Liberal Forum

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... or/?_pml=1

So you can too. Had to cut it to 4000 characters. I commented to a coworker Texas Republicans regret they did not heed the warnings and vote to fund safety.  He said "There you go with the politics again" .  Kids are dead..

In the dark, amid screams, a Camp Mystic counselor had 16 girls and one headlamp

Camp Mystic counselor Ainslie Bashara, 19, wraps her arms around two girls from her cabin on July 3, hours before the flood. (Courtesy of Ainslie Bashara)
As the Texas floodwaters rushed into their cabins, the teen counselors braved the unknown.

The first drops of rain had yet to fall when Ainslie Bashara, a counselor at Camp Mystic, noticed that one of the younger girls had begun to tear up. They were walking back to their cabin, Giggle Box, as another storm swelled over the Texas Hill Country. The girl feared what was coming, so Ainslie wrapped an arm around her.

“It’s just heat lightning,” Ainslie, 19, recalled assuring her that evening. “There’s nothing to it.”

It was just past 9 p.m. on July 3, the start of Ainslie’s night off from tending to Giggle Box’s 16 “littles.” She popped inside to grab her backpack just as the girls, all between 8 and 10, began to brush their teeth and slip on their pajamas. Ainslie said goodbye and headed out for a break with friends. By the time she came back, shortly after midnight, she had to sprint. The storm had begun to pound the 99-year-old Christian camp situated along the Guadalupe River. The cabin was no more than 600 feet from the bank.

Ainslie had arrived a week earlier for a month-long stay. She couldn’t remember a time when Mystic hadn’t been part of her life. Her aunt and older sister had attended, and she’d started at age 7, spending 10 Julys riding horses and catching perch, exchanging friendship bracelets and learning about Jesus. Her younger sister, entering her last year as a camper, had begged Ainslie to return this summer as a counselor.

Ainslie, pictured in 2023, had first come to Camp Mystic at age 7. (Courtesy of Ainslie Bashara)

Ainslie, then 11, holds up a sign during a summer stay at Camp Mystic. (Courtesy of Ainslie Bashara)
So now, inside Giggle Box, she changed out of her wet clothes and into shorts and a T-shirt, quietly sliding into her bed in a corner near the front door. The girls lay still in their beds, some snuggled with stuffed animals. Ainslie stared out the window. A native Texan, she’d seen hundreds of summer squalls, but this one felt heavier. The thunder cracked like fireworks inside the cabin.

Ainslie couldn’t sleep, braced for a frightened camper to slink over in need of comfort. The lightning lit the room like flashbulbs, and at each strike, she scanned faces around the room. Then she noticed a car pass by, a bizarre sight at that hour. She glanced at her watch: 1:58 a.m.

She soon heard another noise that, at first, felt out of place. Two nearby cabins housed Mystic’s youngest campers, and the 8-year-olds had started shrieking.

Ainslie, a rising college sophomore and her cabin’s oldest counselor, hurried across the room to her two co-counselors, who’d each just graduated from high school. Both were restless. “This storm is really bad,” she said, preparing them to help console their girls if they, too, began to break down.

They always left the windows open to keep the cabin cool, and now, as Ainslie lay on her bed, she noticed older kids from another cabin running up the road with blankets and pillows.

“Are we staying or leaving?” she yelled through the window.

“Stay in your cabin!” she recalled a staff member shouting back.

All the girls in Giggle Box had woken up, she said, and they were terrified.

“We need to leave,” the girls started saying. “We need to leave.”

“Our cabin is safe. The other girls’ cabin is not,” Ainslie tried to explain. “That’s why they’re leaving, but we are staying.”