“Y’all will not be an operator next season”: Legislators scold Eastland family over flood deaths, compliance failures

AUSTIN — Sen. Charles Perry told the Eastland family Tuesday what no one in two days of legislative hearings had yet said directly: their camp will not reopen.

“Y’all will not be an operator next season,” Perry told Edward, Britt, Richard and Mary Liz Eastland before the joint General Investigating Committee on the July 2025 Flooding Events. “Because you just missed it and it was tragic.”

The blunt assessment set the tone for a four-hour hearing in which legislators admonished the operators of Camp Mystic on multiple fronts — from the failure to evacuate 27 people who died in the July 4, 2025, flood to an ongoing violation of state law that has persisted for 10 months.

Perry: “Extremely disingenuous”

Perry reserved his sharpest language for Britt Eastland’s defense that the doomed cabins were technically outside the FEMA floodplain. Perry called the argument “extremely disingenuous” and “playing semantics,” pointing out that patriarch Dick Eastland had deliberately lobbied to carve Camp Mystic out of the floodway map in 2013.

The family’s argument that they were operating within compliant boundaries, Perry suggested, was a consequence of their own father’s regulatory maneuvering.

Perry did not stop there. Dick Eastland had done a “tremendous disservice by example and by history and by instilling a fear,” Perry said, that ultimately “manifested itself into 27 lives lost.”

Kolkhorst: “I’m begging you”

The hearing’s most emotionally raw moment came when Sen. Lois Kolkhorst confronted Mary Liz Eastland — the camp’s registered nurse and listed medical director — about the fact that she has still not reported the 27 deaths to the Texas Department of State Health Services. State law requires that notification within 24 hours. It has been 10 months.

Mary Liz Eastland acknowledged she had not filed the report.

“Report the 27 deaths,” Kolkhorst told her. “Don’t be above the law. Please, please. I’m begging you.”

Kolkhorst also questioned how the family could believe they were prepared to take on 500 children given 22 outstanding safety deficiencies on their pending license application.

“It never occurred to me”

Edward Eastland acknowledged Tuesday that in the chaos of the night’s vehicle evacuations, it never occurred to him to use the camp’s PA system — which investigators established Monday was functioning throughout the critical window — to order a camp-wide evacuation.

He also admitted that after telling Jumble House counselors to walk to safety at approximately 3:20 a.m. — an order that saved those campers — he failed to pass the same instruction to the counselors at Twins 1 and 2 and Bubble Inn. His explanation: his priority in that moment was driving a truckload of girls away. He intended to return. He could not.

The family also revised upward a figure from Monday’s hearing, placing the number of able-bodied adults gathered at the Uptight Garage area during the flood at approximately 45 — Polish kitchen workers and grounds crew who were never deployed to assist the rescue. Rep. Erin Gámez pressed the point: “What were the adults on Uptight doing other than watching?”

“The antithesis of an evacuation plan”

Rep. Paul Dyson challenged the family’s written flood directive, which instructed counselors to stay in their cabins until notified by the office. When the Eastlands defended the instruction as a precaution against children wandering into floodwater, Dyson was unsparing.

Telling people to stay put, he said, is “the antithesis of an evacuation plan.”

The family disputed other findings, rejecting the word “complacency” and arguing Dick Eastland was blinded by inaccurate rainfall data and faulty river gauges from the National Weather Service and the UGRA. They maintained they were prepared based on historical flood data but could not have anticipated the storm’s magnitude.

Richard Eastland acknowledged mistakenly uploading an old document referencing Guadalupe River campus activities in the new license application, causing additional trauma to victims’ families. The family stated they have no plans to open the Guadalupe River campus this summer and will not open the Cypress Lake campus without a state license.

The 27 deaths at Camp Mystic remain unreported to the state.