Camp Mystic halts plan to reopen this summer
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FILE PHOTO: Campists' belongings lie on the ground following flooding on the Guadalupe River, at Camp Mystic, Hunt, Texas, U.S. July 7, 2025. REUTERS/Marco Bello/File Photo
By Jasper Ward
April 30 (Reuters) - Camp Mystic, the Texas summer camp where dozens of people died during July flooding, said on Thursday that it has decided to not open this summer after previously seeking approval from state regulators to do so.
"No administrative process or summer season should move forward while families continue to grieve, while investigations continue and while so many Texans still carry the pain of last July’s tragedy," the camp said in a statement.
As a result, Camp Mystic said, it will no longer seek a summer 2026 camp license from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
Twenty-eight campers and staff members perished after heavy downpours in Texas Hill Country transformed the Guadalupe River into a killer torrent on July 4, 2025.
Last week the state sent a letter to the camp outlining two dozen deficiencies in the riverfront camp's emergency preparedness plan, including failure to provide adequate evacuation route maps.
Families of victims of last summer's camp flooding testified before the Texas Legislature and called for closure of the camp.
"Camp Mystic's license should not be renewed," CiCi Steward, the mother of an 8-year-old girl who still has not been found, said during her testimony earlier this week. "If a child dies at a Texas camp this summer, it will not be because we lacked the information to prevent it. It will be because we did not act on it."
The camp said its decision to not reopen was intended to remove doubts that it had heard concerns expressed by the families of the victims and state lawmakers investigating what happened at the camp last summer.
Widespread flash flooding that struck the region that morning and in the following days killed nearly 140 people in the sixth-deadliest freshwater flood disaster in the United States.
(Reporting by Jasper Ward in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)
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