At around 5 a.m. Dr. Kyle Tippens awoke to the power turning off in the house. His noise machine went silent and his fan slowed to a stop. Outside, thunder crashed and rain battered the window. On the morning of July 4, he missed the alerts on his phone warning him of the flooding happening just a few hundred feet from his house.

“I called the property manager at 8 in the morning, trying to figure out how to reset the breaker,” said Tippens, associate professor of finance, . “[He] said ‘hey, let me help you with this breaker but just so you know this is a big deal there’s a lot going on. They’re pulling people out of the river doing water rescues.’”

Over 200 miles away from Kerr County and weeks after the events on July 4, the ACU community continues to feel the impact of the Hill Country flooding this summer.

Late on July 3, the National Weather Service began issuing severe weather warnings. Flash flooding  fueled by 10 to 12 inches of rain in just a few hours. caused the Guadalupe River to rise over 21 feet in under an hour, according to an article by the New York Times. In the flooding, 135 individuals lost their lives.

Brooks Burrows, senior psychology major from Kerrville, spent the first part of her summer working as a counselor at Camp Mystic, which was destroyed in the tragic flooding that took the lives of 28 campers, counselors, and staff lost their lives. She had been home from camp for just three days when the storm hit.

“I grew up on the river,” Burrows said, “and I grew up almost every single summer going with my family, spending days on the river, kayaking and paddle boarding. And just driving through town and seeing everything not there, destroyed. There were kayaks in trees. There were tarps everywhere, cars were demolished. It was just crazy.”

Amid the tragedy in Kerrville, the community came together to help provide food, supplies and shelter to those impacted and to help clean up, Burrows said.

“When school started back, at Walmart they were giving out free school supplies, free backpacks,” Burrows said. “A lot of big buildings opened up their spaces so people could stay there and a lot of different people outside the community donated resources.”

Tippens was on a family vacation in Ingram along the Guadalupe River when the river flooded. His family was physically unharmed by the events but were stranded without electricity or running water in their VRBO until Saturday because the river rose above Cade Loop Bridge, the only road out of the neighborhood.

He said he did not understand the full scope of the damage until around 1:30 p.m. on Friday, when the Tippens family went down to see the river.

“There was debris all the way up really high on the road that we had crossed,” said Tippens. “We all went back to the house and were silent for a while. Nobody really said anything, and we were just realizing that we probably weren’t going to get out of there for a long time.”

Much like Burrows, Tippens watched as strangers came together to support one another. They met with the people in the surrounding houses and shared food.

“We were really wondering what was going to happen, like how many days were we going to be there without power and water and food?” he said. “They were sharing food with us and everybody was just trying to look out for each other. But we were all stuck for about 36 hours.”

On July 5, an earth mover came and cleared debris from the bridge so the Tippens family could return home to Abilene. Once they left, they began to learn more about the destruction left by the flood.

“Some of us really struggled with getting back into the swing of things,” Tippens said. “After seeing the water the way it was, it’s not hard to imagine how destructive it was.”

As cleanup continues, weeks after the flood, Burrows is grateful for the way the community is still working to help recover from the tragedy.

“I’ve seen good and bad come out of this situation,” Burrows said. For example, “Seeing the community come together and people outside of the community provide their help and seeing everyone come to town just to support us.”