Originally Published
May 21, 2020
Devastation, rebuild and recovery on the five year anniversary of the Memorial Day Weekend Flood of 2015
Eleven lives lost. As Wimberley looks back on the Memorial Day Weekend Flood of 2015, it all starts there. Eleven people lost their lives. As tragic as that is, it could have been much worse. “I was thinking the loss of life was going to be a hundred or so,” Wimberley Fire Chief Carroll Czichos said in “Wimberley: Epic Flood Tests a Small Town’s Strength,” a book produced by Stephen Klepfer, Nancy Williams and Carrol Wilson and published by the Wimberley Village Library with first hand narratives of the flood. Beyond the loss of life, the loss of property and the scars left on nature in the Wimberley Valley are almost unfathomable. More than 350 homes were damaged or destroyed accounting for more than estimated $100 million in damage. Since 2015, the city has issued 42 flood demolition permits and 229 flood remodel/ repair permits, one of which was issued in 2020 compared to 178 in 2015. More than 15,000 trees were washed away. In one night, an entire community changed. (Editor’s Note: Many of the quotes about the night of the flood are excerpts from “Wimberley: Epic Flood Tests a Small Town’s Strength.”)
Friday, May 22, 2015
The week leading up to Memorial Day weekend was a normal one, but there was something that stood out. “And so we believe that between Del Rio, Wimberley, Austin, Corpus Christi, if not record moisture was in the atmosphere, near record moisture or ‘percipitable’ water was in the atmosphere,” Paul Yura, warning coordinator with the Austin/ San Antonio National Weather Service, said. “In other words, if the trigger was there, there would be incredible rainfall. And indeed that’s exactly what happened.”
Saturday, May 23, 2015 8:23 p.m.
A Flash Flood Warning was issued for Hays County even though it hadn’t really rained in Wimberley at all.
However, it was raining upstream in Blanco and Kendalia, and it was raining hard.
“Four inches first,” Yura said. “Then five. Our radar was estimating six, then seven, then in the eights and nines. You’re going, ‘OK, this is bad.’ We start hearing some reports of flash flooding. Nothing in Wimberley yet. It’s hardly raining in Wimberley. And we start getting some first indications of how much water truly is coming into the Blanco River.”
Those indications were largely first hand glimpses of the river after an estimated 10 to 13 inches of rain fell at two different parts of the contributing watershed upstream. At that time, there was only one gauge on the river to tell how high the water was and that was located on the Blanco River bridge on Ranch Road 12. By the time that gauge measured the water, it had already passed through much of Wimberley. This means that most people relied on an old-timers network passing along the height of the river to the folks downstream.
“When they started giving us reports from general citizens saying it is the highest water they have ever seen, and realizing that, when you’re in a rural area like this, these people have probably been here 50, 60, 70 years,” Yura said. “It isn’t like this new person just came in and has lived here two years. When we hear, in rural counties, that someone has never seen water like this, we realize that information may go back two generations or three generations of stories. That got our attention.”
Saturday, May 23, 2015, 9:30 p.m.
The first call for help in the Wimberley Valley came in The woman was rescued from the second story of a house on stilts at the northern tip of the Wimberley Valley. That is when Czichos called Don Ferguson, who was Wimberley’s City Administrator at the time, and said get everyone out.
“What you do is reverse 9-1-1 to tell everybody to get the hell out,” Czichos recounted telling Ferguson. “I don’t care. Just tell them to leave. This is not going to be a normal flood.”
At about 9:45 p.m., the city opened the Wimberley Community Center as a shelter for people who would need to evacuate.
Saturday, May 23, 2015, 10:30 p.m.
The gauge on the Blanco River at the Ranch Road 12 bridge began to rise. The Blanco River normally registers between three and four feet deep at the bridge. By 10:30 p.m. that number had risen to nearly nine feet, which is not even considered a flood, rather just a small rise in the river. But the fury of the river was still in tow. Glimpses at the flood gauge, which reports every 15 minutes, show just how startlingly fast the river can rise.
Tina Pennington, her husband, and her two daughters were one of the families displaced. The night of the flood, after all, was the middle of a holiday weekend. A sleepover with one of her daughter’s friends was happening.
Tina’s husband was in a small soundproof recording studio in a small building in the back. She texted him to come inside. She felt nervous but thought it could be that she fell off the coffee wagon and had four cups that day, against doctor’s orders.
“If I had not had that coffee, who knows,” Pennington said.
The first warning when she woke up was that something was wrong was the sound coming from the river.
“The sound gave me the thought that it was a tornado. The pool ring floated by. Water was bubbling through like a geyser all throughout the house. I then told the girls, ‘Get your shoes on we’re leaving.’” The water was up, and still rising.
“We had to swim to get out the door and go up the hill next door,” Pennington said. “The electricity never turned off… Neighbors on the other side had to climb on their roof. It was pitch black and you couldn’t see.”
They were able to get help on the cell phone and were able to tell their neighbors that help was on the way.
For two hours the river would rise five feet every 15 minutes. That means, on average, the river raised one inch in height every 15 seconds.
“At 11:15 p.m. I came across the Blanco Bridge,” Julia Osborn said about her drive back from a flight from Colorado. “I remember Don Ferguson standing on the left side of the bridge. I came home and went to bed. I think I was the last one over the bridge for a while.”
Meanwhile, just a little down the river, Gail Pigg remembers that “it was a bad, bad night… Around 11:15 p.m. the 3 alerts said what a significant flood we had (coming later). We went out to the high point of Flite Acres. We looked and it was bad. The worst we ever had seen.”
At 11:30 p.m. a house on Deer Crossing Lane was knocked off the piers and began floating down the Blanco River. Jonathan McComb would be the only person out of nine in that home that would survive.
Around this time, the power went out at the Wimberley Community Center, where more than 100 people had gone to evacuate from their homes. Wimberley High School was opened as the new shelter on the north side of Wimberley.
Cypress Creek Church acted as a shelter on the south side of the Blanco River.
Sunday, May 24, 2015, 12:00 a.m.
Within minutes of the strike of midnight, the Blanco River breached the bridge on Ranch Road 12.
At midnight the height of the river was 32.43 feet, all but breaking the height of the record flood in 1929 of 33.3 feet. This was the moment that Wimberley knew it was seeing a flood that had never been seen before. By 12:30 a.m., the water was at 37.58 feet.
“When the water hit town, it hit with a debris load like you could not imagine,” Ferguson said. “It began to tear through the community.”
The memories of those who experienced the flood are either first hand of swimming through the waters to reach safety or watching their possessions wash away. The terrifying moments of not knowing how high the water was going to rise. There are very few visual images of the flood as it occurred in the dark of night. Many of the most vivid memories are of the sounds. The shockwave of snapping cypress trees could be felt as much as heard as trees that had stood for hundreds of years were broken in two. The sound of houses crumbling as they floated down the river and crashed into the bridge felt like earthquakes.
“You’re pinned in darkness, and the noises you hear are unforgettable,” Ferguson said. “You hear propane tanks popping off. You hear trees snapping like firecrackers. You see a lot of things in the water that I really don’t want to talk about. You’ve done what you can and, at that stage of the game, you’re living on a prayer.”
Sunday, May 24, 2015, 1 a.m.
“And then it went to 36 (feet),” Jim Spencer, KXAN weatherman, said. “And then it went to 38. And at this point, I remember saying things that I’ve really never said before. ‘I have never seen anything like this. You have never seen anything like this. No one in their lifetime…’” The gauge on the Blanco River responded for the last time at 40.21 feet. The force of the water washed the gauge away. “We thought that the gauge had lost power – but it’s got backup power so we didn’t really think that was what had happened,” Spencer said. “The more likely scenario was that the gauge had been damaged or washed away… The gauge was just literally washed away because that was an historical flood.”
Record height is eventually recorded as 44.9 feet, more than 11 feet higher than the previous record flood. But that is just the official record. There are reports from property owners of water rising more than 55 feet in other portions of the river.
The damage from the flood could not truly be known until sunrise.
Sunday, May 24, 2015, 6:35 a.m. – Daylight
The next day people were in shock. The devastation was unbelievable.
“When daylight came and we were able to get out and see what had happened, it was more like a tornado that hit the river,” Steve Thurber, then mayor of Wimberley, said.
At this point, officials weren’t sure how many people were missing. First Responders were
