Former camper, counselor remember Dick Eastland as ‘father figure’ who made the ultimate sacrifice

it is with our deepest regrets to report this, Camp Mystic director Dick Eastland, lost his life saving the kids at his camp that he purchased in 1974!

Camp Mystic director Richard “Dick” Eastland died while attempting to rescue campers during catastrophic flooding that tore through parts of Central Texas. He is among 59 people confirmed dead so far in Kerr County. Of the victims, 38 are adults and 21 are children.

The camp director and co-owner of Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas, died in the catastrophic flooding as he reportedly raced to save the lives of his young campers.

Dick Eastland, who purchased the camp in 1974, died after the wall of water crashed through the Christian summer camp, which is located along the banks of the Guadalupe River, Texas Public Radio reported.

The report cited a Facebook post from Eastland’s nephew, though the post has since been taken down.

Counselors, former campers and politicians who knew Eastland praised him for his heroic actions and ultimate sacrifice to save his campers.

“Camp Mystic’s Dick Eastland no doubt gave his life attempting to save his campers,” Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, wrote on X. “For decades he and his wife Tweety poured his life into loving and developing girls and women of character. Thank you Mr. Eastland. We love you and miss you.”

Pfluger said two of his daughters were at the camp when it was evacuated during the flooding, and they have since been reunited.

Dick Eastland, director of Camp Mystic, died while trying to save campers during a flash flood. (Camp Mystic)

Paige Sumner, a former camper and friend of Eastland, wrote in Kerrville Daily Times that Eastland “was the father figure to all of us” during summers at the camp.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all that his last act of kindness and sacrifice was working to save the lives of campers,” Sumner wrote. “He had already saved so many lives with the gift of Camp Mystic.”

Kathatine Somerville, a camp counselor at Camp Mystic’s Cypress Lake location, told “Fox News Live” on Sunday that the camp director was among the “most selfless men in the whole world.”

“He was an inspiration to so, so many,” she said. “He was a father figure, a comforting force in the uncertainty of everything. He guided us in our faith and our activities. He always told us to make new friends and to share our love with everyone.”

Items lie scattered inside a cabin at Camp Mystic after deadly flooding in Kerr County, Texas, on July 5, 2025. (REUTERS/Sergio Flores )

There were 750 attendees at the camp when the catastrophic flood happened.

Over a dozen campers were confirmed dead as of Sunday afternoon, Kerr County officials said. One counselor and 11 campers remained unaccounted for.

Officials search on the grounds of Camp Mystic along the banks of the Guadalupe River after a flash flood swept through the area Sunday, July 6, 2025, in Hunt, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

The death toll across Central Texas climbed to nearly 70 on Sunday.

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha told reporters during a news conference Sunday morning that of the 59 confirmed dead, there were 38 adults and 21 children. source

My friend, Dick Eastland: Locals mourn loss of Camp Mystic’s longtime owner and director

The earthquake caused at least 1,404 critical injuries

https://youtu.be/8B8AUz-aaFg?si=ls6ZR_XwBdRHEcCp

At least 2,012 people in Morocco died after a rare, catastrophic earthquake struck the North African country late Friday night.

The magnitude 6.8 earthquake also injured at least 2,059 people, according to Morocco’s Interior Ministry. 1,404 of those injuries were considered critical.

The death toll is expected to rise as first responders struggle to reach remote villages in the country. Morocco’s King Mohammed VI instructed his military to conduct search and rescue missions and operate surgical field hospitals to assist remote villagers.

A man walks past destroyed houses after an earthquake in the mountain village of Tafeghaghte, southwest of the city of Marrakesh, on September 9, 2023.  (FADEL SENNA/AFP via Getty Images)

The earthquake was felt as far away as Portugal and Algeria. Despite the severe destruction, Morocco has not yet formally asked other countries for assistance.

Earthquakes are considered rare in North Africa: the Moroccan cities of Al Hoceima and Agadir were hit by earthquakes in 2004 and 1960, respectively.  The earthquake in Al Hoceima had a magnitude of 6.4, while Agadir’s was 5.8.

People, whose buildings are destroyed after a 7 magnitude earthquake, try to settle in empty areas in Marrakesh, Morocco on September 9, 2023. ( Abu Adem Muhammed/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The quake hit Marrakesh hard, ruining several historical buildings in the city. The city’s Koutoubia Mosque, which dates back to the 12th century, was damaged to an unknown extent.

The ancient red walls that surround the Medina of Marrakesh – a UNESCO World Heritage site – were also damaged by the quake.

“The problem is that where destructive earthquakes are rare, buildings are simply not constructed robustly enough to cope with strong ground shaking, so many collapse, resulting in high casualties,” Univ

source

The catastrophic wildfires in Hawaii that have killed at least 36 people in Maui and reduced much of a historic seaside town to ash were fueled by severe drought conditions and fierce, hurricane-strength winds — a confluence of extremes amplified by climate change that experts say quickly turned a bad situation into a worst-case scenario.

A wildfire tore through the town of Lahaina, once the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and caused extensive damage across West Maui and surrounding areas on Tuesday. Crews are still battling blazes in Maui and on the Big Island.

The precise cause of the wildfires is not yet known, emergency officials said Wednesday, but they were exacerbated in part by strong easterly trade winds whipped up by Hurricane Dora, which has been churning over the central Pacific Ocean.

On Tuesday, the hurricane was passing some 400 miles south of Hawaii — a far enough distance that the storm was not expected to make landfall, but close enough to bring high winds across the island chain.

“Our most disastrous wildfires in U.S. history have been associated with extremely strong wind events,” said Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer and associate professor at the University of California, Merced, who once worked as a wildland firefighter herself.

But it was how those strong winds interacted with Maui’s mountainous topography that created such volatile fire conditions in the town of Lahaina, she said.

The effect is known as downslope wind. As wind passes over a mountain and comes down the other side, it becomes compressed under extremely high pressure, making it both super dry and super hot, Kolden said.

“What that meant was that any place where the winds were aligned and there was this downslope wind, they had the strongest, the driest and the hottest winds associated with this larger hurricane wind event,” she said.

Wind gusts up to 67 mph were reported in some spots in Maui, enabling fires to move quickly over the landscape.

Drought conditions in West Maui also helped the wildfires spread, engulfing shrubs and grasses so rapidly that 12 people jumped into the ocean to escape the blazes.

“When you have dry fuels and you have the high winds, and then when you burn into the community and you start getting structures on fire, then you have lots of embers and it’s just a firestorm,” said Craig Clements, director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San José State University in California.

Clements said he was “in awe” watching the events unfold in Maui. Although wildfires are not altogether uncommon in Hawaii, such intense blazes are not often associated with tropical locales.

In a news briefing on Wednesday, Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hara, commander general of the Hawaii Army National Guard, said high winds, dry conditions and low humidity contributed to a red flag situation that “set the conditions for the wildfires.”

Experts said that while it can be difficult to tease out the exact fingerprints of climate change on individual extreme weather events, the Hawaiian wildfires demonstrate the risks associated with human-caused global warming.

“When we talk about climate change, we always say that it exacerbates the likelihood of an event because it loads the dice,” Kolden said. “There has always been the potential for hurricanes to pass near Hawaii. There has always been the potential for drought in Hawaii. But it’s all happening more frequently. And when it happens, it’s more extreme.”

As such, climate change acts as a “threat multiplier,” increasing each individual risk and exacerbating them if and when they collide, said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy.

“Every extreme event today is occurring over a background of an altered climate,” she said.

For instance, warmer-than-usual oceans can fuel the formation of bigger and stronger hurricanes. Higher temperatures from global warming also make droughts more frequent and intense, and dry vegetation, including non-native grasses and shrubs, burn quickly and provide dangerous fuel for wildfires.

“And then on top of that — the icing on the cake or the straw on the camel’s back, so to speak — you have climate change,” Hayhoe said. “It’s a threat multiplier, an exacerbator, an amplifier.” source

Every winter, Lost Lake in Oregon drains itself down a six-foot hole. The hole is a lava tube, and no one knows exactly where it leads. Lost Lake is one of several self-draining lakes in Oregon.

Lost Lake, a body of water in Central Oregon, gained its name and national notoriety for its peculiar habit of draining itself once a year. In the winter, it is a normal lake — indistinguishable from any other — but in the summer, the lake disappears into a hole and the basin becomes a meadow.

The Washington Post’s Justin Wm. Moyer explains the geological phenomenon behind the pattern:

“It fills up in the winter, when input exceeds the rate of draining, and then it goes dry and it’s a meadow,” Jude McHugh, spokesman for the Willamette National Forest, told the Bend Bulletin.

Wherefore comes this hole? It’s a lava tube, formed during a volcanic eruption when the surface of a lava flow cools, but hotter lava flows beneath the surface

In other words, when the lake’s inflow exceeds its outflow, the lake is full — when it doesn’t, the lake drains. Scientists don’t know exactly where the water goes, but they suspect it is absorbed into the subsurface.

Some dummies have attempted to plug the hole — we’re not sure why but we assume it’s part of some kind of primitive urge that leads to boys stuffing things into other things — and U.S. Forest Service staff have found auto parts and other trash in the mouth of the lava tube.

“If anyone was ever successful at plugging it — which we’re not sure they could do,” said McHugh, “it would just result in the lake flooding.” source

Oregon’s Mysterious ‘Disappearing Lake’ Explained

EVERY YEAR, IN THE HEART of Central Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, there is a lake that mysteriously drains down a hole.  It fills up to capacity each winter, quickly starts to drain every spring, and transforms itself into a quiet meadow by summer.

Lost Lake, near the small town of Sisters and the Hoodoo Ski Resort, is a 79-acre watery haven during the rainy months. Streams and creeks are running high and fast, and this mountain basin fills up like a bathtub. When the rains slow down, so do the streams, but the cycle of the lake doesn’t stop there. The water recedes, pours into a 7-foot wide hole, and simply disappears.

But drivers might do a double take during the summer. During the dry months, the 85-acre (0.34 square kilometers) lake vanishes and turns into meadow.

The reason? Two hollow lava tubes at the bottom of the lake are constantly draining the lake dry, much like a bathtub left unplugged.

“The lakebed begins to fill in the late fall, when the amount of rain coming in starts exceeding the ability of the lava tubes to drain off the water,” said Jude McHugh, a spokeswoman for the Willamette National Forest in Oregon. “And it continues to fill all winter long in a series of rain or snowstorms.”

As the rainy season peters out, the 9-foot-deep (2.7 meters) lake loses its water source, and water disappears down the lava tubes until it’s gone, McHugh said. The lake’s watery boom-and-bust cycle repeats itself every year, she added.

Lava tubes aren’t uncommon in Oregon. The state is home to the towering Cascades, a range of mountains and active volcanoes that extends from southern British Columbia to Northern California.

When lava streams flow down a volcano the outside crust cools as it makes contact with air. Hot lava continues to flow under the hardened crust, “kind of like a subway tunnel,” McHugh said.

After the hot lava drains away, a hollow tube remains. Some lava tubes become a unique ecosystem for animals and others attract tourists. Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California has “all kinds of lava tubes,” McHugh said. “Little guys literally a foot [0.30 m] across, and ones you can walk in that are just massive.”

But Lost Lake, located about 130 miles (209 km) southeast of Portland, sports just two small lava tubes. The lake likely formed about 3,000 years ago, when lava flowing from a volcanic vent blocked a river channel and created the lake, McHugh said.

“Several small streams feed into the lake intermittently, but the lava tube drain holes are the only known outlets,” McHugh said.

It’s not entirely clear where the drained lake water goes, but researchers have an idea. It likely falls down the lava tubes and seeps through layers of cracked volcanic rock as groundwater, McHugh said.

Lost Lake sits on volcanic rock that formed about 12,000 years ago, she said. When this “young” rock formed, it was filled with gas bubbles that left behind pores as they escaped into the atmosphere. The lava also cracked and fissured as it flowed over the terrain, she said.

It takes roughly seven to 10 years for water to filter down through all those cracks and pores, McHugh said.

“Here in western Oregon, it pops out at the valley floor and supplies drinking water and important habitat for humans, fish and all kinds of species,” she said. “That water that fell today, there’s some kid that’s going to be born tomorrow that’s going to be drinking it when he’s 10.”

However, people aren’t always respectful of lava tubes. At Lost Lake, some people have tried to plug the drainage holes and have also thrown trash into the lake over the years, McHugh said.

“We do not want to interfere with natural processes, and we very much discourage that,” McHugh said. What’s more, even if a plug did work, the lake would likely overflow and flood the nearby highway, she said. source

Winter storms across California have significantly improved drought conditions and filled state reservoirs that had held less than a third of their capacity.

Drone photos from the California Department of Water Resources show just how big a difference a recent series of storms, brought on by 11 atmospheric rivers, has made.

The image below shows Lake Oroville in Butte County, California’s second-biggest reservoir. The first image was taken Dec. 21. The second image was taken Jan. 12, after several storms had begun to refill the reservoir. The last image was taken March 8 and shows a dramatic improvement in the water level.

Per The Times’ drought tracker, Lake Oroville was 80% full as of Tuesday. The historical average level for that day — March 14 — was 71% over the last 30 years.

Nearly 100 miles south of Lake Oroville, Folsom Lake was exceptionally dry in November. When the photo below was taken, the lake sat at 27% of its capacity.

By March 10, the Folsom Dam was full enough that the Bureau of Reclamation released water down its auxiliary spillway into the American River to manage water levels.

As of Tuesday, Folsom Lake was at 63% of its capacity, in line with the historical average level.

The winter storms have eased drought conditions across the state and prompted authorities to lift mandatory water restrictions for millions of Southern California residents. source

PAJARO, Ca.  — 

A levee failure on the Pajaro River in Monterey County triggered massive flooding and prompted hundreds of evacuations and dozens of water rescues as the latest atmospheric river storm pummeled large swaths of California.

The levee — three miles upstream from the town of Pajaro — breached late Friday night, said Nicholas Pasculli, a Monterey County spokesperson. Patrols noticed “bubbling up in the adjacent farmland” at 11 p.m., the first sign there was a problem.

Thirty minutes later, the levee failed, Pasculli said. As of Saturday morning, he said, “the failure is approximately 100 feet wide.” The town of Pajaro — with a population of 1,700, mostly farmworkers — is underwater.

Authorities conducted 60 rescues that included the use of high-water vehicles, the sheriff’s diving team and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s swift-water team, officials said. National Guard personnel were dispatched to assist. At least 96 people were placed in county shelters.

Pajaro weathered previous storms because a flood wall in the lower part of the levee held up, said Monterey County Supervisor Luis Alejo.

“We had avoided just barely, by the grace of God, the flooding of the community,” Alejo said of recent storms. Residents were ordered to evacuate Friday afternoon, but some didn’t, he said, because they “were hoping that the worst would not happen because the levee did not breach during the last set of storms.”

“This is a disadvantaged community that often doesn’t get the attention it deserves,” Alejo said. “These are our friends, our neighbors, these are people that we really care about, and we know that they’re going to go through some tremendous hardship over the next several months.”

President Biden, in a phone call Saturday to Gov. Gavin Newsom, said California will have the “full support of the federal government” when responding to the devastation caused by the storms, according to a spokesperson for the governor.

On Saturday afternoon, crowds of onlookers stood on the Watsonville side of the Pajaro River Bridge watching the swollen, muddy river rushing below and the submerged town of Pajaro on the other side.

Sheriff’s deputies, county divers and boat rescue crews were parked along the bridge, behind yellow tape. Law enforcement officials stopped those with relatives or businesses on the other side, as well as the merely curious, from crossing.

One man, who declined to provide his name, said his grandmother was stuck on the other side in a flooded home. Authorities would not let him cross but took down her address and promised to check.

Connie and Victor Alvarez said they were trying to get in to check on their business, Alvarez Collision and Paint. They said they’d been notified by Monterey County that the business was likely flooded, and there was concern that toxic chemicals and solvents could be getting into the water.

“So, we’re here to check,” said Connie Alvarez, as she waited for a sheriff’s deputy to see if she had permission to cross.

Three blocks upstream, on the other side of a flooded area, three people were walking east along the river, carrying black plastic bags. Javier Gomez, a legislative analyst for Alejo, said they were likely among the residents who didn’t heed the evacuation warnings.

“I don’t know how many stayed,” he said. “But we’ve been doing back-to-back rescues all day. Feels like there were at least 100.”

At the Santa Cruz County fairgrounds, about 150 evacuees from Pajaro were talking, drawing, going through donated clothing and blankets and getting ready for what they guessed would be a stay of at least a few weeks.

Monterey County Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Hampson said many of the same people had been evacuated in January, when the river got high.

“At that time, they were displaced for about a week,” he said, noting that this time it’s likely to be longer — as crews will have to clean flooded and contaminated streets and homes and reestablish electricity to the area.

As of Saturday night, there were approximately 18,000 customers without power, mostly in the Central Coast region, according to Pacific Gas & Electric.

Andres Garcia, 39, said this was his third evacuation from Pajaro because of the flooding river; in addition to January, there was one in 1995, when the town was flooded “even worse” than it is now.

He and his wife and 8-year-old daughter left the city early Saturday, after they got a knock on the door from a sheriff’s deputy who urged them to evacuate. Garcia said they left before the water got too high, and he had no idea about the condition of his house.

His neighbor Laura Garcia left after dawn. She showed a video of water sloshing through her house — lapping against a crib, dining room set and shelves.

Andres Garcia said many farmworkers will be out of a job for as long as the water stays high and fields are submerged.

“They can’t do anything while it’s like this,” he said.

Elsewhere in Monterey County, the Salinas River flooded around the community of San Ardo, prompting evacuation orders Friday night.

Rain was expected to continue in the county Saturday, with up to half an inch possible along the coast, said Cindy Kobold, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Up to a quarter of an inch is expected for northern portions of the county.

Efforts associated with the levee break, Kobold said, are “going to be further hampered by incoming weather.”

Another storm is expected to hit the area early next week.

“This next atmospheric river event is not looking like it’s going to be as strong, but when you have a flood on top of a flood, it just makes a bigger flood,” Kobold said. “That means this next one could be more impactful, because the ground is way overly saturated, and we’re going to have additional rainfall, with gusty winds.”

Rescuers swam with the woman 100 feet to shore, McKenna said. The parks have nine swift-water divers in high-risk areas around Santa Cruz County ready to deploy.

“I think we’re supposed to be dying down in the rain a little bit with another one coming in a couple days,” McKenna said. “So we’re trying to anticipate these and be prepared and have the staffing available wherever situations do occur.”

Kobold urged residents to “turn around; don’t drown.” In some areas, it could be difficult to gauge the depth of water on roadways.

“It might seem like it’s only 6 inches deep, but if that road is washed away, and there’s erosion below that, it’s possible that it could be 6 to 12 inches or deeper, and you could get into a very dangerous situation,” the meteorologist said.

Further north, in Butte County, a swift-water rescue team helped two people who were stranded on an island in the Feather River in Oroville. Releases from the Lake Oroville Dam caused water to rise downstream and trap them.

On Saturday afternoon, the National Weather Service issued a brief tornado warning for areas near Tuolumne and Calaveras counties due to a severe thunderstorm. Another was later issued for Fresno County after reports of a funnel cloud, the first tornado activity in the area in 11 years, according to the National Weather Service. Sizable hail also fell in Fresno County on Saturday.

Flash flood warnings were in effect for parts of Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Monterey, Tulare, Sonoma, Fresno, Madera and Mariposa counties, according to the National Weather Service. At least two deaths have been confirmed as storm-related, officials said.

Major flooding was reported in Tulare County’s Springville area — where officials conducted dozens of water rescues Friday morning — and in Kernville, where the roaring Kern River surrounded houses and mobile homes, spurring evacuations.

Valeriana López, a 55-year-old resident of Tooleville in Tulare County, said the floodwater didn’t come inside her home but turned her yard into soft mud. She set down boards to get across the yard and was searching for sandbags to create a walkway.

Sheriff’s deputies went door to door Friday night urging residents to be ready to leave, López said. But she chose to stay.

“I’m going to trust in God, because we can’t do anything,” she said. “We don’t have anywhere to go.”

Farmworkers and other low-income residents in Tooleville have long struggled with inadequate infrastructure, including contaminated tap water and failing wells. They have been waiting for a planned project that will connect their water system to that of the nearby city of Exeter.

A few weeks ago, heavy rains damaged electrical wiring in the water system’s pumps, leaving residents without water for a few hours, said Emma De La Rosa, a regional policy manager for the nonprofit group Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability.

Highway 99, one of the state’s main north-south thoroughfares, is closed for a four-mile stretch in Tulare County just north of the Kern County line due to flooding, according to the California Department of Transportation. A detour has been established. A portion of Highway 1 near Big Sur in Monterey County remained closed.

The chief concern Saturday afternoon was thunderstorms, said Gerald Meadows, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Hanford. The greatest risk, he said, is from the southern edge of Tulare County and northern edge of Kern County north through the San Joaquin Valley.

Possible rainfall and gusts in excess of 45 mph are “just going to exacerbate any flooding issues that we’re already seeing,” he said.

Up to a quarter of an inch of rain is expected in the San Joaquin Valley and up to half an inch in the Sierra Foothills and higher terrain, according to Meadows.

While next week’s storm won’t be as heavy as the one that moved through Friday, Meadows said, “with a little bit higher snow levels or snowmelt range expected, we can see as much, if not more, flooding impacts.

“One of the big messages we want to get across for the folks in the San Joaquin Valley especially, as well as the Sierra foothills, is though it’s clearing up and it’s not raining very hard right now, we’re not through this just yet,” Meadows added. “The impacts are going to increase, and the thunderstorms can change the situation pretty rapidly.”

Rain in Southern California was light Saturday but was expected to pick up again starting Monday evening, according to the National Weather Service.

Two-day precipitation levels in Los Angeles were around 1 inch in coastal and central areas and nearly 2¾ inches in the Opids Camp area of the Angeles National Forest as of 6 a.m. Saturday.

Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead saw about an inch of precipitation Friday and Saturday, most of it rain as temperatures stayed above freezing, according to the weather service. The San Bernardino Mountains have been pummeled by back-to-back storms that produced record snowfall, trapping residents, closing roads and making it difficult for rescue workers to get food and other supplies to those in need of help.

Rust reported from Pajaro, and Mejia and Dillon reported from Los Angeles. 

BY SUSANNE RUST, BRITTNY MEJIA, LIAM DILLON

source

NASA satellite images show the mountains north of Los Angeles before and after a storm that brought several feet of snow.

NASA satellite images illustrate the dramatic difference before and after February’s storms in Southern California’s mountains.

The storms triggered a rare blizzard warning in the Ventura, Los Angeles and San Bernardino county mountains. Images taken Feb. 10 and Feb. 26 from NASA’s Landsat 9 satellite show the stark difference in snowfall in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles.

USE SLIDER IN CENTER OF PHOTO TO SEE THE SATELLITE DIFFERENCES

Communities at high elevation received several feet of snow, up to 8 and 9 feet in some areas. Lower elevations, like Mount Wilson, Lockwood Valley and Frazier Park, received between 1 and 3 feet.

Some communities at even lower elevations saw a few inches.

In San Bernardino County, many communities are still digging out from the historic snowfall.

At Lake Arrowhead Village, snowbanks surrounded a block of stores. Plow crews cleared a parking lot at a Stater Bros., one of the few places in the area where residents can stock up on supplies.

The roof of a grocery store in Crestline collapsed Wednesday under the weight of snow that piled several feet high.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday proclaimed a state of emergency in San Bernardino and 12 other counties to support disaster relief by making state agencies and aid available and asking for federal help in clearing and repairing highways. The governor announced that the state was bringing in more snow plows and road crews to help clear roads and he authorized the California National Guard to mobilize for disaster response if needed. source

SoCal Weather Photos: Scenes From the Late-February Winter Storm

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A view of Lake Arrowhead Thursday March 2, 2023.