After Hill Country floods, families face a difficult question: Rebuild, or let go?

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This story was produced by Grist and co-published with The Texas Tribune.

Brian Keeper doesn’t remember exactly when his family began spending holidays in Hunt, an unincorporated town on the banks of the Guadalupe River where they’d camp, swim, and fish. Sometimes they caught so many perch, bass, and catfish that it felt like his mother had the grill going all day long.

“We were just in love with Hunt,” recalled Keeper. “We were in love with coming up here and getting in the river.”

But he does remember the year he and his seven siblings helped their father build a one-bedroom summer house along the river. It was 1975, and the Texas Longhorns were on their way to winning the national collegiate baseball championship. Keeper was 18.

As Keeper and his siblings grew up, the house in Hunt only became more important to their family. His father added rooms and insulation, making it into a home that could accommodate all of them. The family celebrated birthdays, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and Thanksgivings on the river’s shore, stringing lights and setting up tables in the backyard. Kinky Friedman, the provocative satirist and musician, came over for Passover one year. When Keeper’s mother tired of city life in Houston, she often decamped to the Hunt property, where she learned to hunt wild animals and adorned the walls with the heads of deer and bighorn sheep.

All along, the river was a comforting presence — and a looming threat. Keeper’s father, ever vigilant, had inquired with neighbors about the 1932 flood in Hunt, which killed seven people. When he built the house, he elevated it 10 feet higher than the 1932 flood levels. His foresight served the family well for 50 years. Even when the Guadalupe swelled and stretched over its banks during the 1987 flash floods, one of the worst disasters the area had experienced, it inundated the yard but never made it past the steps to the back porch. With almost 1,000 feet separating the family from the riverbank, other precautions — things like flood insurance — never crossed anyone’s mind.

That’s why Keeper was worried about little more than the aging house’s leaky tin roof as rain poured down on July 3 of this year, when he put down Tupperware containers in a closet where water was starting to find its way inside. But he was a light sleeper from his years caring for his father, who passed away in 2019, and he awoke around 4 a.m., worried that the small containers might have started to overflow.

The Tupperware was doing its job, but when Keeper glanced out of the window, he became disoriented; he couldn’t see the river. When he stepped out onto the deck, he found out why: The river had surrounded him. The Guadalupe had flooded the yard and was level with the back porch, higher than it had ever been. Fear rose in his chest. “As soon as I saw that, I knew we were up shit’s creek,” he said.

Without another thought, he grabbed a life vest, flashlights, and a leash for his poodle, Fidel, and tried to exit from the other side of the house. But when he opened the front door, water started lapping at his feet. Panicked, he ran up the stairs to the loft and called 911. They told him that his best shot was to find a way out of the house. Then he began calling his neighbors to try to wake them up. (His calls ended up saving the lives of two families on his street.)

Over the next several minutes — or was it hours? — Keeper ran up and down the stairs several times trying to identify a way out of the house. At one point, the doors and windows began to break and water rushed in. The refrigerator and furniture began floating. Somehow, the electricity never went out, and the house lights illuminated the whole scene: Tree limbs poked out from the waters, and the roar of the river filled the house. It was the loudest sound Keeper had ever heard.

The force of the river was so strong, it split the foundation in two and began flowing through a crack separating one of the bedrooms from the living room. The water swept Keeper’s feet from under him, and he found himself suddenly horizontal. He clung to the banister of the loft stairs, with Fidel still under one arm. “I guess this is going to be it,” he thought.

But one step at a time, Keeper managed to pull himself up the staircase. The current was so strong that Keeper estimates it took about 20 minutes to ascend the stairs out of the water and into the loft. “I just remember screaming over and over again, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’” he recalled.

Once he got to the loft, he sat at the top of the staircase. A strange calm came over him; his thoughts seemed to all have evaporated from this mind. The electricity had finally gone out, and the house was pitch dark. Eventually, Keeper noticed that the stairs below him appeared to be reemerging from the swirling water, one by one. The river was receding. When he finally came down the stairs, he found that the water had pushed the furniture up against the front door, blocking his exit. He crawled underneath a tilted bureau, pushed past a coat rack, and turned the handle to loosen the front door.

Then he walked out into the world the river had left behind.

Now, Keeper and his siblings face the hard reality of rebuilding their family home. The house wasn’t just one important part of Brian’s life — in many ways it was his life, the place where he’d spent summers growing into adulthood, where he’d moved in 2011 to take care of his father before he died. He’d assumed he’d stay on to care for the house until his own time came. Suddenly, at 68, Keeper’s future is more uncertain than he ever expected. He could rebuild, or he could wait for someone to make him an offer to take the property off his hands — maybe even the county, if officials decide to buy out homes along the river to protect communities from future flooding. He could clean up and walk away.

In the weeks since the ordeal, people have repeatedly asked him if he’s grown fearful of the river. His answer has always been a resounding “no.” He wants to stay and rebuild — but at what pace and what cost, he doesn’t yet know.

More than 2,000 structures damaged in Kerr County

Keeper is not alone in this situation. More than 2,000 structures were damaged by the July 4 floods in Kerr County, which suffered the brunt of the floods that devastated the Texas Hill Country, killing at least 138 people and causing an estimated $1.1 billion in damage. For inland counties like Kerr, where only about 2% of homeowners have flood insurance, navigating the piecemeal support offered by an array of public and private entities after the floods adds endless complexity to residents’ hard choices. Those who choose to stay must ensure their next home can withstand flooding of uncertain severity in the future. As the warming waters of the Gulf load the storms that move over Texas with ever more moisture, fewer guarantees can be assumed than in the past.

As residents begin to rebuild, county officials are trying to avoid costly missteps — like permitting rebuilding in flood zones without enforcing elevation requirements — that have set back recovery in other flood-prone regions in the country. In Fort Myers, Florida, residents rebuilt in high-risk areas after Hurricane Ian in 2022. Last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency found the county in violation of federal guidelines and revoked its access to subsidized flood insurance. Rates were projected to rise 25%, and more than 250 structures that were built in risky areas were required to be moved or demolished.

The vast majority of homes in Kerr were built decades before the county issued a rule requiring that new construction in floodplains be built at least a foot above flood levels as determined by engineering assessments based on FEMA data. As the structures are rebuilt, homeowners like Keeper will need to bring them up to code, adding cost and complexity to an already difficult process.

Kerr County has historically been able to approve floodplain permits on an ad hoc basis — permits have been so few and far between that the county still accepts paper applications. But with hundreds of homes needing to be rebuilt, county officials are bracing for a flood of applications. And while the county has received substantial support from state agencies, the federal government’s ongoing role in disaster recovery isn’t entirely clear.

FEMA was initially slow to respond as a result of a new rule requiring Kristi Noem, the secretary of its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, to personally sign off on all expenses above $100,000. The agency also didn’t send search and rescue teams for the first 72 hours. Thousands of calls from flood survivors to the agency went unanswered the first few days, since contractors who operated the lines were fired after Noem missed a deadline to renew their contract. The Trump administration has also cut funding for hazard mitigation programs, endangering funding for buyouts, which are provided to local municipalities, and other measures that FEMA typically provides after major flooding.

“The floodwaters in Texas rose in hours. FEMA can’t take days to respond,” said MaryAnn Tierney, who spent 15 years in executive positions at FEMA until May, when she quit as the agency came under fire from Donald Trump. “But that’s where the agency is: short on people, tied up in approvals, and potentially late to the moment when they are needed most.” Tierney said she worried about the agency’s ability to respond once hurricanes begin making landfall along the Gulf Coast in the coming months.

Residents in Kerr County are more preoccupied with immediate concerns.

In the days after the flood, Keeper was shattered. As the reality of everything he’d lost — not just practical things like his car, but also keepsakes like the canoes he’d built and painted himself — and what he’d been through sunk in, he couldn’t stop sobbing. And without the ID that was swept away with his wallet when the river first burst into his home, he realized that even buying a new cell phone would be a struggle. Without the brothers and sisters who’d helped build much of what he’s now lost, he doesn’t know what he would do.

“I’ve kind of looked to my siblings to help me find my way forward,” he said.

Baseball game drew pastor out of flood's path

The Houston Astros saved RickyRay Robertson’s life.

The night before the flood, instead of staying in the riverside cottage where he normally slept on his family’s property in Kerrville, the 62-year-old pastor had decided to stay in his larger house across the street so he could watch a rebroadcast of the Astros game. He awoke to police sirens around 4:30 a.m. and found that his cottage had been swept away. Like Keeper, Robertson feels lucky to be alive.

“When you live on a river, rivers rise. And when you live in the Hill Country, they rise fast,” he said.

Despite the close call, Robertson wants to rebuild the cottage and repair the main house. Like Keeper and most others in the county, his family did not have flood insurance and will have to figure out repair costs on their own. His mother, who owns the property, had put it up for sale before the floods, but Robertson wants to stay — and now he’s not sure they’d find any buyers anyway.

But because local governments sometimes offer to buy out homes at high risk of flooding — often with the support of state and federal funds — there’s a chance Kerrville or the county itself will emerge as a potential buyer. Robertson’s family home is one of three residential properties along the Guadalupe River in the town bordered by city parks and a popular hiking trail. The property also lies within the 100-year floodplain, meaning it faces a 1% chance of flooding each year. If the city or county were to acquire it, the land could be absorbed into the park, mitigating flood risk not just for the properties themselves but for the surrounding area, since the parkland could be designed to better absorb rising floodwaters.

Some of Robertson’s neighbors believe a buyout would be a good idea. Matthew Stone, a retired navy officer, bought a house across the street from Robertson’s cottage about two years ago. Though the flooding just reached his family’s doorstep and didn’t damage the home, he thinks it would be best for his neighbors to take buyouts.

“My hope is that they bulldoze all this and turn it into a park all the way around,” Stone said. “If the city could acquire this, then they could continue the river trail all the way through.”

Robertson isn’t entirely opposed to selling to the city or county — if they’re able to meet his mother’s expectations for a reasonable price.

“If those guys came in here and said, ‘We’re just going to take your land,’ that’s not going to happen,” he said. “But if they came and said, ‘We’re going to pay the retail price that you’re asking,’ what would Mom care?”

But Daniel Olivas, who owns the home adjacent to Robertson’s, isn’t interested in a buyout. Olivas, a retired civil engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, was at his full-time residence in San Antonio at the time of the floods and learned about the damage from Robertson. The water reached more than 6 feet inside his house. He was hoping to air out the house and renovate it, but the smell of rotting fish and the river was so bad that he has decided to demolish and rebuild. Like Robertson’s, his home is in the 100-year floodplain. As a precaution, he’s rebuilding the house on piers to a height above where floodwaters rose on July 4. His wife has been inquiring about flood insurance costs and has received quotes in the range of about $5,000 per year.

Olivas has already contacted an architect and a builder to design and rebuild the home. He’s secured a demolition permit and expects to need a range of other permits, including one for floodplain development, to begin construction. The city of Kerrville has required permits for building in the floodplain since at least 1998; Kerr County has had similar rules on the books at least since 2011. According to an analysis by Cotality, a property intelligence firm, of the nearly 6,000 properties within FEMA flood zones in the county, more than 1,300 are within the 100-year floodplain. Both the city and county require that homes be elevated 1 foot above the level to which floodwaters are expected to rise during a 100-year flood. Olivas expects to do more than meet that requirement.

"We've been running on adrenaline"

Enforcing Kerr County’s development rules for flood-prone areas has fallen to Charlie Hastings, the county’s floodplain administrator. To say Hastings has been overwhelmed in the weeks since the floods would be an understatement. At a public meeting about two weeks after the floods, Hastings was visibly shaken.

“I’ve had one cup of coffee in three weeks,” he told county commissioners. “We’ve been running on adrenaline.”

Hastings oversees development in the county’s flood zones, including reviewing and approving floodplain development permits. So far, that process has been done manually.

“Right now the [permit] that we have is four pages long, and you fill it out by paper, and you walk it to my office, and shake my hand and we go from there,” Hastings told the commissioners. “That’s not going to work if I’ve got 2,000 [applications]. So, that is something that I need help with.”

It’s a problem that Tierney, the former veteran FEMA official, has seen repeatedly.

“After disasters, people want to rebuild,” she said. “A lot of communities are not prepared for the influx in permitting that happens after a big disaster. When 500 people all of a sudden decide they want to fix their house at the same time, it totally overwhelms the permitting office, and then they can’t properly enforce their flood code.”

Hastings, who was not available for media interviews in the days after the floods, has long known the importance of a robust flood code. When he was Kerrville’s city engineer in 2002, heavy rainfall inundated parts of the Texas Hill Country, causing 12 deaths and damaging about 48,000 homes, including 200 homes in Kerrville. As city engineer, Hastings helped assess the damage and developed a plan to reduce the city’s future flood risk. With the help of FEMA funds, the city ultimately bought out 23 properties and restricted construction on them, a condition of using federal funds for buyouts. In 2004, he helped organize a survey of floodplain standards adopted and enforced by Texas cities and counties, which has grown into an annual effort to encourage municipalities to adopt stricter floodplain management rules.

It’s unclear if the city or county will opt for buyouts again. FEMA typically provides 75% of the funds required for buyouts, with certain conditions attached. A key requirement is that the properties be converted to open space and left undeveloped in perpetuity.

But what works in better-resourced urban communities — Texas’ Harris County has bought out roughly 4,000 parcels in the Houston area since 1985 — doesn’t necessarily apply to rural towns like Kerrville. Since homeowners move after selling their properties, buyouts can shrink a small municipality’s tax base if residents don’t relocate in the immediate vicinity. FEMA also uses a strict cost-benefit calculation to determine whether or not a property qualifies for a buyout. In rural areas with lower land values, homes often don’t meet the threshold required to qualify.

Anuradha Mukherji, a researcher at East Carolina University, has studied how the rural town of Tarboro in North Carolina navigated buyouts after repeated flooding left residents “completely exhausted, financially and mentally.” The town is agriculture-dependent and resource-poor. But Mukherji said that with the help of FEMA funds and local leaders with strong ties to the community, residents were ultimately persuaded that moving out was economically better for them in the long run.

It’s unclear whether residents in Kerr County will be similarly convinced. Like Keeper, many have strong ties to the area and are reluctant to grapple with the idea of moving away. And even if they are convinced that it might be in their best interest, there may not be funding available. Under President Trump, FEMA has been making major changes to emergency response management, increasingly shifting responsibilities to state and local authorities. The agency typically includes an automatic hazard mitigation grant, which is used for funding buyouts when a major disaster declaration is granted. But in an effort to cut costs and to push states to utilize other unobligated funds available to them, the Trump administration has not provided these grants to states, including Texas, after flooding.

There’s a chance that the state could step in to provide funds, or Kerr County could choose to raise money independently. While the Texas Legislature is currently considering funding for siren systems and other emergency preparedness, there haven’t been any bills to provide funding for buyouts. The chances of the county finding the money itself also seem slim. County commissioners and Kerrville city leaders have been discussing increasing property taxes by up to 8% to fund relief efforts, but those discussions have been met by protests.

“It’s bad timing,” Robertson said. “All hell will break loose.”

A family decision

For years, Keeper lived up to his family name. He was the keeper of the house, the caretaker of his parents. Keeper’s father had created a trust for the Hunt house and made him its sole beneficiary. Since he’d spent years caring for his ailing father, he was to live on in the house and utilize proceeds from the trust to pay for upkeep and property taxes. But his father did not plan for a catastrophic event like the flood.

Now Keeper and his siblings have to decide if they want to use the remaining funds in the trust to rebuild the house, leaving little to pay for expenses, or else liquidate the property and help Keeper find a new place to live. Whether or not giving up the land is the wisest decision from a public policy perspective — fewer people living in high-risk areas can reduce the burden on local and federal governments and save lives — the decision ultimately rests with Keeper and his family.

For them, it will likely come down to the cost of rebuilding, and that cost will be largely determined by whether or not they will need to secure a floodplain development permit. To complicate matters, the house is in the most dangerous part of the Guadalupe River’s floodplain, its so-called floodway, which typically has the strictest construction restrictions. Living in the floodway is so dangerous that some local engineers refuse to assist homeowners with rebuilding plans.

The Keepers haven’t filed for a floodplain development permit with Hastings’ office yet, but when they do, they’re likely to at least be required to elevate the house on piers. Their house and those of their neighbors are prime candidates for a buyout, should one be on offer, and Keeper himself isn’t entirely opposed to selling to the county.

Either way, he’s looking forward to living in a new house. After his father passed away, the never-ending repairs and maintenance on the 50-year-old building began taking a toll on him, even though he still enjoyed his daily swims in the river. Despite nearing 70, Keeper was still climbing up trees on the property to saw off overgrown limbs, and every month, he’d get on top of the house to clean off the roof with a broom and a hose.

For the last few weeks, Keeper has been sleeping on friends’ couches and at the La Junta camp across the river. He petitioned FEMA for a trailer he can stay in, but his initial application was rejected because he couldn’t adequately prove his residence in the destroyed home, thanks to the vagaries of his family’s trust. Friends and strangers have been keeping him afloat. One of the neighboring families he woke up during the floods set up a GoFundMe page for him, and it has raised nearly $30,000 so far. Last week, a donor gave him a trailer. (It will take a few months before it can be hooked up to water and electricity.)

Keeper misses what he’s lost, but he’s found that he’s ready to move on.

“Taking care of this house was like taking care of another member of a family,” he said. “I’m about to embark upon a rebuild of a house that’s much more appropriate in size for me and my little friend Fidel.”

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