911 calls capture minute-by-minute desperation of deadly Texas floods as callers beg for rescue

The earliest calls feel almost like premonitions, fragile voices that foreshadow the terror that would soon sweep across the Hill Country.

Editor's note: EDITOR’S NOTE:  This story contains audio clips and descriptions of 911 calls that may be distressing. Listener discretion is advised.

Kerrville, Texas (CNN) — Heartbreaking pleas for help poured into the Kerrville, Texas, police department’s Telecommunications Center as the deadly catastrophic floods swept across Texas Hill Country in the early hours of July 4.

The recordings, released by the Kerrville Police Department on Friday, are uploaded in the order the calls came in, tracing the flood emergency minute by minute and the rising terror of people trapped as water climbed first by the inch, then by the foot through homes and cabins.

The earliest calls feel almost like premonitions, fragile voices that foreshadow the terror that would soon sweep across the Hill Country. They begin with an eerie calm — soft-spoken warnings from residents who sensed the rising water but could not yet see the catastrophe gathering in the dark.

Scott Towery, general manager of the River Inn Resort, called at 2:52 a.m. CT to warn that more than 100 guests were at the property as the water surged at an alarming pace.

His follow-up call came moments later, his voice taut with urgency, comparing the rising flood to one of the region’s worst on record.

“We’ve got about 130 people out on site and a big flood coming. We’re waking them up now,” he tells the dispatcher. “Our dam went underwater two and a half hours ago … It’s really high, like the 1998-flood-type high.”

Then the shift became unmistakable.

The next call was barely a call at all — a faint, almost indecipherable voice tangled in the sound of rushing water. The dispatcher, listening to nothing but that open line and the relentless sloshing beneath it.

What began as a cautious warning quickly escalated into panic, as callers pleaded for rescue while dispatchers, repeating the same urgent directive to get to higher ground, struggled to keep their voices steady.

“We cannot,” one frightened caller replies. “There’s water everywhere. We cannot move.”

The devastating flash flooding in the early hours of the Fourth of July killed at least 117 people across Kerr County, including young children at summer camp, as parts of the Guadalupe River rose from about 3 feet to almost 30 feet in just 45 minutes. Another 28 deaths were reported across five other counties.

Together, the recordings form a harrowing portrait of a night when the water rose faster than help could reach.

Desperate calls, screams, and lives hanging by a thread

Across the Hill Country, people clung to life however they could, according to the 911 calls – which police have warned are unredacted and “highly distressing.”

Cars became unsteady rafts, lifting and drifting with survivors perched on their roofs. A floating bed carried people in the dark. Others scrambled onto a pergola and an AC unit, gripping whatever rose above the water. Entire cabins broke loose and drifted like boats, while some survivors clung to trees and bushes, holding on with numb fingers as the current tried to tear them away.

Just two people were on staff at the Kerrville Police Department Telecommunications Center to take their 911 calls when they started coming in at 2:52 a.m. on July 4, Kerrville Police Chief Chris McCall said in a video statement Thursday.

“Some callers did not survive,” the chief said.

Dispatchers lurched from one call to the next, the raw panic in each voice carving itself into permanent memory. The recordings grow darker as the night deepens, each voice trembling more than the last.

One call came from a man who woke to the rush of water in his apartment. He is in full panic, crying, screaming and begging for help. “I need help. I can’t get out. I’m scared, please.”

A desperate meow rises behind him, the tiny voice of the cat whose cries punctuate his terror. “All I have is my cat with me. Please I’m really scared. Please, help me, please. I can’t get out of… I need help, I can’t swim.”

When the dispatcher tells him she has to disconnect to answer other emergencies, he begs her not to leave him alone. “Please don’t let go of me,” he pleads, sobbing. She stays on for eight minutes before the line eventually breaks off.

Elsewhere in the storm, another voice trembles onto the line, shock settling into every syllable.

“I’m stuck in the tree. The river is flooded,” he says. “I think my wife got stuck, and I’m pretty sure she’s dead. I am freaking out. The river is so high.”

And then there was the sound of someone fighting for breath inside a room filling like a sealed tank.

“There’s water up to my head now…I’m stuck in this room,” a man says, his voice shaking. When the dispatcher asks if he can climb to the roof, he lets out a helpless, exasperated “No.”

A window had burst somewhere in the room, and he describes the water forcing its way in, flooding faster, rising higher.

“What the f**k am I going to do?” he cries. The dispatcher offers the only instruction he can: “Try to keep your head above the water.” Moments later, the caller begins to swear and appears to hyperventilate before the line clicks.

Everyone fought to survive, and dispatchers bore the weight of every scream and every breaking voice as they tried to help. But the flood left them with agonizingly few options.

When one caller, a woman who watched as the floodwaters rose closer and closer to her home, asked if she should leave in her car, the dispatcher could only offer the truth.

“Unfortunately, the weather is being so unpredictable,” she tells the caller. “Nobody was expecting it to flood like this.”

“The best thing you can do right now is stay where you are,” the dispatcher says. “That sounds terrible, but there is so much flooding happening on Highway 39 that cars are being washed away, and I would hate for you to become one of those people.”

Callers plead for children’s lives as camp cabins flood

In the midst of the raging floodwaters and the haunting calls from screaming victims struggling to survive, two children’s camps became epicenters of terror.

By the end of the tragedy, the flooding deaths included 25 girls and two counselors who were swept away from Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian camp situated along the banks of the Guadalupe River.

The first call from Camp Mystic came at 3:57 a.m., an astonishingly calm voice reporting that some campers were stranded on a hill while cabins across the bridge were already filling with water.

Another caller, this one confused and frantic, explained that their cabins were flooding while terrified voices and screams echoed in the background. The dispatcher, unable to do anything else, simply urged her to go as high as they could.

A resident a mile downriver from the camp called and reported finding two young campers who had been swept from the camp.

“We’ve already got two little girls who have come down the river, and we’ve gotten to them,” a woman told a dispatcher. “But I’m not sure how many else are out there.”

And then a Camp Mystic director’s voice broke through the line, telling the dispatcher that as many as 20 to 40 people were missing – faces, names, lives suddenly reduced to numbers in a river.

At Camp La Junta, a boys’ camp along the South Fork of the Guadalupe River, the desperation was just as immediate. One caller’s voice rushed through the line: “We need desperate help. We’ve got kids trapped in cabins that we cannot get to…Now, now, now … we’ve got tons of small children … Please, please, please.”

The cabins were beginning to cave in, the caller said. With the floodwaters pressing in, there was no time to wait.

Another caller, clinging to the rafters of a cabin rooftop, pleaded for the children beneath him. “We are 100% trapped,” he said. “I’m not worried about myself. I’m worried about these kids right here, because we cannot have one of these kids falling under the water.”

In every call, the helplessness was palpable and the heartbreak immediate. It was a flood that spared no one, not even children, taken in the dark before anyone could reach them.

The families of more than a dozen Camp Mystic victims filed lawsuits against the camp and its owners last month.

Attorney Mark Lanier, who represents some of the families, said the release of the 911 calls may shed light on the tragic events of July 4, though it will likely deepen the parents’ grief.

“Our clients continue to suffer unimaginable heartbreak and grief from the loss of their babies,” Lanier told CNN on Friday, emphasizing that the families remain determined to uncover every factor that led to the deaths of their daughters and to hold those responsible accountable.

Overwhelmed dispatchers “did their best”

The uncertain reassurance from the two dispatchers at the Kerrville Police Department Telecommunications Center hangs in the recordings like a held breath, a testament to both the limits of the system and the unbearable human cost of that night.

The dispatchers answered a total of 435 calls over the next six hours, the police chief said, including more than 100 between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. The 911 calls are being released to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests, McCall said.

Some of the calls were transferred to a nearby dispatch center to help relieve the call load, as is protocol in high call volume situations, McCall added.

After dispatchers got “the basic critical information” and could no longer help over the phone, they faced “a difficult decision to disconnect and move on to the next call,” McCall said.

“I’m immensely proud of our telecommunications operators,” McCall, the police chief, said. “These public safety team members showed incredible perseverance as they faced high call volumes and did their best to provide assistance and comfort to every caller.”

The City of Kerrville issued a statement acknowledging that the 911 calls’ release “will bring up strong emotions,” but that it “presents another moment to affirm who we are: a united, resilient community determined to recover and rebuild.”

The chief also encouraged those who have struggled with the tragedy to get support, saying all members of the police department have participated in peer support meetings.

The local emergency response to the July Fourth flooding was heavily scrutinized by the community, who alleged local officials were unprepared for the weather event that ripped the rolling countryside to shreds.

In September, Texas lawmakers enacted new camp safety laws aimed at addressing gaps in disaster preparedness by strengthening requirements and streamlining the emergency response. The owners of Camp Mystic said this week they plan to exceed those requirements when a portion of the camp reopens next summer, according to The Associated Press.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN’s Taylor Galgano, Sophia Peyser, Caroll Alvarado, Maria Sole Campinoti, Taylor Romine, Stephanie Matarazzo, Graham Hurley, Sarah Moon, Julia Vargas Jones, Sarah Dewberry, Andy Rose, Toni Odejimi, Rebekah Riess, Isa Mudannayake, Ellen Rittiner and Christina Zdanowicz contributed to this report.

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