JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
About 80 miles east of this month's devastating floods in Kerr County, Texas, is the small town of Wimberley. It also experienced a deadly flood a decade ago on Memorial Day weekend, 2015. NPR's Kat Lonsdorf went there to see what recovery looks like 10 years later.
(SOUNDBITE OF ENGINE STARTING)
KAT LONSDORF, BYLINE: Natalie Meeks starts up a golf cart to drive us around her property.
NATALIE MEEKS: Just for perspective, everywhere we are right now was completely underwater.
LONSDORF: Meeks and her husband own this small resort called The Waters Point, with a dozen or so cabins right along the Blanco River.
MEEKS: That was actually a cabin that got washed away.
LONSDORF: She points at the facade of a cabin still standing. We get out down by the river, which today is calm and several hundred feet away from the cabins. But 10 years ago, it suddenly rose more than 40 feet in the middle of the night, swelling to a quarter of a mile wide and wiping away nearly everything in its path. That flood killed at least a dozen people and damaged hundreds of structures in this small town of roughly 3,000. Meeks says what happened in Kerr County over the Fourth of July brought her right back to that night.
MEEKS: It's really hard for us to watch the footage now because it's just so eerily similar to what we went through that night.
LONSDORF: This resort has been in her husband's family for nearly a hundred years. And while it's relatively common for the river to rise, Meeks says that night was unlike anything they'd ever seen.
MEEKS: All you could hear were these ancient cypress trees just snapping.
LONSDORF: As she and her husband scrambled to pull guests from the cabins to safety.
MEEKS: ...Where we were, and the river wasn't stopping.
LONSDORF: All 100 guests and Meeks' family survived that night, but the destruction was overwhelming.
MEEKS: It took us almost a year just to have the debris and trash cleaned up to where it didn't look like a war zone.
LONSDORF: Ten years later, they're still rebuilding with bigger floods in mind. But Meeks says it's more than just the physical damage.
MEEKS: It's emotional for a long time. It's just a long process.
LONSDORF: This area in Texas, including Kerr County, has long been known as Flash Flood Alley. Droughts cause rivers to run dry for months, sometimes years, and then heavy rains suddenly make them overflow. Flood safety, especially after 2015, is something people here in Wimberley think about a lot. But Wimberley Mayor Jim Chiles says the scale of devastation from this month's flood in Kerr County, which killed at least 130 people, has put flood preparedness back in the spotlight.
JIM CHILES: We've got to make sure it doesn't happen here.
LONSDORF: Mayor Chiles says, in recent days, he's been having talks with community leaders.
CHILES: They're very premature, but we had an agenda-setting meeting and we put something on there to talk about sirens. Sirens are very expensive, and we got to figure out how to do that.
LONSDORF: He says he's hopeful the state will step in to help with it. After the deadly flood in 2015, Wimberley used emergency state money to secure several new river gauges for the town, which send real-time information about water levels to weather alert systems. But securing more funding for something like sirens will likely be difficult. Kerr County tried for years to find a way to pay for a new alert system, and ultimately failed. And President Trump's administration has frozen or canceled billions of dollars dedicated to help rural communities prepare for disasters.
JIM VENABLE: Well, it's always about the dollars, right? You know? And how much are the people worth?
LONSDORF: Seventy-seven-year-old Jim Venable has lived in Wimberley for most of his life. He says he hopes more infrastructure for flooding and alerts will be put in, but he's not optimistic. He says people here are still on edge every time it rains.
VENABLE: You know, I think there's still a lot of PTSD.
LONSDORF: He points out that, especially in the summer, Wimberley's population booms as visitors from nearby Austin and beyond pour in.
VENABLE: We keep inviting people to come in, but we've got to protect them and take care of them because we're apt to get these storms anytime.
GABRIELLE SNYDER: I had a phone call this morning, and we've had some other tourists who are concerned. Should they come? And, you know, and that's a really hard message to put out there.
LONSDORF: Gabrielle Snyder works for Wimberley's tourism department. She says part of her job is telling visitors about the need to sign up for flood alert systems and participate in emergency preparedness. But she has to walk a fine line because the town wants and needs people to come.
SNYDER: Obviously, Wimberley knows better than a lot of communities how devastating this situation is, but at the same time, Wimberley is open.
LONSDORF: Snyder's home flooded back in 2015. Her family had to evacuate, and the house was basically destroyed. Later, they bought a new house, still in Wimberley but with one rule.
SNYDER: Never again will we live on the river.
LONSDORF: After witnessing what a powerful flood can do, she says she's fine to appreciate the river from a distance. Kat Lonsdorf, NPR News, Wimberley, Texas.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.