt responsible for the lives of every person on site. Apparently the co-owner and director of Camp Mystic, Richard Eastland, died trying to save campers. That is heroic, but insufficient. He wasn’t prepared.
Having been a teacher for 25 years, I know that administrators are expected to put procedures in place to keep students and teachers safe. When a big blizzard is forecast, our assistant superintendent is up all night, communicating with other districts. Most administrators cannot think clearly about threats or anticipate issues, but they do what they are told, and that is usually sufficient.
Running a large camp can be complex, with most dangers being routine and manageable. Most of the staff are casual employees, working only for the summer. A number of the staff are college kids who may have attended Camp Mystic and are looking for a fun summer job.
When I worked at summer camps run by Johns Hopkins University, we had about 200 students. No one on site was a year-round JHU employee. Site management consisted of four people who had to have worked several summers with JHU and had additional training. Two dozen instructors and teaching assistants, a dozen resident advisors and a dozen support people, may or may not have ever worked a summer camp before. None of them are necessarily reliable in an emergency.
Camp Mystic probably operates along similar lines. Most of the staff didn’t appreciate that they were responsible for the lives of their campers.
When I was an instructor at the summer camp site in Hong Kong, there was a chance that a typhoon would hit. The weather service was about to declare a “Signal 8”, which would close school and send everyone home. It was a residential camp, so that wasn’t applicable. The camp was at a university on the South China Sea. It was lovely in calm weather, but this was going to be dramatic.
The site director held an all-camp assembly to explain the situation. Local parents could pick up their children, but most of us would be hunkering down. I was surprised that most of the staff did not know what they were supposed to do.
The buildings are all concrete and we were a dozen floors up, so there was little danger. All the staff had to do was look confident, attentive and competent. The college kids on staff looked as worried as the campers. We got them to buck up and look like adults.
After the meeting, I bought a bunch of beer before all of the campus workers went home. I didn’t take any photos because we were goofing around too much. Being an instructor, there were no campers around, so that seemed fine.
I know nothing about the staff at Camp Mystic, but imagine that every dorm had an RA for every dozen or so campers. The RA’s were probably college students with phones. They don’t have the maturity or experience to know that they should have been monitoring the situation rather than sleeping. It’s incredible that the first sign of danger was water entering the dorm.
Each RA should have understood that they were responsible for their own safety, along with the safety of their campers.
There is enough high ground around Camp Mystic, that the director should have been able to develop a plan in case the water kept rising. Apparently the river rose 29 feet, which is a lot, but only if there is no plan for a dorm in the floodplain. The plan may never be used, but there should be something in place.
While a student at Ohio State, I and my roommates worked in dorm security at Morrill Tower. On a weekend night, there wasn’t much to do after the bars closed and the drunk residents stumbled in, so half of dorm security went home at 3 am. The rest stayed until 7 am.
Working security was like a slumber party, with the occasional need to check ID’s or key a resident into their room. This is my roommate Mark. He was the first of us to get the job, and eventually was a shift supervisor.
One evening, Columbus had a tornado watch, so we had the radio on to listen for updates. Around 1 am, Mark was considering who to send home. I suggested that with the tornado watch, he keep everyone on the clock just in case. Mark wasn’t sure he had that authority, but dorm directors weren’t on call or anything.
I wasn’t being cautious or prudent. It was Friday night, and we were playing pool and ping pong. Everybody would rather work the hours, and we were having a nice time. Mark kept everyone on, and looked like a genius when a tornado was sighted.
At some stupid hour, 3 or 4 am, campus police called to tell us to set off the alarm and evacuate all the residents to the stairwells. Morrill Tower was all concrete, with stairways in the middle. It looks like this:
The danger was that windows could blow in, injuring students in the bedrooms.
At that hour on a Friday night, all of the residents were in deep sleep or deep drunk. We banged on doors, keyed into suites and shuffled everyone into the stairwell. A few of my exuberant colleagues keyed into bedrooms and kicked bed frames to rouse the residents.
We didn’t train for that, but we understood the idea. Make sure every bedroom door gets opened, people come out and they know where to go.
That is different than Camp Mystic. One difference is that we knew that our only task was to maintain order and protect the residents. At least within the limits of being a student employee. Camp staff plan activities, get to know campers and try to provide a meaningful experience.
Another difference is that we had campus police who were trained professionals with experience and judgement. Mark made the decision to keep the office fully staffed, but he would not have made the decision to sound the alarm and roust the residents.
There is no legislation or government policy that would keep a Camp Mystic from happening again. The camp director has to be focused on big decisions, and not wrapped up in the entertaining daily life at summer camp. Parents need to ask camp directors about safety and contingency plans because they are entrusting the camp director with the lives of their children.
Any parent who leaves their children with anyone, has to make sure that person is competent to take on the responsibility. It’s great that we have people like Scott Ruskan, but we can’t rely on them to cover for our mistakes.
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