As we learn more about the young girls who lost their lives in the Central Texas floods, we are getting a look at the moment some of their campmates were evacuated from the floodwaters.
In videos posted to TikTok by Grosebeck, Texas nurse Devon Paige, you can see a bus full of girls from Camp Mystic being driven away from the devastation. As the bus passes by rushing floodwaters and piles of debris, the girls can be heard singing worship songs.
In the nurse’s caption of the video, she writes “The girls are singing to try and calm everyone.”
Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors died in the floods, is in Kerr County, near Hunt, about 13 miles west of Kerrville. Around 750 children were at the camp when the flooding started, officials said.
Paige posted several other videos on her TikTok page, one specifically labeled #BEFOREtheflood. It shows camp attendees in the dining hall, playing outside and even celebrating Paige’s birthday with a cake. It’s a chilling look into the girl’s time at Camp Mystic before the floodwaters changed everything. =
“Today I visited Camp Mystic. It, and the river running beside it, were horrendously ravaged in ways unlike I’ve seen in any natural disaster,” Abbott wrote. “The height the rushing water reached to the top of cabins was shocking. We won’t stop until we find every girl who was in those cabins. ”
Camp Mystic is an all-girls summer camp, which runs several camps attended by thousands of children during the summer, Patrick said. In a statement read Friday by the lieutenant governor, the camp said they did not have power, water or Wi-Fi in the aftermath of what it called a “catastrophic level” of flooding. The statement added that “the highway has washed away, so we are struggling to get more help.”
