Californians who survived wildfires now help Kerrville tell its flood story

Three visiting student workers helping build a permanent oral history archive of the July 4, 2025 flood say their own experiences surviving Los Angeles County’s catastrophic January 2025 wildfires shaped how they’re approaching interviews with Kerr County flood survivors — not as outside journalists, but as peers who’ve lived through their own community’s disaster.

Andrew Sweet, Zacharie Sergenian and Analisa Sanchez discussed the project Friday on The Lead Live, hosted by Louis Amestoy and Libbie Horton from the Peterson Health Digital Studio at Pint & Plow Brewing Co. The three are working with local recovery group Kerr Together on a partnership with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, pairing the visiting students with local youth to record firsthand accounts of the flood and its aftermath for a permanent local archive.

“We have these wonderful students who are doing some great work collecting stories and just firsthand accounts of where our community is,” said Kelly Hagemeier of Kerr Together.

Sessions are scheduled for Saturday, July 11, from 1:30 to 5 p.m. at the Kerr Together Disaster Relief Center, and Sunday, July 12, from 1:30 to 5 p.m. at the Heart of the Hills Heritage Center, where the finished archive will ultimately be housed. Organizers are asking residents to share stories touching on leadership, memory, acts of care and courage, lessons learned and aspirations for the community’s future. Those interested can RSVP through a form linked at usc.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_00AGC1zXevBYEuO, or direct questions to Talia Abrahamson of the Texas Hill Country Youth Media Initiative at taliaabr@usc.edu.

Beyond USC Annenberg and Kerr Together, the project is backed by Texas Public Radio, Schreiner University, the Kerrville Community Arts Program, the Heart of the Hills Heritage Center and the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country.

A different kind of loss

Sanchez, who was careful to draw distinctions rather than easy comparisons, said the Eaton and Palisades fires “were a major urban disaster” that destroyed entire neighborhoods but claimed far fewer lives than Kerr County’s flood. That difference, she said, demands extra sensitivity from the interviewers — the team trained with a counselor from the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas to prepare for the emotional weight of the conversations.

“We want to make sure that everyone who’s being interviewed is comfortable with what they’re saying,” Sanchez said. She said the project isn’t focused on the disaster itself so much as what came after: “How did you guys find the courage to kind of get yourself back up again and reignite your community?”

Sanchez’s own high school, Flintridge Sacred Heart, sits on a hill overlooking Altadena and landed inside an evacuation warning zone during the Eaton fire. She estimated at least a dozen girls in her grade lost their homes, with many more evacuated.

Bungalows, Zoom and a windowless Sears

Sergenian lived about a mile from where the Palisades fire broke out on Jan. 7, 2025. His family evacuated at 11:30 a.m. — roughly an hour after the fire started and well before an official warning went out around 2 p.m. — a decision that let them beat gridlock so bad some evacuees abandoned their cars and walked. He later watched the fire’s glow and smoke roll toward the ocean from an 11th-floor building, and spent the following weeks in a hotel lobby he described as packed with fellow evacuees before friends and neighbors scattered as far as Santa Barbara.

The fire burned down the entire back half of Palisades Charter High School, destroying the campus’s classroom bungalows. Students went to Zoom classes first, then spent months in a renovated, windowless former Sears department store before the campus reopened around February. Many classmates transferred out permanently rather than finish the year in the old store.

Sweet, discussing the Pasadena Unified School District’s experience, pointed to Los Angeles Times reporting that found elevated lead and arsenic levels in the grass at district campuses after the fires, which pushed athletic practices indoors for four to five months. He also connected the community to baseball history, noting Jackie Robinson grew up in Pasadena and attended John Muir High School — a school with a field named for him — alongside his brother, an Olympic runner.

Peers, not “bigwig journalists”

The three said their own experience of losing school routines and normalcy gives them a direct line to Kerr County teenagers navigating the same disruption to a pivotal stretch of their lives. That shared footing, organizers said, is the point: interviewees have responded to the students as empathetic peers rather than outside media, leaving subjects feeling cared for rather than examined.