The narrative was that state resources were in Kerr County before the flood, but no one asked how many

“Thank God there had been pre-deployed resources.”

That is what Casey Garrett, the investigator working for the legislative committee examining the July 4 flood, told Texas lawmakers in April — crediting the state’s early staging with saving lives at Camp Mystic and offering the committee a picture of swift, effective preparation.

The records tell a more complicated story.

Documents obtained by The Kerr County Lead after more than a month of requests to the Texas Division of Emergency Management show that the state’s committed water-rescue presence in Kerr County, as the flood bore down, was a single six-person squad — staged in Kerrville, roughly 20 miles east of Hunt.

That number was never disclosed at the hearing. The committee did not ask for it.

In two days of testimony, the committee also never asked whether Highway 39 — the primary road connecting Ingram to the Hunt corridor — was passable. The state’s own activity logs show it was not.

The investigator’s account
Garrett’s April presentation drew a picture of rapid, concentrated prepositioning. By 1 p.m. on July 3, she told the committee, TDEM had fully deployed state and National Guard resources across a 160-square-mile area. Those assets were in position when the river rose.

“Thank God there had been pre-deployed resources,” Garrett told the panel.
The pre-deployed Guard trucks, she said, evacuated the surviving girls from Camp Mystic’s Cypress Lake campus. Guard helicopters airlifted girls from the devastated Guadalupe River campus to safety.

Garrett’s presentation was also sharply critical of Camp Mystic officials and of Kerr County emergency management, scrutinizing local decisions and local preparedness in detail.

What it did not present was the specific allocation of state water-rescue assets to Kerr County — or a clear account of what those assets could and could not reach once the roads went underwater.

What the records show

The situation report TDEM filed at 10 a.m. on July 4, covering the period through 8 a.m. that morning, lists committed state resources by county. Of seven Texas A&M Task Force 1 swiftwater rescue squads spread across the region — staged in Brown, Llano, Comal, Tom Green, Kimble, Kerr and Uvalde counties — one six-person squad was assigned to Kerr County.

Texas Military Department helicopters were staged in San Antonio and Austin. Its ground transportation platoons were in Llano and New Braunfels. None of those assets were in Kerr County.

The report uses three status designations — activated, assigned, available — and the distinction matters. The only water-rescue asset assigned, meaning committed, to Kerr County was that single squad. TPWD game wardens and boat teams appear as available across a multi-county region. The military air and ground assets were activated, but sitting in other counties.

The squad itself was in Kerrville.

3:40 a.m.: the call from Hunt

The activity log kept by Water Group Supervisor Tommy Daniel records what happened when it tried to respond.

At 3:40 a.m. on July 4, a call came in: people on the roof of a house in Hunt. By 3:50 a.m., the six-person squad was rolling west from Kerrville toward Hunt. A second squad was simultaneously dispatched from Junction. By 4:00 a.m., Daniel had notified the State Operations Center that resources were being requested. By 4:15 a.m., the San Antonio squad’s route was blocked by water and road closures. By 4:45 a.m., its vehicles were disabled. The crew was safe.

It was a fast response. It failed.

Nothing in the logs suggests a larger or differently-staged force would have crossed those roads in the dark. The water that stopped the squad at 4:15 a.m. would have stopped any ground unit going the same direction.

The road the committee never asked about
Highway 39 is the primary route west from Ingram into Hunt. On the morning of July 4, it was cut off in multiple locations by floodwater.

The legislative committee examining the state’s response — the same committee that received Garrett’s presentation — did not ask about the condition of Highway 39 during two days of testimony on whether the response was adequate. The closures appear in the state’s own activity logs. They were not brought to the committee for scrutiny.

The Guard trucks Garrett credited with evacuating Cypress Lake girls operated only after the flood waters were cleared. Garrett’s account never acknowledged that it was school bus drivers from Kerrville and Ingram school districts who did much of the heavy lifting late in the day on July 4. The first reported helicopter landings at Camp Mystic weren’t until almost noon.

DPS marine: 90 miles in the wrong direction

DPS’s Tactical Marine Unit, the agency’s specialized water-rescue arm, never reached Kerr County during the disaster. In a written response to a public information request from The Kerr County Lead, DPS said the unit was “not pre-deployed” and was monitoring weather conditions from its duty stations in Austin and Port Lavaca. It “had no assets deployed” in Kerr County or any of the surrounding Hill Country counties.

The unit deployed on July 5 to Marble Falls in Burnet County — 90 miles away — where its own daily activity report records that “No rescues were performed.” Marine and dive teams did not reach Kerr County until July 14 and July 16, for the recovery search from Camp Mystic downstream toward Canyon Lake.

In the early-morning hours of July 4, The Kerr County Lead has confirmed, DPS had no troopers west of Ingram. The only law enforcement and public safety personnel in the Hunt area were the Hunt Volunteer Fire Department’s cut-off units and off-duty Kerrville Police Department officers who live there.

The number Kidd was never asked

TDEM Chief Nim Kidd’s own testimony was more measured than the investigator’s account. Pressed on whether the state was adequately prepared, he did not claim it was.

“Now, was it enough assets and were they in the right place?” Kidd told the committee. “I don’t think we’ll ever have enough assets for the amount of rainfall that we saw, at the rate of fall, at the place that we saw it fall.”

Kidd noted that weather prediction is “an art” rather than an exact science and that TDEM had distributed resources across a 35,000-square-mile threat area because it could not know in advance where the worst rain would fall. He told the committee the state had boats in San Angelo, Kerrville and elsewhere before July 4.

What Kidd was not asked — and what Garrett did not present — was the figure those positions add up to in Kerr County specifically.

That number is six. It emerged not at the hearing, but after more than a month of records requests.