Camp Mystic official says she still hasn’t reported flood deaths to Texas agency

The medical officer for Camp Mystic, the Christian summer camp in Texas where 27 girls and counselors were killed in a catastrophic flood last year, testified this week she has still not officially reported the deaths to the state health agency reviewing the camp’s application to reopen.Mary Liz Eastland, a member of the family that owns and operates the camp, appeared in court this week as part of a hearing tied to a lawsuit brought by the family of eight-year-old camper Cecilia “Cile” Steward, whose body has not been found. The family is seeking to temporarily close off the camp’s flooded areas to preserve the damage as evidence while their lawsuit proceeds.The hearing comes ahead of Camp Mystic’s plans to reopen again this summer.Under Texas-administrative-code" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="118719" data-entity-type="organization">Texas administrative code, camps are required to report deaths to state health regulators within 24 hours. But during her testimony, Eastland said she did not do so.“I did not think of this requirement in the moments happening after the flood,” she told the court, adding she also had not done so before the camp filed its application to reopen in March.Asked whether she should do so now, with the camp license pending, she replied: “I guess so.”Eastland told the court that she could not recall exactly when she first learned campers had died, estimating that it may have been a day or several days after the 4 July Flooding.She described how water poured into her home that night and how she broke a window to escape with her children to higher ground. She said that at sunrise, she and other camp staff gathered survivors for a head count, checking names against cabin rosters.“I had to figure out who we had and didn’t have at that point,” she said.Eastland testified that she did not try to reach the low-lying areas to evacuate campers in the early stages of the flooding because the rapidly rising flood waters made access impossible.In one exchange, an attorney for the Steward family asked her: “You knew the property. You knew the flood lines. You knew access points. Your children knew them. And these were first-year campers, you had 34 more years of experience than Cile. She needed your help, and you abandoned her, didn’t you?”.“Yes,” Eastland responded.Eastland’s testimony followed hours of questioning of her husband, Edward Eastland, a camp director whose father, Richard Eastland, was also killed in the flood.Edward Eastland told the court that he had not seen the official weather warnings before the storm, did not convene a staff meeting about the potential flooding and acknowledged that the camp did not have a detailed, written flood evacuation plan.He said that earlier action could have saved lives, but maintained that they could not have anticipated the scale of the storm.At times emotional, Edward Eastland described his efforts to save the campers on 4 July.“There were girls going out of the front door. I grabbed two girls, and there was a third one I didn’t grab,” he said, as reported by the Washington Post, adding that another girl “jumped on my back – I don’t know who it was – before we got washed out”.“The water came up over my head very quickly” he said. “The water was churning.”“What happened to Cile?” the attorney for the family said.“I don’t know,” Edward Eastland said.The Associated Press contributed reporting