TEXAS FLOODSTexas Officials Say They Didn’t See the Flood Coming. Oral Histories Show Residents Have Long Warned of Risks.
After a tragedy, records from local archives can help us understand how a community understands itself. Here’s some of what we learned following the devastating July 4 flooding in Texas.
In late September 2000, longtime Kerr County, Texas, resident W. Thornton Secor Jr. sat down with an oral historian to tell his story. Like many of the residents recorded as part of a decadeslong effort by the Kerr County Historical Commission to document the community’s history, Secor had a lot to say about the area’s floods.
“It always seems to happen at night too,” Secor said of local floods he and his family had experienced. “Can’t see most of it.”
Secor, who died in 2022, was a third-generation manager of a lodge that still operates along the Guadalupe River. His oral history shares family memories of floods going back to 1932 — like the time a flood that year washed away most of the cabins his grandfather built.
Now, Secor’s daughter, Mandi Secor Lipscomb, is left considering the future of the lodge in the aftermath of another devastating flood, on July 4. Secor Lipscomb is the fourth-generation owner and operator of the same lodge, Waltonia on the River.
Often when I try to understand a place or process a big news event, I look for records kept by local historical societies and libraries. In archived documents, preserved photographs and oral history collections, one can start to see how a community understands itself. So, as news reports about the floods in the Central Texas Hill Country poured in throughout the week, I went looking for historical context. What local knowledge is held by people who live, or have lived, in what’s repeatedly described as “Flash Flood Alley”? How have people in Kerr County’s past contended with floods of their own time?
A trove of more than 70 oral histories recorded by the Kerr County Historical Commission begins to answer those questions. The recordings document memories of floods going back to 1900, but oral histories alone rarely tell a full or accurate story. Still, there’s at least one conclusion to draw: Everything has a history. The flood that killed more than 130 people in the Kerr County area this month is not the first time a flash flood on the Guadalupe River took lives of people, including children.
