1w ago

Camp Mystic asked to remove buildings from government flood maps despite risk

www.npr.org /2025/07/13/nx-s1-5465635/camp-mystic-flood-maps-fema-texas-flooding

The federal government allowed Camp Mystic, the all-girls summer camp along the Guadalupe River, to remove multiple buildings from government flood maps, even though private data suggests the flood threat remained, and was even worse than the government reported, according to documents and data NPR has reviewed.

The camp requested that FEMA, the agency responsible for creating maps that help warn Americans where water might rise, remove more than a dozen buildings from what FEMA designates a floodplain at least twice in 2013, 2019 and 2020, the documents show. That last request in 2020 coincided with a major expansion during which the camp built a number of new structures but does not appear to have taken down any cabins from dangerous flood areas.

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All federal support should be pulled from these rescue efforts. They dug their own river bed let them lie in it.
- Yeah, fuck the victims because the corpo was greedy! /s
  
  No. There was no corpos involved in this. This was a tragedy entirely of their own making. 2020 FEMA marks their shit in a flood plain. Biden offers them money for an alarm they turn it down because they don't want to be 'bought off' by Biden. Then the state offered them the same fucking money "but not from Biden this time". They turned it down again because they thought it was too expensive. Then they fired all the people that were supposed to answer the emergency calls. Then they had the buildings marked in a flood zone "mysteriously" no longer in the flood zone to avoid insurance issues. Fuck these people and you and everyone else defending this utter stupidity and wasting our money on idiots who don't deserve or want it.
  Stop being a fucking enabler.
This is another sharpie map moment. Nature and physics doesn’t give a shit about what map you’re on. The maps are designed to help people make well informed decisions. Purposely ignoring it and sticking your head in the sand just means there’s a greater likelihood you get fucked, not that it’ll magically go another way.
- They did it because they didn't want to have to pay for flood insurance. They didn't give a shit about the kids' lives and just wanted to save money.
- This "asking to be removed from flood maps" is as common as people disputing their property valuation for tax purposes. In the immediate term, no owner wants to go from not in a flood plain to on a flood plain. Of course the reality is that maps don't dictate nature's behavior, but property value goes down in addition to property expense going up.
  One possible solution is government buying out flood prone areas, but I've only seen this happen in more affluent communities. This still leaves some risk, though, since there will always be a threshold where there is some flood (or hurricane or wildfire or windstorm or hailstorm...) risk, but not enough risk to be relocated by the government.
  
  Doesn’t matter why they wanted to be removed. At that point they knew they were in the flood plain and did nothing. Hell, they built more.
  
  One possible solution is government buying out flood prone areas
  The proper solution is fining anyone stupid enough to ask to be removed from a flood map 300% of their gross earnings during the past decade, and submitting them to every possible inspection, since they're surely trying to hide other criminal idiocies.
The biggest difference between FEMA's maps and those created by the private sector, is that FEMA does not map rainfall or flash flooding,...
I think that the biggest difference is the fact that private companies are more difficult for wealthy Americans to influence to protect profits.
- No, the biggest difference is that those privately made maps are bespoke - ordered for specific regions. Fema has to do the entire continental US with an higher focus on all populated areas while being continuously underfunded by malicious assholes in congress. So their modeling is mostly based on elevation purely out of expediency and because that information is still extremely valuable. It doesn't account for rainfall and flash flooding because that kind of modelling is expensive and time consuming to perform for even small areas.
  
  Agreed, which probably means they were on it because of stuff like documented previous flooding (like when it flooded in the fuckin' 80s and girls died) and that makes it all the more egregious that they worked to get themselves off of it. The camp owner is starting to seem less like a hero and more like someone feeling fully warranted shame and fearing divine judgment.
  
  https://nypost.com/2025/07/04/us-news/camp-mystic-attended-by-daughters-of-texas-political-elite-for-decades/

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