Following emotional pleas from parents of the victims of the flooding at Camp Mystic, the Texas Senate unanimously passed Senate Bill 1 on Aug. 21. The House had voted earlier the same day on five related measures, including House Bill 1, its own youth camp safety legislation. Lawmakers must now reconcile the two versions before the legislation can be sent to Gov. Greg Abbott.
Senate Bill 1, renamed Heaven’s 27 Camp Safety Act in honor of the victims, is the first comprehensive youth safety bill created to enhance disaster procedures. The bill comes after the July 4 flood took the lives of at least 137 people, including 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic.
“You have a flash flood warning or a flood warning, you will be required to remove these kids from those cabins,” said state Sen. Charles Perry (R-Lubbock), who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding, per The Texas Tribune.
“Had the requirements of SB 1 been in place on the night of July 4, I have no doubt that some lives, if not all lives, would have been saved,” Perry said.
More than a dozen family members of the girls who died at the camp spoke during the heartfelt hearing. The families spoke of having to bury their young children, most of whom were just in the first or second grade. The speakers detailed how their children and their counselors adhered to Camp Mystic’s emergency plan, which called on kids in cabins closest to the river to remain in place during a flood.
“Joy and growth cannot exist without safety,” Cici Williams Steward told committee members. Steward’s daughter Cile is the only child whose body has not been found.
“[M]y daughter was stolen from me, not because of an unavoidable act of nature, but because of preventable failures on just her fifth day of camp,” said an emotional Steward.
In heart-wrenching detail, Steward related how she had to explain to her younger daughter that Cile was dead but her body has not been recovered, so that she would not first learn about it from classmates when she starts kindergarten.
“She needed to hear the unbearable truth from us that Cile’s body has not been found.”