Coco Grieshaber, an 8-year-old Camp Mystic alumna, threaded beads into a homemade bracelet at her dining room table, sharing memories of the Texas summer camp that she left four days before flooding devastated the area on Fourth of July weekend.

Federal regulators repeatedly granted appeals to remove Camp Mystic’s buildings from their 100-year flood map, as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain.

Camp Mystic successfully appealed to remove several structures from a FEMA flood zone, despite being located in a high-risk flood area in Texas Hill Country.

The emergency weather alert had come early Fourth of July morning: There would be life-threatening flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas. And Camp Mystic – an all-girls Christian camp situated along the Guadalupe River – housed about 750 campers on the flood-prone site as heavy rains started pouring.

Taaffe called the counselors at Camp Mystic “heroes” and wore a tie to honor them and the young girls who died during the Central Texas flood.

Many of the 650 campers and staffers at Camp Mystic were asleep when, at 1:14 a.m., a flash-flood warning for Kerr County, Texas, with “catastrophic” potential for loss of life was issued by the National Weather Service.

Bubble Inn saw generations of 8-year-olds enter as strangers and emerge as confident young ladies equipped with new skills from the great outdoors and lifelong friends – bonds that would one day prove vital in the face of unfathomable tragedy.

When a reporter asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott who is to blame for the deaths of more than 100 people in this month’s catastrophic Guadalupe River flooding, Abbott scoffed. Wh