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Parents whose kids attended Camp Mystic during last July's deadly flooding in the Texas hill country are asking state lawmakers to block the camp's reopening next month. Kailey Hunt from member station KUT reports.
KAILEY HUNT, BYLINE: Torrential rain caused the Guadalupe River to rise more than two dozen feet last Fourth of July. At least 130 people died. At Camp Mystic, 25 campers and two counselors were killed when floodwaters engulfed the site. One of those campers was Malorie Lytal's 8-year-old daughter, Kellyanne. Lytal, a former Mystic camper, spoke to Texas lawmakers at a joint hearing of two legislative committees tasked with investigating the flood on Tuesday.
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MALORIE LYTAL: When I brought my two daughters home from the hospital, I immediately signed them up to attend Camp Mystic. I never knew signing that Mystic application was signing Kellyanne's death certificate.
HUNT: Lytal said the family that owns the camp, the Eastlands, should be focused on comforting and supporting families like hers right now, not reopening the camp.
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LYTAL: Instead of transparency, accountability and wrapping their arms around these families during our time of unimaginable grief, the deaths of our daughters have been nothing more than an inconvenience to Mystic's rush to reopen camp.
HUNT: Julie Sprunt, another former Mystic camper, told lawmakers that her 9-year-old daughter Mackenzie was lucky to have survived the event. Mackenzie was swept nearly a mile downriver from the camp by floodwaters before eventually being found clinging onto a tree by strangers. Sprunt criticized the Eastland family for what she said was a lack of emergency preparedness.
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JULIE SPRUNT: They are not equipped to care for traumatized children. They were not equipped to keep them alive. And now the plan still feels like going forward, it's more dependent on prayers than safety plans.
HUNT: Earlier in the day, the Eastlands acknowledged to lawmakers that, in hindsight, they were not prepared for last summer's flood. In his testimony, Richard Eastland, one of the camp's owners, said his family has gone, quote, "above and beyond" the state's required safety measures. State health officials told lawmakers on Tuesday the camp is also under an internal investigation after hundreds of complaints were filed against it following last summer's 27 deaths. The camp has said it is cooperating with investigators.
Last week, the Texas Department of Health Services notified Camp Mystic its license to operate may not be renewed unless it makes major revisions to its emergency plan. For now, Camp Mystic said it intends to welcome nearly 900 campers back this summer, with the first term's counselors arriving as soon as next month. For NPR News, I'm Kailey Hunt in Austin.
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