In July 1987, another deadly flood along the Guadalupe River was eerily similar to the Fourth of July flooding.
KERR COUNTY, Texas — The catastrophic Fourth of July flooding along the Guadalupe River wasn’t the first time the Texas Hill Country has seen deadly flooding.
Nearly 40 years ago, in July 1987, a similar scenario played out as a wall of water rushed in, wiping out campgrounds.
Jim Moore was a KHOU 11 reporter back then who now lives in the Hill Country. He covered the ’87 floods, and he said the images from this weekend are eerily similar.
Moore said the desperation flood victims must have felt as they clung to trees with the river raging below them is something he hopes to never see again.
“My cameraman and I at that time we discovered one of the bodies under a brush pile. It was a horrendous thing to see,” Moore told us. “There’s a level of devastation that you probably wouldn’t understand if you’ve never been.”
The victims included 10 children who were killed when rushing water swept away their bus as they tried to escape the flooding.
“When asked, what were the evacuation orders back in ’87? It sounds like people kind of try to get ahead of it, but they still kinda got caught in that wall of water,” Moore said. “I think it was slightly different because it was during the day, it was daylight, and they had gotten warnings.”
Hope gave people the strength to hold on as families desperately searched along the Guadalupe in the immediate aftermath, and weeks later.
“People were desperate. They were going up and down the river, looking for their children. I remember helicopters racing on the river. And as you can imagine, the water was still very high,” Moore remembered.
He said debris 100 feet up in a giant cypress tree is a reminder that this could happen again.