Jane Towler was up late in a small cabin along the Guadalupe River as thunder boomed through a thrashing rain. It was 4 a.m. and water was pooling on the floor. Suddenly, her phone rang. It was her friend from a nearby cabin.
“Jane, we’re f—ed!” Brian Keeper said frantically. “The water’s in my house! Get out!”
Towler’s grandfather bought the property in Texas Hill Country in the 1930s, and she’s lived through many floods in her 70 years, losing a canoe or chairs here and there. But last Friday was different.
The river would swell 26 feet (nearly 8 meters) in 45 minutes and lay waste to homes and buildings, sweep away cars and trucks, and claim the lives of more than 100 people, including many summer campers.
Towler didn’t know how bad things would get, but the fear in Keeper’s voice kicked her into flight mode. Pulling shoes onto bare feet, she ran in her pajamas toward the nearby house where her son, Alden Towler, and family friend Shabd Simon-Alexander were sleeping, along with Simon-Alexander’s toddler daughter. Towler, her son and Simon-Alexander chronicled their harrowing survival in several videos and hundreds of photos shared with The Associated Press.
Realizing the situation was worsening
When her son awoke to Simon-Alexander’s desperate screams, the water was already ankle deep.
“Who do we tell? We have to tell someone,” Simon-Alexander said in one of the videos.
“Everything in our yard has floated away,” Jane Towler said as her video captured the muddy water rising in the kitchen. Simon-Alexander’s daughter was quiet, strapped to her mother’s chest.
“Okay, I want us to be prepared to go up in the attic,” Jane Towler said.
Alden Towler got busy stacking belongings on a bed in another room to keep them dry. But Simon-Alexander pointed out the futility.
“When your mom got here, there was no water on the ground,” she said.
With the water now at his knees and him still in just underwear, Alden Towler shifted priorities and grabbed a bottle of water and peanuts.
“What if we go up hill?” he asked.
“We cant get out! The whole area is flooded! OK, do you want to go see? I don’t want you to get flash flooded away, Alden!” his mother said as she opened the hatch to the attic.
As the fridge toppled over with a splash, their narrowing options crystalized.
“What do we do to be safe? Go on the roof?” asked Jane Towler.
“I guess we go on the roof,” her son replied.
A climb into darkness
Simon-Alexander consoled her daughter. Five days earlier, they celebrated the girl’s first birthday with pancakes, balloons and a canoe ride.
Now, Simon-Alexander stood with her baby, the water up to her thighs. Looking back, she said at that point she was sure they would drown, either where they were or in the attic. But in the video, she calmed her daughter in a gentle voice, telling her, “Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot, baby.”
