A year after July 4 flooding, D-FW responders say they left parts of their hearts, souls in Hill Country

An oblong gray rock sits in the foyer of the Fort Worth Fire Department’s Station 2. Its only defining feature: words in thick black paint across the front. “Camp Mystic 7-4-25.” A few rooms over, a sticker pasted across firefighter Shane Harmon’s helmet reads, “Cile.” A hand-drawn black heart hovers above the name.

Torn around the edges and slightly stained, the sticker has been on Harmon’s helmet since 8-year-old Cecilia “Cile” Steward’s parents gave it to him in August 2025. It was how she signed her letters to them from Camp Mystic. It’s how Harmon remembers working in the flood waters, desperately trying to find Cile and her friends.

A torrent of rain caused the Guadalupe River to rise more than 26 feet in just 45 minutes last July, killing more than 130 people across several counties, including 25 campers and two counselors at the all-girls camp. The camp’s longtime director also died. 

Read more: The Texas Hill Country deadly July 4 flood, one year later

A year after the flooding, Cile and Jeff Ramsey, 63, remain missing.

“[Cile] kind of became part of us, you know?” said Harmon, who was among more than 2,000 first responders from across the state involved in rescue and recovery operations. “We left part of our hearts and souls there.”

“We gave so much to try and find everyone and still couldn’t,” added Chris Nelson, a lieutenant at Station 2 who also responded to the floods. 

“He’s talking about leaving part of yourself down there,” Nelson added with a small shake of his head. “It’s like man, we tried. We tried the best that we could.”

For Harmon, the loss was personal. Ramsey was a distant relative, Harmon said. And a woman he went to high school with was among those who lost a child when the water rushed in.

Cile, from Austin, and Ramsey, from Lewisville, were pulled into the Guadalupe about 13 miles apart from one another.

Harmon and Nelson said they received call after call from families, beyond those they personally knew, for updates on the search for loved ones. Those connections, Harmon said, made the destruction more difficult for them to comprehend.

Along with Fort Worth personnel, Plano Fire-Rescue, Dallas Fire-Rescue and Bedford Fire Department emergency responders were among the thousands who helped with rescue and recovery efforts in the Hill Country.

More than 20 out-of-state agencies, including from California, Florida, Ohio and South Carolina, also lent a hand.

Charlie Abney, special operations battalion chief with DFR, was in New Mexico for a separate flood response when he started seeing reports of teams being activated and positioned in different parts of the Hill Country on July 2.

“Every day we kept adding more because the weather forecast seemed worse and worse,” Abney said. He was dispatched to the areas north of Kerrville about 9 a.m. on July 4. Abney has worked for DFR since 2008 and specializes in swift water rescues.

Greg Qualls, water rescue team leader with Bedford fire, has seen many disasters firsthand since he began his career in 1996. He has lived in the Bedford area his whole life and previously worked for the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he said. 

Qualls was among those who responded July 3, before the brunt of the storm hit the Kerr County area, to evacuate Brownwood and San Saba. He remembers being told to “expect a call” because “something big” was coming. 

His team worked in San Saba until about 1 a.m. before reports of firefighters “hanging from trees” in Burnet came through. After leaving Burnet about 2 p.m., they moved to New Braunfels and then Kerrville for what his supervisor said was a “massive incident.”

His team put more than 5,000 miles on the pickup truck used to haul the boat during rescue efforts. He was dispatched two more times, the last in October, Qualls said.

“They called us back out to support the dive teams working all the way down to Canyon Lake,” Qualls said. “I got fulfillment from it. There’s a lot of times we’ll roll into a disaster, we’re there for a very brief amount of time, and we never see it recover.”

Harmon was called out the morning of July 4, while Nelson arrived a few days later when the department received a second request for help. The two men, who have been part of Fort Worth fire’s technical rescue team for almost 20 years, searched nearly 120 miles along the banks of the Guadalupe from sunup to sundown over the first two weeks of their deployment. 

“We’d go out there around 5 a.m., wait for the sun to come up, and then start working,” Nelson said. “When the sun went down, we left.”

“It was too dangerous, too risky, to be out there at night with the water still flowing,” Harmon added. 

Ken Carpenter, special operations battalion chief for Plano fire, arrived in the Hill Country on July 4 about 4 p.m. 

Carpenter has been with Plano’s department for more than 20 years and has worked as a registered nurse at Medical City Plano for 12 years. 

Four of the men — Harmon, Nelson, Qualls and Abney — were collectively at the scene of the floods for more than 180 days as a part of Texas A&M Task Force 1, which is headquartered in College Station. The Texas task force has two units: urban search and rescue and the state boat team.

Harmon and Nelson responded as search and rescue. Abney and Qualls were dispatched with the boat team for recovery operations.

A Type-1 task force is capable of working around the clock: wide-area searches, floodwater operations, and search and rescue efforts in contaminated areas, according to the task force’s website. Participating first responders from across the state can be deployed for up to two weeks at a time before replacements rotate in.

Carpenter was deployed with Region 2 of the Texas Emergency Medical Task Force, which set up mobile clinics and ICU hospitals for treating volunteers, first responders and others for injuries sustained while combing the river.

Carpenter’s team was there for 21 days. The majority of injuries endured by search, rescue and recovery workers were cuts, abrasions and turned ankles, he said, though the medics also administered Hepatitis A vaccinations due to the quality of the river’s water.

Teams that replaced him didn’t officially leave the Hill Country until about two months ago, Carpenter said. 

The final recovery phase wasn’t until January, Harmon said, though canine units with the Texas task force return to the river every few weeks to comb through what contractors dredge from the river in hopes of finding Cile and Ramsey.

Discussion about faulty emergency alert systems, nonexistent outdoor flood sirens and inadequate public safety regulations at youth camps in the Hill Country has been common since July 4, and resulted in a variety of Texas legislation and funding to improve weather forecasting and warning systems. 

“‘We should have, we could have, why didn’t we…’  things get kind of jaded,” Nelson said.

The four other men expressed the same sentiment: The state responded the way it should have to a disaster officials couldn’t predict.

“Over the years, you see a lot of devastation, but for that length, that width — the distance from the start to the end — and the amount of people affected…yeah, it was unusual,” Nelson said. “It was different.”

Carpenter remembers seeing debris stuck 60 to 70 feet high in trees and thinking, “Wow, this was a lot of water.” 

When faced with disaster, he said he can’t think of a way Texas could’ve reacted better.

“I’ve been to floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and explosions,” Carpenter said. “Twenty years of that … it didn’t shock me, but it was very unique. Unexplainable.”

Qualls also described the wide reach of the Hill Country flooding as “unique.” He’s seen a lot, he said, and he knows it’s only a matter of time until the next one.

“It was an act of God,” Qualls said. “There’s no controlling that.”

Abney said he’s been on more than 60 state flood deployments and has never seen anything “remotely close” to what happened in the Hill Country last summer.

Qualls remembers hearing that some Central Texas first responders were pinned into areas of the river that flooded and swept away their vehicles and trailers during operations.

Recalling what he saw, Harmon said, “Some things you just can’t cope with.”

Clothes with young girls’ names written on them in Sharpie strewn 10 feet high on a cliff. Trees intertwined with the wreckage of homes and vehicles. Families shattered and communities changed. 

“We’d have to be pretty cold-hearted for that not to stick with us,” Nelson added.

When coming to terms with the work they did at the scene, Nelson said, there are many more mental health resources available than there used to be. Everyone copes in a different way, he said.

Carpenter said he regularly works out, using jiu-jitsu as a form of therapy. When handling traumatic events, he said his prior experiences make it “not nearly as hard as it used to be.”

Qualls was in the car making a nine-hour drive to a cabin in New Mexico with his wife and two rescue animals — a cat and a three-legged Pitbull — when he spoke with The Dallas Morning News. Traveling, he said, is his way of “propping his feet up” and getting “away from everything.”

Despite the emotional toll of his job, Qualls finds solace in his family and the firefighting community; a feeling shared by all five men.

Harmon and Nelson said sometimes the best therapy is being able to talk about things with people who already understand.

“People look at us and go, ‘Oh my god, you’re mentally wrecked.’ And it’s like, well yeah, kind of, but there’s a whole group of us, and we like hanging out together,” Qualls said with a laugh. “We’re called firemen.”