Julia Hatfield was just one of the residents of the Blue Oak RV Park along the Guadalupe River in Ingram, Texas, when the devastating and deadly flash flood of July 4 decimated the park. Even now, she says, her neighbors are still a long way to rebuilding — and recovering.
“This community is going to need so much help,” Hatfield, a touring singer-songwriter, says. “The fear is that once media attention moves on to the next thing, people might forget that there’s going to be a long time that Kerrville needs some support. That’s not gonna change in a week.”
Hatfield, named the 2018 Best New Female Vocalist at the Texas Regional Radio Awards, frequently performs upriver in Kerrville and the surrounding Hill Country. On July 4, she had an afternoon gig on the books at Howdy’s, a hilltop restaurant overlooking her RV park. “We just fell in love with the people at Blue Oak,” she says.
In a call with Rolling Stone, Hatfield says she made a nine-hour drive home on July 3 and was in her bed by 11:30 p.m. Her husband had seen the heavy rain forecast and, concerned about leaks in their RV, stayed up most of the night. They got cellphone alerts about flooding potential overnight, Hatfield says, but it was nothing that seemed unusual for their part of Texas.
Around 4:30, however, she says her husband heard screaming.
“That’s when he looked out. Right below us, the RVs were already starting to get washed away. He woke me up immediately, and we started throwing stuff in the car. I didn’t know what to grab, and the only thing that came to mind was instruments,” Hatfield says. “But I got out, and we started trying to figure out how we could help everybody, but it all happened so fast. It was about a foot or two of water a minute.”
Hatfield says they moved their car and sought refuge on the deck of Howdy’s bar, up on the hill. From there, she witnessed rental cabins floating by, with people standing on the front porches.
“The trees were snapping in half. The noise that it made is going to haunt me forever. The RVs, they were just crumbling,” she says. “I heard a child start to scream, and I saw him starting to get washed away. I screamed for the first responders, but by that point, they had moved their vehicles to the top of the hill, so nobody was there. A few seconds later, he was gone.”
Later that afternoon, Hatfield’s mother called and said a child was on the local television news and had been rescued. According to Hatfield, it was the same child she had seen washed away —a small miracle for a region that saw more than 130 deaths, with roughly 100 people still unaccounted for.
As the waters subsided, Hatfield and her husband began volunteering in rescue and cleanup efforts in and around Kerrville, a town so intertwined in the Texas music scene that it would be impossible to separate the community from the music.
“So many of the songwriters, the things we do revolve around water, and the Guadalupe is probably the biggest one,” Hatfield says. “What I’ve seen through this is the music community coming together in a really powerful way.”
In the days since the flood, the Blue Oak RV Park has become symbolic of the tragedy, especially in music circles. The park was where Pat Green’s brother, John Burgess, was swept away and died, along with his wife and two of his three children. Green’s sharing of his family’s grief on social media opened a wider window into the tragedy that unfolded at the park. Hatfield emphasizes, however, that the scope of the devastation stretches from horizon to horizon.
“It’s just 27 miles on either side of the river of complete destruction,” she says. “Most of these [debris] piles from the RV parks are the size of large houses. There were cars completely crushed, wedged between these piles and remnants of RVs.”
Transportation for people whose RVs were destroyed is one of the causes Hatfield has taken up in the aftermath. She’s partnered with a nonprofit calledEmergencyRVtopair flood victims with RV donations. “I keep thinking about all these people who bought RVs in 2020 [during the pandemic] thinking they were going to use them a lot, and now they can’t seem to sell them whilewe have a need for them,” she says.
Hatfield recognizes that being a musician puts her in a position to both bring in donations and give a platform for Kerr County Flood Relief Fund. She’s already performed at benefit concerts, with more coming, and says the support — even the most simple of gestures —has been awe-inspiring.
“I had some friends in New Braunfels who just started giving me stuff the other day,” Hatfield says. “They were like, ‘Hey, I have some frozen meat!’ They’re a bunch of Texans, you know? Whatever they’ve got is yours.”