Texas Hill Country family recounts terrifying escape from Guadalupe River flood

Water was already climbing inside the small cabin when Jane Towler, her son Alden Towler and family friend Shabd Simon-Alexander realized the night had turned into a fight to survive. The family, whose property has been in the Towler family for generations, had lived through floods before in Texas Hill Country. Nothing had prepared them for the July 4, 2025, surge that sent the Guadalupe River up more than 26 feet in about 45 minutes.

Jane Towler was awake around 4 a.m. when a friend from a nearby cabin warned that water was entering his home. That warning set off a frantic chain of choices that changed by the minute. First came an effort to save belongings. Then the family moved to the attic. As the cabin filled, the only option left was the roof. Photos and video shared by the family show the water rising fast enough to erase any illusion that there was time to wait.

Their ordeal was part of a far larger disaster that swept across the Guadalupe River basin and the Hill Country of Central Texas. More than 100 people died, including many children at summer camps such as Camp Mystic. Homes, roads and camps were destroyed across Kerr County and beyond, and vehicles and structures were swept away as the river became a violent torrent. What had once been a nuisance on land the family knew well became a lethal flood that overran the normal rhythms of river life.

The response exposed how thin the warning net was in some of the hardest-hit places. A timeline of the rescue, pieced together from warnings, 911 calls, survivor videos and official testimony, showed a chaotic sequence in the dark hours before dawn. Local reporting said Kerr County had no flood warning sirens before the disaster, and residents in low-lying river communities had little time to act once the water started rising.

The flood also drove a sharp policy response in Texas. The Legislature passed Senate Bill 3 to address outdoor warning sirens in flash-flood-prone areas, and Gov. Greg Abbott signed it on September 5, 2025. Kerr County became the first Texas county to install and test the new sirens in 2026. At the same time, scrutiny of the response continued, including a review by the U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Inspector General and testimony from Texas emergency management officials about failures and needed reforms.

For the Towlers, the night on the roof was a personal escape. For Texas and other flood-prone river communities, it became a warning that survival still depends on whether alerts, staffing and local systems can match the speed of rising water.