Home Care In Ingram, TX

The catastrophic flooding in Central Texas has left over 170 people missing, with families desperately searching for loved ones like Bill Huston, whose dog was found, and the discovery of a pill bottle belonging to another missing person highlighting the wide-ranging devastation.

More than 170 people are still missing due to the Texas flooding disaster in Central Texas.

A Fort Worth couple tells Fox 4’s Peyton Yager that they tried to call their friend early on Friday morning, when they heard reports of a devastating flood in Kerr County.

They haven't heard from him and are losing hope.

61-year-old Bill Huston and his RV were parked feet from the Guadalupe River in the town of Ingram, where Huston and his corgi, Sage, slept at night.

Russell and Melissa Offringa are waiting for an update on their best friend. Sage's body has been found, but Huston is still missing.

What they're saying:

Russell and Huston met 40 years ago at Navy bootcamp and then reconnected when the two moved to North Texas.

Huston stayed in Aledo before moving down to Kerr County's HTR Texas Hill Country RV Park earlier this year, for a construction job.

"Bill thought so much of his dog. It was precious to him. You know the last thing he was doing was holding onto her," said Russell.

"You have to have hope because what else do you have? But yeah, it's tough."

The campground is cleared as all the trailers and cabins are now gone due to the flooding.

"It’s the silent moments when the data is not coming in. You aren't getting any more information. That is when it really hits home," said Melissa.

Missing person's pill bottle

Dig deeper:

Still unaccounted for from the fourth of July flood is one, Al Iorio.

His home in Ingram, Texas was washed away.

Five miles downstream, a Prosper woman, Elizabeth Copeland, was visiting a Kerrville RV Park and found this green pill bottle in the debris, prescribed to Al Iorio.

"Just something told me to go look up the name on the bottle and I did. The first post that came up on Facebook was a lady on Facebook," said Copeland.

That woman was Iorio's friend looking for any sign of him and Copeland met up with the woman in Kerrville.

"Closure could sometimes be a medicine bottle, or a jersey, or a t-shirt."

Search continues

What's next:

Days into the grueling search, families, like the Offringa's, are yearning for that closure.

At the same time, struggling to process the likely outcome, wishing those along the river had more warning.

"There was just nowhere to go," said Russell.

Huston’s coworkers in Kerr County are on the ground searching for him and providing updates to the Offringa's. The Fort Worth couple actually went down to visit Huston a few weeks ago and stayed at the same RV park.

An RV park that is now gone.

The Source: Information in this article was provided from interviews conducted by FOX 4's Peyton Yager.

For the past 30 years, Lamps & Shades has offered customers a unique shopping experience in the Hill Country. Located off the Guadalupe River in Historic Old Ingram Loop, the shop was once filled floor to with lighting, decor and trinkets.

But on July 4, Central Texas storms flooded the river, causing the store to flood.

On Tuesday afternoon, the store's owners, Johanna and Wright Rouselle and their daughter, Amy Grace Ulman, were hard at work cleaning up the mud, salvaging what could be salvaged and taking it all in.

Ulman described the experience as "unthinkable."

"Just getting your head around how this happened in the middle of the night with no warning," Ulman said. "People asleep in their beds and just washed away."

Ulman spoke with a CBS Texas crew during a break from pulling items out of the muck left behind by the river. On Friday, the shop was filled with nearly four feet of water.

"There are so many tragedies around the world all the time, and it's hard to take it all in," Ulman said. "But when it hits close to your home and the people you know, it's just different."

Inventory isn't all Ulman's family has lost. Some of their friends are among the more than 100 victims of the catastrophic floods. Ulman said this unimaginably hard time for her family has been met with an outpouring of support for the whole community.

"There's a lot of amazing communities around the world, but this is special," Ulman said. "People really are just showing up out of every corner."

Adding to the hardship, Ulman said her parents just learned their insurance doesn't cover floods.

Still, she said her family will figure it out and they're hopeful about the future. But she said she hopes the stories of heartache and resilience from the Hill Country won't soon be forgotten.

"I know in a couple of weeks, the world will have moved on," Ulman said. "I just hope that people keep praying and keep the support up."

An RV park in Ingram, Texas, was swept away with families "reportedly still in their campers" on Friday amid life-threatening, catastrophic flooding that hit Central Texas.

Newsweek reached out to the Kerr County Sheriff's Office by phone for comment.

Why It Matters

Heavy rain battered Central Texas on Friday morning, with some areas reporting as much as 15 inches of rain, prompting National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologists to issue a flash flood emergency, a more severe alert than a flash flood warning.

The Kerr County Sheriff's Office confirmed fatalities from the floods but said it would not release further information until next of kin was notified.

What to Know

A video shared on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday, shows raging flood waters bathed in flashing emergency lights where an RV park used to be in Ingram, Texas.

"New info out of Ingram, TX is hard to stomach," CBS Austin meteorologist Avery Tomasco posted on X with the video. "This is video from the back of Howdy's Bar and Chill restaurant. There is usually a large RV park here, closer to the Guadalupe River. It was all swept away with families reportedly still in their campers."

Numerous water rescues have occurred across central Texas, NWS meteorologist James Wingenroth told Newsweek.

Read more Weather

A report on X from News 4 San Antonio claimed that a Kerrville family was still missing after floodwaters swept their house away.

Earlier in the morning, the Kerr County Sheriff's Office confirmed fatalities from the floods in a post on Facebook.

"This is a catastrophic flooding event in Kerr County. We can confirm fatalities but will not release further information until next of kin are notified," the post said. "Our Office is working with a wide variety of local and state agencies to respond to calls and rescues. The entire county is an extremely active scene. Residents are encouraged to shelter in place and not attempt travel. Those near creeks, streams, and the Guadalupe River should immediately move to higher ground."

Much of Central Texas remains under flood-related weather warnings as of late Friday morning.

What People Are Saying

Tomasco in a follow-up post on X: "This flood event continues. Torrential rain wrapping into the western Hill Country, including Kerrville which is still in a flood emergency. Numerous other flood warnings in effect. Gillespie, Mason, Llano counties favored for heaviest rain next 1-2 hours"

NWS San Angelo in a flash flood warning issued Friday morning: "Move to higher ground now. Act quickly to protect your life."

What Happens Next

Guadalupe River water levels are expected to fall quickly after peaking on Friday, but the San Saba River could remain in flood stage through the weekend.

David Carpenter knows every piece of the Guadalupe River; his family’s roots in the Hill Country town of Ingram predate Texas. He grew up learning the currents, finding the holes for catfish, jumping from rope swings with his friends and, later, his children. But his time at the river is different now.

Since July 4, Carpenter has greeted each dawn by reading his daily devotional and praying. Then he makes the twelve-mile drive and approaches the banks of the river alone. With a four-foot saw in hand, the sawmill owner hacks his way through dense cypress trees and hundred-foot tall debris piles in the most dangerous areas of flood destruction. He spent the first days on the river shouting into heaps of brush, tears falling freely, calling out the names of missing friends and campers. He never heard any responses. One evening, he had to be pulled off the river because he was racked with full-body cramps from lack of food and water. But he refuses to ease up.

In the hours after flooding swept the county, Carpenter saw the parents of missing Mystic campers waiting and hoping for answers at the Ingram elementary school, a reunification center for victims and families. “It broke me,” he told me. “I prayed with them. They cried. They told me their daughters’ names. So what do I have? I’ve got a chain saw.”

Nearly five hundred people have since worked alongside him on the South Fork of the Guadalupe. On July 7, his 24-year-old son, Sam, joined him and teams of state troopers and retired Navy SEALs to sift through stuffed animals and tiny shoes. That day, the crew found three bodies. One of them was Carpenter’s close 26-year-old friend, whose family he sits next to every Sunday at church.

Later that evening, I spoke with Carpenter beneath an oak tree in his backyard. His driveway was filled with the vehicles of teens from Kerrville, Ingram, and Hunt who gather at his house for youth-group meetings. Many of them were grieving friends and family members.

These towns share a culture, a heartbeat bound by the river. The community now also shares collective grief. As of July 10, more than 120 people have been confirmed dead and at least 161 are still missing. Grand cypress trees that once stood nearly one hundred feet tall, creating shaded canopies overhead, now lie mangled, snapped like toothpicks and covered with shards of clothing, homes, and crushed cars. Moss-covered stones that once lay peacefully on the bottom of the teal river are whitewashed and piled up amid mounds of silt. Thousands of dead trout and bass lie strewn out nearly five hundred feet from the river.

I grew up in Boerne, a small town just thirty minutes southeast of Kerrville, where the Guadalupe is a short twenty-minute drive east of Main Street. As a child, I waded in the shallow, bright green water of the river with my sister, my hands reaching for the smooth stones below. I still visit my grandparents in Center Point, a small community outside Kerrville. And I’m still friends with fellow campers I met through summers at Laity Lodge Youth Camp, about forty minutes past Camp Mystic. In fact, a camp connection was what led me to the passenger seat of Sara Kendrick’s bright red Jeep on the afternoon of July 7. Some locals endearingly refer to Sara as the unofficial mayor of Hunt, an unincorporated community with a population of not much more than a thousand. Sara and her husband, Sean, live on a ranch at the headwaters of the North Fork of the Guadalupe. Normally more than a hundred feet away, the river reached a foot high at their house, with fish flopping against the side of their home. They were stranded, without electricity, but they were safe.

Sara drove me from Kerrville along Texas Highway 39 to Hunt, weaving down familiar stretches of road I’ve driven so many times. Her phone rang incessantly: a friend needing prayer; another, struggling with the loss, asking for her to pick up whiskey and coke from the liquor store; a neighbor asking her to field donations. She’s also fielded lots of calls from national news reporters, who’ve asked how she’s doing. “We’re squeegeeing mud off of one room off of one house, and I have fifty friends that I could be helping right now,” she told me. “I feel so overwhelmed.” Sean, an elder at Cross Kingdom Church, in Kerrville, received a text that day from a friend asking for prayer for PTSD—a search-and-rescue crew had just found seven bodies in the debris near the HTR TX RV park, in Ingram.

“Lord Jesus, please bring peace. Please bless this river,” Sara whispered as we drove. We passed the flooded remains of the Hunt Store, the hub of the small community and a favorite stop among camp families in the summer. The Kendricks are close friends with the owner, Haley Lehrmann, and they stop by to say hello almost every day. “There’s guys that every morning, they’re there having coffee. And then every afternoon, there’s a table that the locals sit at and have a beer and just talk about the day—every single day,” Sara tells me. “And that, you know, may sound small to someone else, but this is our community’s life. Those people, I don’t even know if they’re alive right now.”

Sean and Sara, who have lived in Hunt for twenty years, met at Vista Camps, a 104-year-old duo of boys and girls summer camps along the Guadalupe where Sara now works full-time. A pink beaded necklace with silver charms hangs from her rearview mirror, the charms treasured tokens from her time as a camper there. Vista Camps, which is split into Rio Vista and Sierra Vista, sits on the heavily battered South Fork of the river between Hunt and Ingram, not far from other cherished spots such as La Junta, Mystic, Heart O’ the Hills, Honey Creek, and Waldemar.

The Kendricks spent the day cleaning the flooded camp directors’ home on the Vista Camps property: sifting through ruined heirlooms and trying to salvage the codirector’s wedding dress. The son of the directors, Justin Hawkins, was almost swept away saving Vista’s “war canoes,” which have held generations of campers as they competed in the camp tradition of racing down the river. “We were supposed to drop our kids there for four weeks today. And instead, my nine-year-old is squeegeeing mud out of the owner’s house,” Sara said.

Of the ten women in Sara’s Bible study, two had children at Camp Mystic. One of them was an eight-year-old student at Hunt Elementary who was a friend of the Kendricks’ younger daughter. Renee Smajstrla, who Sara’s daughter Mercy fondly called Naynay, was a camper in the Bubble Inn cabin when she was swept away. Her body was recovered the night of July 4. In a Fox News interview, Mercy talked about scrolling through Sara’s phone for videos and pictures with Smajstrla, crying over the loss of her friend. (The video has more than 92,000 views on Instagram.) When Renee’s mother, Catherine, saw the video, she texted Sara that it brought her comfort.

Sara told me that across Kerr County, churches and elementary schools are overflowing with donations. Texans from across the state drove in to set up tents on street corners to grill burgers and wrap burritos for first responders. Homes and businesses that went untouched by the flood are empty because people are out helping neighbors and strangers alike. “So many people—the plumbing companies, the contractors . . . everybody’s dropping everything, regardless of finances,” Sean said.

One of those people is his friend David Carpenter, who finished the day back at his home full of hurting teenagers, preparing for another dawn among the piles of debris. He trusts that the Guadalupe will once again be a place of joy for him and his community. “People will be forced to deal with that river again, like we’re dealing with our grief,” he told me. “And people will play. And they will laugh again in that river. And that river will be redeemed.”

Volunteers from across Texas are aiding flood recovery efforts in Ingram, clearing wreckage and searching for missing persons.

INGRAM, Texas — In the days following catastrophic flooding along the Guadalupe River, a mobile mechanic from Bandera and a crew of volunteers from across Texas are helping clear the wreckage left behind, one pile at a time.

Daniel Beedle, owner of Centerfire Services, arrived in Ingram just hours after the floodwaters receded, bringing with him heavy equipment, friends, and a mission to help his neighbors.

“We’re like five days in on cleanup from the floods out here in Ingram,” Beedle said. “We had probably 20 pieces of equipment and, and 40 people.”

Beedle and his team used skid steers, excavators, and even a six-wheel army truck to build low-water crossings and gain access to areas of land that had been completely cut off by the flood. They weren’t just clearing mud and debris, they were carefully combing through wreckage, knowing lives had been lost and some people were still unaccounted for.

“Every pile… every vehicle has to be treated differently,” said Joe Rigelsky, founder of Upstream International and pastor at Pipe Creek Church. “To keep the dignity of humanity, you've got to remember there are people watching this who know their kids are missing.”

Rigelsky has responded to disasters for nearly two decades, but this one hit close to home. Volunteers like him and Beedle say the work may be messy and exhausting, but it’s necessary.

“This is our community. This is our neighbors. So it’s our job,” Beedle said.

Local businesses also stepped up in a big way. Companies like Koviak Built, Reddy Pros, Coyote Dirt Works, Van Delden Wastewater Systems, Singer Services, Bad Company Excavation, Divine Shine and many others donated equipment, manpower and time to support the recovery effort.

Among the volunteers is Clifton Dugosh, who’s been assisting cadaver dog teams during the search for missing persons. “We just want to help the families get a bit of closure, if we can,” he said.

Cadaver dogs, like Rocket from Las Cruces, New Mexico, have helped pinpoint specific areas for closer inspection. They're based in El Paso, Texas and came down to South central Texas to help out crews. But the heavy lifting, physically and emotionally, is being carried by the dozens of volunteers on the ground.

“You find common ground in suffering,” said Rigelsky. “You wake up eager to go help find people—or at least bring closure.”

Officials and volunteers are asking anyone who wants to help to check in with local coordinators first. Supplies, manpower and search efforts need to be carefully managed to avoid duplicating efforts and to ensure resources go where they’re needed most.

Despite the chaos, one thing is clear: Texans continue to show up for one another when it matters most.