“I’m about to lose her,” yelled a volunteer firefighter in Wall, Texas on July 4.
Chief John Manera’s team of unpaid men without swiftwater rescue training were stopping the current from dragging a woman to near-certain death.
In a video capturing the operation, two men are submerged up to their necks, their orange flotation devices keeping their heads just above the waterline. One holds tight to the woman, lying on her back as the deluge of water tears off one of her shoes. The other reaches for a rope. A small line of volunteers — homeowners, farmers, and ranchers who showed up to help — hold the other end.
The Good Samaritans seemingly appeared on their own, Manera said.
“We needed assistance, to tend to the ropes we were using to get this lady to safety,” he said. “I don’t know who might have put the word out but … we were very thankful to the community for helping.”
In 46 years as a firefighter, this was Manera’s first-ever water rescue, he told me afterward.
There are no rivers in the unincorporated community in Tom Green County two hours north of Kerrville, where the worst of the flash floods hit. There are no lakes. No swiftwater rescue team. And few that could reach them in time.
Manera called neighboring Dove Creek Volunteer Fire Department, whose members are more familiar with the intricacies of water rescue, the Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office, the San Angelo Fire Department, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the Texas Game Warden.
Unfortunately, most routes to the stranded woman were inundated with 9-plus inches of rain that fell quickly on Independence Day morning. Everyone had to find alternate approaches to the scene, including a boat from Texas Parks and Wildlife, and Manera.
By the time Manera arrived, one thing was clear: They couldn’t wait for a boat if they were going to get her out of the water alive.
As one rescuer fought to keep his grip on her, another plunged into the water. Three men finally attached the rope to a flotation device they’d helped her put on. The line of volunteers on the other end started heaving. A harrowing 60 seconds later and the woman was carried out of the water.
By the time the rescue boat from Texas Parks and Wildlife arrived, she was already receiving medical care.
‘Help’s Not Coming from the Government’
“Search and rescue in the United States is 99% volunteer,” Chris Boyer, the executive director at the National Association for Search and Rescue, told me in an interview in the days after the floods.
Apparently, that’s been the case since famous historic missions like the search for the Donner party in the 1840s. I’ve covered my fair share of natural disasters as a reporter. Is it weird I didn’t know that? Boyer explained that people often assume search and rescue falls under law enforcement, but it doesn’t.
Volunteer in this case doesn’t mean novice. They’re often highly-trained individuals who work with nonprofit and other organizations to donate their time and expertise. There are simply “very, very few” paid search and rescue positions “outside of the National Park Service,” Boyer said. “There are rangers that have rescue responsibility, but it’s usually ancillary to other duties.”
In Texas, he said, there’s no state law requiring sheriff’s departments or other municipal agencies to “have a search and rescue team, or any standards or training or anything.” So what we’re left with is a bunch of overlapping teams in highly populated areas like Houston but far fewer in areas with fewer residents, like Kerrville.
“They’re an underserved population,” Boyer said.
Last week, well before anyone in Kerrville — and the rest of Central Texas — got a chance to grill hotdogs or wave along parade routes, the remnants of Tropical Storm Berry collided with a stalled frontal boundary over the Hill Country. Moisture from the Gulf of Mexico morphed into downpours as kids on summer break clutched stuffies in Airbnbs along the Guadalupe River. Swimsuits and sunscreen were still tucked in campers’ trunks as the water exploded over its banks. Surviving campers told reporters they shoved their retainers into their pajama pockets as they swam out of their cabins.
By the time most saw the muddy water it was too late to call for help.
As of Thursday, at least 121 people were dead and 160 remained missing.
There’s no question that first responders saved countless lives. But for every Scott Ruskan — the U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer who helped save 165 people at Camp Mystic in the hours after the river rose 26 feet in 45 minutes — there were many more civilians who, out of heroism or necessity, stepped into the fray. Counselors at neighboring Camp La Junta were hailed for getting all 400 boys there to safety. As were bus drivers and coaches from Kerrville Independent School District for driving those hundreds of campers out of the flood zone. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum applauded two young women working at Camp Mystic as part of an international exchange program for keeping child survivors there safe and calm.
Public officials from the local to federal level have called the floods “unprecedented,” saying they had “no reason to believe” the flooding would be so severe. In press conferences, officials have largely rebuffed questions about preparedness, alert systems, and why so many have died. Instead, they’ve touted the numbers of first responders and state agencies on scene.
Wednesday, Gov. Greg Abbott said the state had deployed over 2,200 personnel and more than 1,200 vehicles and equipment assets, with more than 20 state agencies responding to flooding threats.
Yet, much of the search and rescue efforts have been carried out by volunteers like John Manera’s firefighters in Wall.
It was volunteer firefighters who asked that dispatchers issue a “CodeRED” alert to Hunt residents at 4:22 a.m. on July 4, KUT reported. (Some residents told The Texas Standard they didn’t receive any alerts until after 10 a.m., despite that request.)
MARK9 is a Dallas-based SAR team that uses cadaver dogs to perform search and rescue operations at the request of government agencies. About 10 handlers and four dogs were in the field on Thursday, MARK9 team leader Zephrin Allen told The Barbed Wire. Allen himself had been on the ground in Kerrville and said he’d seen between 50 and 75 volunteers.
Alpha SAR, based in the Houston area, also deployed nine personnel and two K-9 dogs. Operation Outreach America said they had 11 volunteers in the field, including two helicopters, four pilots, and four cadaver dogs. The San Antonio-based Alamo Area SAR said they have between 18 to 20 team members, and between six to nine K-9 teams, working at any given time. Team Rubicon, a national humanitarian organization, has more than 60 volunteers aiding flood relief efforts — and expects “easily over” 100 in the next two weeks, a spokesperson told The Barbed Wire.
Meanwhile, faith-based aid group Samaritan’s Purse sent out 95 volunteers for “muck and gut” work, cleaning up flood damage in homes.
Civilian volunteers are the “tip of the spear,” Brian Trascher, vice president of the volunteer-based aid group United Cajun Navy, told The Barbed Wire. The Louisiana-based organization popped up to assist with search and rescue operations in the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, and since has become a staple of natural disasters.
Still, some have vented frustration that more first responders weren’t deployed in advance. Members of the Austin Firefighters Association said they were given an order not to heed calls for pre-deployment along the Guadalupe River. They’ve now called for a vote of no confidence in Austin’s fire chief.
For years, experts have warned of the likelihood of harsher flood events due to climate change, which will require more rescue operations, boots on the ground, and rebuilding missions.
“The extreme rainfall events are getting more intense and frequent because there’s more water vapor in the air,” meteorologist Jeff Masters, who blogs about extreme weather and climate change for Yale Climate Connections, told me in an interview on Tuesday.
“It offloads everything to the volunteer… The feds say ‘it’s not our problem.’ The states won’t be capable, and so the volunteers are still going to pick up the slack for everything.”
One early study of the July 4 floods by ClimaMeter at the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris, France, found that conditions like those leading up to the flash floods are up to 7% wetter than in the past. Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who researches extreme weather in a changing climate, posted on Bluesky that the flooding was “undoubtedly made worse because of climate change.”
“I would estimate that there was 7-20% more rainfall” than there would have been without human interference in the climate, he said.
Masters told me that’s a significant amount when you’re talking about whether flood waters reach the top of structures like summer camp cabins.
“We’re not used to seeing death tolls like that in the U.S. in freshwater flooding events,” Masters said, “but I think we’re going to have to start getting used to these death tolls.”
On top of that, the Independence Day floods mark the largest-scale natural disaster since President Donald Trump announced in June that he wanted to “wean off” the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Trump activated FEMA on Sunday, but sources in the agency told Marisa Kabas with The Handbasket that, as of Monday, “barely any staff” had been deployed to Kerr County, and the Acting Administrator David Richardson “is nowhere to be found.”
One current FEMA employee told The Handbasket they’d typically have already had hundreds of people on the scene, including search and rescue.
As CNN reported, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently enacted a rule requiring her personal sign-off for every grant over $100,000. (Weather disasters now routinely exceed $1 billion in damage.) FEMA officials needed Noem’s approval before sending regionally-stationed Urban Search and Rescue crews to Texas — a previously standard practice. Noem didn’t authorize the deployment until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, sources told CNN.
FEMA, Boyer realizes, has gotten a bad wrap. But since 1979, it has been the great equalizer for poorer and less populated parts of the country, like Kerrville. For example, Texas Task Force One sent out the call for aid to the Austin Fire Department and to other agencies — they’re a statewide urban search and rescue team under direction of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which also coordinates the state’s swiftwater rescue program and the helicopter search and rescue team. The group has a $7 million cache of supplies thanks to FEMA.
Take that away, and you’re putting more strain on volunteers, just as deadlier weather events are happening more frequently.
“It offloads everything to the volunteer,” Boyer said. “The feds say ‘it’s not our problem.’ The states won’t be capable, and so the volunteers are still going to pick up the slack for everything.”
That volunteers will bear the brunt of deadlier, costlier weather disasters is just another part of our new, political and climate changed reality, Masters agreed.
“Everyone needs to understand that this is a whole new world that we’re on the doorstep of, life is going to change for everybody,” Masters said. “You really need to find a local situation and community that is strong and will support each other because help’s not coming from the government.”
‘We Can Use This Canoe to Help Some People’
I’ve been thinking about our ability to survive climate change-fueled weather disasters since September, when Hurricane Helene hit the Carolinas. I stayed up way too late the night the storm made its way into Western North Carolina, watching video after video of severe flooding in the Appalachian Mountains, a place where I’d gone to school, gotten my first job as a reporter, and crossed from adolescence to adulthood.
It felt impossible. Even more so than the July 4 floods — Central Texas is one of the most flood-prone places in the country. But a hurricane in the mountains? And in a place like Asheville, dubbed a climate haven for its moderate temperatures for the south and distance from the coast?
The next morning, my husband Chris forwarded me an update from his sister, Sally Warren, who lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina, with her husband Eric and three children. They were safe, with food and water, no power, and patchy cell service. Only their basement flooded.
“People were in danger, holding onto their gutters and in their attics, and it was up to Eric in his canoe.”
But their neighborhood was submerged, unreachable by emergency responders.
Eric had pulled 10 people from the water in a canoe he’d randomly gotten for free from a local summer camp and fixed up himself. Just months earlier, he’d taken lessons in paddling and basic safety.
He and another neighbor used a chainsaw to cut one couple out of their attic. Several were now sleeping at their house. They’d turned their carport into a home base.
On the morning of Sept. 27, 2024 the Warrens woke as the winds from Hurricane Helene died down. They walked outside to see, with relief, that their house was intact, but flood waters had risen high into the valleys of their hilly neighborhood. Their neighbor Stacy approached, soaked after swimming from her sodden house towards their relative dry patch. She was worried about her chickens and ducks, which she’d left in cages on her countertops, just above where the water had risen.
“So I said, ‘Well I’ll go get my canoe and I’ll take you down and we’ll get those out of your house and they can stay with us,’” Eric told me later.
That was when he first realized, “Oh, we can use this canoe to help some people.”
As he ferried Stacy back down the hill, Eric saw another neighbor, Rose, standing on her front porch, water up to her chest.
“I’m coming to get you!” he shouted.
As flood water steadily climbed inside her house, Rose had packed a bag, grabbed a life jacket, put their cats in a carrier, and stood on the porch. The current was so strong she didn’t dare cross it. Instead, she blew the whistle on her life jacket and activated the SOS on her Garmin. Her husband, a paramedic, received the alert but couldn’t get to her. Rose watched as multiple boats, including a jon boat — an aluminum fishing boat with a flat bottom — with a motor, failed to reach her.
Eric, fresh from his tidal current experience, paddled over, got her in the canoe, and back to their house on relatively high ground.
Afterward, several neighbors congregated where the road disappeared below the water, when a kayaker yelled, “Call 911, there are people in the water!”
Sally tried on her cell, which still had a charge. But the call dropped each time. OK, she thought. No one realizes we’re out here and need help. It’s just us.
“It was weird,” my sister-in-law told me. “Your brain goes into just trying to protect you at that point. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it… that people were in danger, holding onto their gutters and in their attics, and it was up to Eric in his canoe.”
‘One of the First Things That Shut Down’
To many Americans, FEMA is the group that shows up in the aftermath of a disaster wearing jackets with white letters on the back, handing out checks to people whose houses have been flattened by tornados or waterlogged by hurricanes.
But the agency touches nearly every aspect of natural disaster response.
Roughly 85% of fire departments across the country are volunteer or mostly volunteer, according to a national database run by FEMA. FEMA also runs the National Fire Academy that trains them for free.
“It is specifically there to help small volunteer fire departments. When you sign up and you get accepted to a class there, FEMA pays for everything. They pay for your air flight. They pay for your housing,” said Boyer. “That’s how we get trained, standardized, credentialed firefighters into small communities.”
But under the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, “that was one of the first things that shut down.”
The academy abruptly closed in March. The reason cited was travel expenses for non-employees: the Trump administration didn’t want to pay to fly volunteer firefighters to the academy. After pressure from Congress, it reopened in June.
Also under FEMA is the aforementioned Texas Task Force One, whose protocol is to call in task force members ahead of large-scale disaster events like the July 4 floods.
The members respond to the requests by pre-rostering specially trained rescue workers for deployment.
Bob Nicks, president of the Austin Firefighters Association who has nearly 40 years experience as a firefighter in Central Texas, told The Barbed Wire that after answering the call, task force members typically head to the county at risk and begin surveying areas that are expected to have the highest impact. Nicks said in past deployments, task force members have connected with community members to let them know about possible emergencies. They also start mapping out routes and have their rescue equipment in place and ready to go once a natural disaster begins.
But in the days before the flood, the Austin Fire Department didn’t answer the call from Texas Task Force One like in past years. Nicks said that on July 2, two days before the flooding began, Austin firefighters received a GroupMe text from Texas Task Force One. Austin Fire has “an agreement with the state to say yes when they call, unless there’s exceptional reasons that you shouldn’t say yes.” Nicks said this time around there was a standing order from Austin Fire Chief Joel Baker from June to deny deployments until the end of the fiscal year due to budgetary constraints. So firefighters did not respond to the request.
The same thing happened again the next day, on July 3, as they got another request.
Refusing to answer a request for pre-deployment goes against best-practices in emergency services, Nicks explained, even if no one knows the severity of a weather event in advance.
“The whole nature of emergency response is to anticipate problems and pre-deploy, so you have resources on the scene when it happens, rather than reacting to when it’s already occurred,” he said.
In an interview with KXAN, Baker said there was no delay and that his department sent three rescue swimmers and will continue to support the response to the floods in Central Texas.
Nicks disagrees.
“The fire chief, in my professional assessment … caused lives to be lost.”
‘I See You, and I’m Going to Help You’
In those early hours on Sept. 27 as Helene’s waters continued dumping more than a foot of rainfall along the Appalachians, Jeri and Raymond Parker, both in their late 60s, woke up to Clear Creek on the top step of their porch in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Raymond knew it was too late to get his truck out, so they called 911.
The dispatcher, however, told them no one would be coming.
“I said, ‘I see you, and I’m going to help you.’ But man, I knew I was either going to be able to help them or I was going to have to leave them.”
Raymond grabbed a knife and cut into the ceiling as the water crested the kitchen cabinets. They pulled themselves into their attic, then Raymond broke a hole in the eve, and waved his arm out.
That’s when Eric, my brother in law, saw a flash of red. Raymond’s sleeve.
“I had a really sickening feeling when I saw them, and I paddled up right below their window. I said, ‘I see you, and I’m going to help you.’ But man, I knew I was either going to be able to help them or I was going to have to leave them,” Eric said. “I knew I wasn’t going to put myself into danger and do something foolish, that was a really, really awful feeling. Just knowing it was going to be one of those two.”
There’s a reason for natural disaster training. Members of Texas Task Force One participate in over 25,000 hours of training per year. Their members have nearly 30 specialized boats for swiftwater rescue and specialized ropes and equipment to support tethered rescues when waters are dangerous.
Many of the volunteer organizations, like the newer Operation Outreach America that responded to Hurricane Helene, participate in regular training. Last month, as The New York Times reported, many newer disaster rescue organizations gathered in Tennessee to train and discuss better coordination in emergency situations.
Just this week, officials in Kerr County stressed the importance of volunteers with appropriate training — because rescue teams can’t afford to stop searches to rescue untrained people.
Of course, even those with training are putting themselves in danger: Marble Falls Volunteer Fire Chief Michael Phillips, who served in his role for 30 years, remained missing as of Thursday. His vehicle was swept away by floodwaters while Phillips responded to emergency calls on Saturday, according to KVUE.
Boyer, with the National Association for Search and Rescue, said people who want to volunteer often “don’t realize that they are risking their future lives.” For example, if a volunteer has an open sore that isn’t under the proper protective gear, bacteria in silt exposed by floods can cause an infection and result in medical bills.
That’s a problem for even trained volunteers because in most states, Texas included, there are no protections like workers compensation or disability. If you get hurt, even if you’re with a volunteer group called in by a sheriff or government official, “that sheriff’s not going to take care of you, that county is not going to take care of you, that state is not going to take care of you,” Boyer said. “That volunteer now has gone out to be a steward in their community, taking risk, and now they’re victimized by that stewardship.”
My brother-in-law Eric called his canoe instructor later to thank him — he credits the lessons for being able to help when he did. Luckily, he and his neighbors found a way to safely get the Parkers out of their flooded home. They tracked down a chainsaw, and — balancing on the porch roof — they cut a hole large enough for Jeri and Raymond to climb through and into the black canoe.
‘All These People Coming Together’
When I first learned about Eric’s heroics, I was on a short break from teaching a class of graduate journalism students about themes and universal truths. I’d just told them the old adage about cliches: They’re trite on the word level, but inescapable when you get to concept and form.
As I dismissed everyone for lunch, I re-read the text, stopping on the canoe.
In the parable of the drowning man, an acolyte in the midst of a flood waits for the Lord to save him as he turns away people’s offers of help. Some show up in boats, others in helicopters. In at least one version of the tale, help is offered from one of the townsfolk in a canoe. In another, it’s a pickup truck.
All variations end in the same fashion: The man drowns. After he dies, he asks why God didn’t save him despite his faith in the Almighty. God responds that he’d sent boats and helicopters and canoes. What else could he do?
Many have noted the incredible, life-saving acts of service in Texas over the last week, as they did in North Carolina last fall. It has left me thinking, again, about the canoes we may be missing to help us survive climate change.
Then I found an article in Yes magazine by Madeline Ostrander.
“Sense of place, community, and rootedness aren’t just poetic ideas,” Ostrander wrote. “They are survival mechanisms.”
Ostrander reported that “place attachment,” or bonding between individuals and their environments, can help individuals and communities prepare for, cope with, and recover from crises like climate-change fueled disasters, according to several studies on the topic. Belonging to a community, it turns out, can increase our sense of collective responsibility when disaster strikes.
The science isn’t conclusive — it never is — and there’s some evidence that such attachments can also blind people to the risks of living in certain places. Camp Mystic, the nearly 100-year-old Christian girls camp along the banks of the Guadalupe River in the hardest-hit area of the flood, had seen similar floods before. It sits on a piece of land that’s known to be “extremely hazardous” as a flood risk, and 1.3 million Texas homes are also “susceptible to dangerous floodwaters” across the state, according to a state estimate reported by The Texas Tribune.
But on the flip side, some researchers have suggested that place attachment is under-utilized as a way to engage people about climate resilience.
“Whether they realize it or not, a lot of the connection people feel here is a connection to nature,” said David Koger, a digital product leader who lives in San Antonio and spent Tuesday as a volunteer canvassing the banks of the Guadalupe River in Sisterdale. That’s about 30 miles east of Kerrville.
“Everyone has floated the river, gone to summer camps, spent time in the Hill Country,” he told me. “People go there because they find it a peaceful place.”
Koger was joined by dozens of other civilians assigned sections of a grid by the Sisterdale Volunteer Fire Department. Their hope was to find any signs of the more than 160 people missing. His small group walked miles of debris-strewn terrain and marked the locations of three places on GPS that warranted further investigation. They thought two were likely animals, but they weren’t sure about the other one.
To have that morbid experience in a place where people typically go to relax was jarring, Koger said. And why he thinks others like himself — with zero or limited experience in search and rescue — volunteered.
“All these people coming together doing what they can to restore it,” Koger said, “I think there’s a level of ‘I need to fix this place so I can have it again, (so) that it exists.’”
That kind of Texas Strong mentality is now a key to surviving our new climate, said Masters, the meteorologist, as are more practical considerations like whether local municipalities are financially stable.
Rachel Lane saw a Facebook post asking for riders to assist with mounted search and rescue after the floods, and she told The Barbed Wire she knew she had to go.
“Horseback riding isn’t often a useful skill in 2025 — and not every horse is suited to search and rescue,” said Lane, who joined Kerr County Floods Mounted Search and Rescue Volunteers. “Horses like that are rare. I’m lucky enough to have both the training and a horse I trust with my life.”
On Monday night she got the call that her services were needed, and along with two other rider friends, loaded up a trailer at 2 a.m. and headed for Ingram.
After their neighbors were safely out of the flood waters, Sally and Eric opened their doors to everyone in the neighborhood. They had a generator, and their house was one of the few that was dry without a felled tree poking through some portion. They also had a freezer full of chickens they’d raised and harvested that spring.
They served three meals a day for seven households under their carport on folding tables with paper clothes, and they took sack lunches to neighbors whose houses had flooded.
“It was such a tragedy, unprecedented, none of us ever expected it, and hopefully we’ll never see it again. But man, it brought out some of the most encouraging and beautiful times,” Sally said.
“A community is a bunch of different people with different skills. No one was hoarding resources, they would have given you the shirt off their backs,” she added.
“We couldn’t give enough.”
The Barbed Wire Senior Editor Leslie Rangel and News Fellow Riya Misra contributed to this report, along with Ella Robinson at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit newsroom at American University.
Correction: This story previous misspelled David Koger’s name as Kroger. The Barbed Wire regrets the error.