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A Second Year of Central Texas Floods Reopened Old Wounds. Communities Are Still Healing.

In July 2025, the Guadalupe River surged in a storm that killed more than 130 people. Only a year later, the waters rose again.

A downed street sign and stop sign are tangled in debris outside the Center Point Volunteer Fire Department after flooding.

Razor Dobbs looked out at River Road. The rural stretch that hugs the winding banks of the upper Guadalupe River in Center Point, Texas, was being inundated with rain.

It was past two in the morning on July 16 and the Guadalupe was rising fast. Within seconds, Dobbs said, it was coming up onto the road.

“It hit me: This is bad,” Dobbs said. “This is like last year.”

Soon, Dobbs, a firefighter with the Center Point Volunteer Fire Department, was called to begin evacuations across town. He spent the next 22 hours working—responding to dozens of distress calls, rescuing residents from attics, and wading through water to pull people from floating cars.

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we just had a flood,’” Dobbs said. “No, we had a biblical flood.”

Multiple rounds of storms hit Texas between July 13 and17, resulting in what the National Weather Service described as “catastrophic flooding,” that led to the death of two people. More than a dozen locations in the counties hardest hit received more than two feet of rain in just a few days. Rivers surged causing widespread property damage and road closures in counties as far as Southwest and West Texas.

Strikingly for communities in the heart of the Hill Country, like Center Point in Kerr County, the floods were strikingly familiar.

For, in those communities, it had only been a year since the Guadalupe River rose almost 30 feet in under an hour after being pummeled by an intense burst of late-night rain. The surge created a wall of water that tore through the Hill Country. More than 130 people died, including 25 young girls at Camp Mystic. Most of the deaths occurred in Kerr County.

Key differences helped spare lives when the river rose again this year. The storm played out over multiple days and multiple river basins, allowing people more time to evacuate and prepare. There were fewer visitors camping and staying along the Guadalupe (last year’s floods occurred during the early morning of the Fourth of July). Responders and residents alike reported swifter reactions to warning signs due to anxiety and experience related to last year’s tragedy and, in some cases, more available response tools.

But Dobbs said a lower death toll should not undercut the severity of this year’s floods. In Center Point, the Guadalupe rose 32 feet in four hours, as high as last year. In Comfort, a town nine miles away, the river rose higher than it did in 2025, cresting at 37 feet. The river in that area had measured only around three feet in the weeks leading up to the flood.

Rebecca Loebe, a Center Point resident, was asleep in her home when the rain began to fall in the early morning of July 16. Her husband woke up around 5:30 am to a missed call and a text from their neighbor. “Go check on the river,” the text said. “It’s flooding.”

Loebe’s husband woke her after reading the text and the two jumped out of bed to examine the state of the Guadalupe.

Loebe knew the river had been high after days of rainfall. But her property is 40 feet up, so when the river rises under typical circumstances, “it goes from being 40 feet away to being 36 feet away.” Only a tiny portion of her backyard lies in the 500-year floodplain, she said.

“I found that out when we were getting home insurance,” Loebe said. “And I said, if the water ever gets up........

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